I promise I will write more. I guess my intention to break back into building a portfolio didn’t exactly do wonders for my desire to write here more. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write (of course), but when I add the stress of thinking about getting things approved for publishing, the added stress turns me off of anything I consciously think of as writing.

I think I may have bruised my spine on Saturday when I fell up an escalator. It doesn’t bother me until I start walking about or if I bend over for a while. Then it feels like someone is gripping my spine, and my lower left ribs start to hurt. Mr. Yumicho (I really need to come up with a better name for him) caught me. He strained his shoulder, but says he’s feeling a bit better than when it happened.

Oh, high drama on the internets. I belong to a community of American expats in the UK. Really, I don’t want to implicate the whole community, so I won’t name the place to protect the innocent (and the slightly guilty too I guess). Besides, it’s a great place and even great online forums have their flaws. So this weekend the proverbial crap hit fan when one of the moderators there posted a thread in which she seemed to think that the idea that the community was insular and cliquish would be put to rest. That the accusations that long standing members are rude to members who are having problems adjusting to the UK would suddenly go away (and if they didn’t, there’d be no more discussing it because this was the “once and for all” topic).

It began with denials that people weren’t rude (and when they were, they were quickly dealt with), the assertion that people who thought there were cliques and it wasn’t a welcoming place were crazy (mad I tells ye!). It ended with admissions that people did gossip, not only on their blogs and journals, but there were exclusive LJ groups (two to be exact) that contained only members from the forum in question. One of these groups is about, what else, gossip and is named appropriately. The other was named after a thing that many newcomers to the UK post on our forums about (and invited its members to come vent there). The gossip group is made up primarily of moderators from the forum in question.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think that an online community has to expect that its members will likely express themselves elsewhere. But you can’t have it both ways. If a group of people have exclusive membership groups where the sole purpose of that group is to gossip or complain about the community at large, then they can’t deny that they are cliquish. That’s what a clique is. They also have to realise that (especially when the members of those groups hold moderator powers) the existence of the sub-groups may start to flavour the community at large. I mean, before I found out about those two LJ groups, and I probably could have named their members pretty easily. Well, to be fair, some of them were being the most adamant that there weren’t any cliques on the board so if you asked after the start of the “discussion” thread, my job would have been super-easy.

Yes, it is like primary school all over again. But what makes it interesting is how friggen neurotic some of these people were behaving. And with a little prodding, you can make them dance and squirm. I wasn’t that involved in the thread, and I am not condoning how strongly some of the dissenters came off, but even with reasonable, calmly worded posts, I suddenly felt like a troll because it set them off so much.

The sad thing is that at least two members have left over the bruhaha. The entire thread is now deleted. I am not sure what sort of good keeping it around would have done except prove we are all human.

I should restate that. We are all human. We are entitled to our flaws. I guess in a way, we are entitled to dishonesty about our flaws. But dishonesty doesn’t change the fact they’re there.

I decided to blog on this not to gossip (although I recognise even in an open blog with no names mentioned and no known readers from that community that this could be seen as gossip), but because online communities really need to balance moderation with expression. Moderation can sometimes protect a community, but it can also compound the problems. If you insist a community has room for everyone, and the best you can offer for those with issues is to leave if they don’t like it, you aren’t being inclusive, but being a hypocrite.

A forum maintainer and the people he or she appoints to assist with the day to day business do indeed have the rights to set the rules and maintain the standards. But that doesn’t exclude our right to judge those standards. We might not be able to point out where the mistakes of a community staff member might lead to the death of the community. When we are involved in forums, we devote a bit of ourselves to those communities. It’s truly unfair to forum members to not recognise that contribution, from a newbie to a poster that’s been there for years. “Like it or leave it” might be a great comeback, but in practice it doesn’t lead to a welcoming community. Nor does it lead to rich debates or diversity in the forum population. Which is fine if you recognised the fact.

I also wrote this because I felt during the thread there was a challenge to do so elsewhere. I found this invitation very appealing, even if I think there wasn’t an expectation that the people having the problems would be able to manage to do so. There was also an invitation to start our own forum. Which I am considering.

But during this, it was asserted that expression outside the forum was not to be a concern for the forum itself. We will see if it will be, and I will be sure to update this if I am removed from that community for this post.

It’s funny. Before I started writing this, I felt sorry for most of the people involved. Now I sort of feel angry at their behaviour. I did vacillate from feeling embarrassed for many of the people involved to feeling a bit disgusted. I did consider just not visiting the place for a few weeks, but in a way, that would mean the terrorists would win.