I like your ideas about account creation and exclusivity through obscurity and TL0. My concern is about … ahem … “problematic” users from BoingBoing being made aware of this site and invited over.
The nomination vote provides a good balance that doesn’t close the doors on membership: nominate someone, put it up for a vote by the community here, and if the vote passes the nominator gets to go back to BoingBoing and PMs them to notify the nominee. If the community here has doubts about the nominee you’ll find out very quickly. From the experiment on BoingBoing, most passed with 90-100% of the vote – really only one exception who lost out around 40% yea to 60% nay.
For reference, here are the rules I used, slightly re-written:
If you want to invite someone else, please post an “INVITE: user” comment here, a single-choice anonymous Yes/No poll (you can build and insert polls from the gear icon in a new comment), and optionally why you think he/she/they would add value. One user per comment/poll.
Threshold Info: if that comment gets eight or more “Yea” votes within 12 hours then the nominee gets an Invitation, unless he also gets 10 or more “Nay” votes in the same time period, in which case he doesn’t. If someone objects to the “Invitation” comment or a vote feel free to reply to it with an “OBJECT: user” comment detailing the reasons why. If you want to change threshold info we can discuss it in the thread.
Once you close a poll you’ve set up please delete it if you can. If you’ve objected to a user you might delete that too if the poll goes in his favour.
People who don’t pass the threshold can be re-nominated, but only 8 weeks after the poll has closed.
Adjust threshold levels as appropriate to here. The ones I provide give enough people plenty of time to vote and still allows the new user to come here relatively quickly.
you have put the word Read before the url, and on the same line. Discourse no likey. all urls need to be on their own line, solo, and you have to hit return once or twice. then they’ll onebox, or embed in the case of e.g. youtube urls.
Jeff had to yell at me for being all “yo, my video won’t embed, fix it” one too many times until I got it :^)
I am reminded of some of my help desk co-workers 20 years ago. They had great phone voices. None of the wooers had any visual reference.
IANAL either but according to USPTO, “BOING BOING” is a trademark owned by Happy Mutants LLC (which is not a trademark). None of this precludes a legal headache though.
I’m assuming he’s already been invited, since he was a Regular AFAIK. Maybe create an Invites thread? I like the invite methodology, but there’s a critical problem with it; to the extent that we’re inviting foks from BB, who were not Regulars before Regxit (Rexit?) I think fewer folks here are going to have an informed opinion about whether someone should be invited or not. I know I’m not participating as much at BB so I wouldn’t know who the emerging good commenters are.
I haven’t put any blocks in place (other than TL0, which became active once we crossed 50 users) for this among other reasons. If certain users were trouble on BB, there’s no guarantee that they would be trouble here. I’m hoping that when a user in this space chooses to engage in a topic that is outside of their experience, they can be reminded that their perspective is not part of a constructive dialogue on that subject, and they would do better to listen rather than tell. If they aren’t receptive to that, they may be prevented from participating in the conversation entirely. At present, I don’t think we have any way to do so without also keeping them from all other conversations on the site, but we may be able to find a solution for that at some point in the future. If this behavior continues to happen, the penalties will continue to rise until that person is no longer welcome in our community.
Obviously, there are a number of specifics to work out there. I guess my primary point is that I would rather have a community that is open by default.
I am, however, completely open to proposals for more of the community to be available to those users at higher trust levels. There is the lounge already for TL3 users, but there’s nothing I know of that would prevent us from having TL2 level categories as well.
I am not as much of a known quantity at BB as others. Additionally, me talking about it may come off as shameless self-promotion. When others are making the invitations, those issues aren’t present.
Part of my trepidation was about the authors and owners of BB. Another part was about the existing community there.
Ultimately I’m not trying to take something away from BB to build this place. I want this to be a place where people come because they want to, not because they’re leaving someplace else.
Agree. I think the more we define this space in positive terms the quicker it takes its own identity. BoingBoing still has their space and most of us are free to participate there if we want, and everyone can read. We can still discuss those articles if we like but I see this as so much more, a real community playground where we are the authors and the space is around the community. The community is not just an add on to the blog.
You’ve got me, there. I know that they used to have a print 'zine, but I’ve only ever known them as an online entity. The details are fuzzy, but I want to say I found the site in the late 90s or early 00s.
@waetherman and @tinoesroho have reached out to a fair number of the well-known users, which I think is where most of this community has come from, either directly or indirectly. I think there was a pretty direct reference in the new lounge as well. Definitely let us know if you think there’s a conspicuous absence. I’m not trying to prevent anyone from coming here.
We’re at nearly 120 now. Most of came via links on BB. I’d definitely encourage everyone to invite whomever they think would be a good addition to this community, whether from BB or elsewhere.
Also, there are definitely a few users that have joined under new names, so it may not be obvious who they were at BB.
