To me, a forum is a place where people with similar interests can come together and share ideas, information and just plain BS at times. The role of the admin, in my opinion, is to inspire the willingness between the people to be nice, abide by some general rules but let the forum go where ever it might within the confines of the forums ideals. Moderators take the responsiblity to foster discussion while only stepping in where the dictates of the forum are broken.
Thus, everyone who posts on a forum has a stake in the forum. Everyone who puts out a little of themselves puts a trust in the forum to respect that effort. A great forum admin allows this growth and enjoys to see people openly sharing their experiences due to the trust the posters feel in the forum.
Its from this trust that a sense of ownership is born. We all want the forums we post on to prosper and are willing to share with others with the same sense of belonging to the forum community. That sharing of belonging starts at the admin and filters down to those that share the same sense of belonging.
Look at what you feel is right and then post…BUT!!! look at what the forum stands for and decide if you stand for the same set of ideals.
Filed under: General
Interesting points, generally I concur.
Many types of forum discussion software are open source and not subject to ownership in a traditional sense. Indeed, every time someone posts, that particular installation of the discussion board software is being modified. In this sense, I agree with your notion that those posting on any given forum share a degree of ownership.
For a while, some time ago, I used to post on Dave’s ESL Cafe. However, I increasingly felt that this particular forum went so far against the kind of ideals you’re uggesting here that I set up ELT World as an antidote.
I’ll be referring people to this post on the ELT World blog in the hope that it raises a discussion that can go towards ‘finetuning’ the way ELT World is run.
David V.
[...] Truth in TEFL blog has raised a really interesting issue in a recent post about who really owns discussion [...]
David,
How about VBulletin (used by Aj and TD). That is commercial software and is owned on license.
A forum is no different to any other kind of website with user contribution.
Take Flickr. That contains some of my most cherished photographs, but I wouldn’t for a second claim to own it. Yahoo does.
Take Gmail. They would be noithing unless people used it for their daily email. I don’t own it. Google does.
In Internet terms, posession of the passwords is 9/10 of the law.
Cheese,
The article was about the sense of ownership that develops amongst forum members that post on a forum.
It isn’t about literal ownership but how the community of posters drive a forum’s identity by what they feel is appropriate posting.
Open Source vs Licenced boards
I’ll stand corrected if I’m wrong (we use phpbb on all our sites), but ‘ownership’ when referring to the software, has no elation to any possible ‘ownership’ of the material, i.e. postings, which accumulate in the database on the server. The developers clearly state that they accept no responsibility for any forum content. They usually provide a template set of Terms & Conditions, some which automatically insert the ,name of the forum owner, but the php template can be modified at will.
The legal position may not be the same as for contributions to print media – I think it will always be debatable who owns a forum’s content, even if the board’s owner states that all posted material becomes his copyright; and whether the regular posters consider their community as a legal entity and are able to establish any claims to intellectual property.
Chris,
The point I was trying to make is that through our posts on a forum, each poster becomes part of the forum and from that, a sense of ownership is felt. It was meant as more of a philosophical discussion rather than a literal one…but thanks for your comment!
I was commenting on the on the topic which has developed from your original article on this page. I wasn’t ignoring the original subject. One question is however: How much of a member can one feel among 17,000 registered members, and how high does one have to crank one’s posting clock to gain recognition as one?
A further question is: Why is it that some of the most obnoxious posters, become the admin’s favourites?