I’m not sure if our example is a good one to follow, but it’s worked for us, more or less. It’s been an evolving relationship over time, with decisions, procedures, and policy growing out of the community’s interactions with fellow posters and management.
We started out giving our users a lot more things to play with; originally we allowed the uploading of image files, html, that sort of thing. We didn’t consider avatars at the beginning, but I’m not sure was an available option in early versions. (It’s been a long time, a lot of blood under the bridge.)
Later we decided against avatars and “flying baloney” not only for esthetic qualities, but because just getting posts read and written takes up all our server capacity and we can’t spare anything for extras. This is also why we don’t use the calendar or public messaging or the polling features built in as well; we really concentrate on the core functions.
Over the passage of time, we had to remove most of the options from use because of continued abuse by a few users. We’ve had a lot of that sort of thing, where the actions of a small minority adversely affected the entire membership, but when a situation that takes hours of your time to correct can be totally eliminated in a keystroke, you see why that becomes your best solution.
We also decided pretty early not to allow users to edit their posts, not even for correction of typos. This can be a very disputational board even under the best of circumstances and it’s just better for us to not offer this to our users; again, the possibility of abuse is just too tempting. YMMV, however.
For security reasons, we don’t allow the display of who’s online.
And some of our functions, such as search, are only available to subscribing members. This is not only an incentive to subscribe, but also to further limit accessibilty to member information by spammers and the like.
You must also be totally clear in your purpose; while we do allow quite a bit of flexibility in some forum areas, there’s others where the focus of that particular area is more finely drawn and we tend to enforce with more presence in those areas to hew closer to the forum descriptions as outlined. We still think that gives everyone a lot of choices. Because each area does tend to be so different, there’s little differences in forum rules as well; the breezy, let-it-all-hang-out-your-mama-is sensibility of the Pit, for instance, is a sharp contrast to General Questions. MPSIMS (Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share, which is often not any of the previous) is more casual than Great Debates, as the names should tell you.
If you have other questions, I would recommend that you write us personally, I think this is better served taken off the board. My email address is TubaDiva@aol.com.
Good luck with your new board.
your humble TubaDiva
Not sure I understand that one, bob.
