Basically when I set up the BOI originally, I only made suggestions about the type of format and guidelines as to how I thought it could most easily be used. There really weren't any rules, as such. Probably I was naive in thinking that everyone would act as I would in a given situation. I mean, after all, if I have a legitimate gripe with someone, I WANT them to know who I am. Doesn't everyone think that way? Boy that sure was a learning experience!
So realistically, every rule I put in place was a reaction to an action that took place on the board. And those rules just grew and grew and grew. I had to eventually offload it onto a separate page because all those blasted rules were eating up way too much bandwidth everytime someone loaded up the page.
But here's the rub I face. Rules sometimes need to be bent. Nothing is just plain black and white. Even the 'full name' rule has violations where I think it best to overlook it for one reason or another. For instance, someone is getting slammed and a buddy lets him know about it. So he checks in here, goes into fire and brimstone mode to defend himself, and of course he doesn't read the rules. Neither does he post his full name, but everyone can tell from the context of his message whom it is. If I were to delete it, this person would be convinced this site is nothing but a lynching party because I would not allow him to defend himself. Would that be fair to do? I don't think so.
And another thing, there are no sacred cows here. If someone thinks they will get special treatment because they are an advertiser, then they are dead wrong. I think there are a few people whom may post more than we all want to hear from him/her, but sometimes some comic relief is in order.
Drifting off from the main topic is nearly impossible to prevent. If you get two people talking about something, they will invariably do that in a regular conversation. Why should anyone think a message board would be immune to something like that? I do try to keep it within reasonable bounds, but honestly I can't follow every thread in the BOI in a manner that I can even understand what the main point is about. Much less be able to tell what exactly is off of the point far enough to warrant being deleted.
Several times I have deleted messages simply because I skimmed them over too rapidly and they really shouldn't have been deleted. No way to recover the text once I press the button, however. I just took my lumps and went on.
There are certainly LOTS of messages in the BOI that I should delete, but who has that kind of time. Heck I could spend most of the next several months just browsing through the Neil Gubitz Break-In thread trying to weed out all the chaff. And that's after I have deleted a bunch of messages almost on a daily basis there.
Anyway, it's 3:17am here and I'm just babbling when I should be stumbling off to bed. I know I have several emails that I didn't respond to today, but they will have to wait until tomorrow (or whatever day it will be).
Just in closing, let me say this: The key to the BOI being successful is participation. Participation by as many people as possible. Having someone post an inquiry about someone and only getting two responses, one positive and one negative, doesn't give them very much to go on. But 10 people or 20 people responding, even if there is an even split on opinions, will be very valuable to someone trying to get a feel for how someone runs their business. So I can't enforce the rules in such a way that the only result is that people just leave here and don't come back. Even when I want to take a two by four to someone I usually will pull the whack just enough that it smarts, but doesn't kill the recipient.
If there are spelling errors and such in here, just chalk it up to my getting old and feeble with my birthday coming up...
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