Attention lurkers!

Before you drop the hammer I want to alert you to a problem I’ve been having since the board was updated. When I check to see the new posts since my last visit I get several pages worth, but due to some problem, either on my end or on your end, I can only view the first page of results. Every time I click on the link to the other pages I get the same first page of results over again. I bring this up because it might possibly be that other folks are having the same problem and thus are having difficulty posting to as many topics as they otherwise might.

The last couple of times in I haven't seen the Muscle Growth Art board.  Could this be why?  I'm listed as a "Site Regular" and have even posted (for better or for worse) a couple of stories in the Fiction area.  Or is this board just under some kind of construction?

Lingster, you're a bastard.

Okay, now that we've agreed on that much…

I understand the desire to build community.  And I suppose that if you have 500 users who post and 6000 who don't, you're paying for over ten times as much bandwidth as you think you need just to support your community.  Given that your hosting costs aren't trivial anymore, that does kinda suck.

However, threatening to exile lurkers does not strike me as a great way to build online community.  There's a long-standing tradition of lurking in online forums, and it's not necessarily a bad thing.  In fact, lurking for your first few weeks in the community is often considered good etiquitte.  It gives you a chance to get a feel for the norms of the place so you don't just jump straight in and make a fool of yourself.

Secondly, how do your content providers feel about this?  Yes, I know they all want feedback.  They put much of their life and soul in to their work, and while some might say that the work is it's own reward, they would be wrong.  We have social needs, and recognition and praise are tremendously important.  One of the big reasons that people publish is because they want to form a connection with others.  Feedback from critics and peers is also critical to developing your skills.  But none of that necessarily means that you want to cut people off from your work for not providing feedback.  It reduces the size of your audience, means that people who might enjoy your work will now not have that opportunity.  Is that what you wanted?

Thirdly, you cannot sustain a community of six thousand contributing members.  I'm not just saying that because I still think that web forums are a lousy platform; communities simply do not scale to that size while retaining their quality, whether they're web forums, chat rooms, usenet groups, or town halls.  Different sources will give you different numbers, but they're generally closer to 150 than 6,000.  At some point, the volume of traffic becomes too much for many members to stay in touch with, intimacy drops, the signal to noise ratio rises.  The community loses its heart.  Surely you've been around long enough to see this happen time and time again.

So there are some reasons why that is a crappy plan.  How can we address your problem in a less crappy way?  I'm not really sure, but I have some leads.  Gather recognizes the value of contributions with
Gather Points."  Now you probably don't have the same option of redeeming contribution points for Barnes & Noble gift certificates as they do (unless you move Amaz0ns to Gather?), but it's a nice idea, and rewards are probably a better way to groom a community than
threats to remove content.

Another resource on this topic is the Online Community Toolkit.  Currently in their Whats New section is "a nice synthesis of the issues around people who read in online groups but don't post."  That's timely of them.

or you could just post more entries about controversial BOFH moderation policies.  After all, it got me to post, right?  😉

You raise some very good points, gracilis, but there are some things that you did not inlcude in your speech.

First of all, lurkers are not being banned. They are being limited.

Another thing is that the definition of a community is a group of people coming together for a common reason. While you may be right about too many people active at once diluting the community, you are figuring that everyone will be submitting art, writing stories, or some other such thing. Many things of this nature are beyond the scope of many people's abilities. For example, I can write, but I cannot draw well. As such, I add to this group by writing.

People who either cannot do something like this, or otherwise don't want to, are still perfectly capable of commenting on another person's work. This limitation is trying to influence people to respond to things that have been submitted to these boards. If they respond, it will push some of the contributers onto greater projects. That is the underlying reason for criticism. Also, having many people criticising a peice of work is a good thing. How many things in our world have been influenced by the desires of the mob? individual criticism is nice, but it's power is different.

Like I said, you have made some very interesting points. But, again, no one is being banned for being a lurker. Just limited.