A User's guide to forum policy and success, what-to-do and what not-to-do.
Hello, As you all may know, I am UltiGrav on Platform racing 2, Crystalina in AcidChat, and Agent_Fire on Jiggmin, Obviously.
In this thread, I am though gonna write a thread on this, so please read it thoroughly.
As online communities continue to grow and become more like real-world communities, so too does the amount of deviant and anti-social behaviour. This creates the need for control and the maintenance of order, through online (proximal) and offline (distal) means of regulation.
“Third places”, communities that consist only of social interaction, have been forced to develop many different methods to govern the people that interact there. These communities, such as the online game “World of Warcraft”, often use administrators to regulate player behaviour, while a few forums like “4chan” are mostly uncontrolled. Proximal regulation can also come from vigilante “justice” or just the presence of moderators. Offline forms of governance, too, are effective at maintaining order online. Internet filtering and policing are employed by a number of countries to catch criminals and prevent deviant behaviour online. With the huge number of people using the internet, all of these methods of regulation need to be employed to ensure that online communities remain welcoming to everyone.
Since its creation, more and more people have been drawn to the internet for the convenience of its worldwide network, Most people who find themselves regularly using the internet may be part of one or more online communities made up of people who share similar interests, This might be to feel a sense of belonging, to engage in a particular activity with others, or just for fun. Although many of these communities are formed for a particular purpose, a large proportion of these communities can be classified as “third places”. Such societies are environments where conversations and social interactions are the main activity. Due to the relationships that can form there, they can also be described as “homes away from home”.
Applications and sites use the communication aspects of traditional physical communities to create a sense of communal responsibility in the online place. However, it is not only the positive aspects of community that arise when sites try to create this atmosphere. A number of users of third place environments choose not to contribute constructively.
In any community, including those online, there will always be people that violate or differ from the norms established there. These often result in behaviour and comments which end up causing disruption. In an online context, the most obvious outlet of deviant behaviour is the excessive use of offensive language, which can be classified into a few main groups. Firstly there is the use of casual, unintentionally offensive language. Many users of online communities talk online as they would in real life, which can include frequent swearing and cursing, unaware or unconcerned about the offense they may be causing to others. Then there is the opposite use, where people intentionally use bad language. These are people, commonly referred to as “trolls”, who intentionally try to irritate or provoke other users by saying quite offensive or controversial things in order to incite hostility and anger.
It is often impossible to win a provoked argument with these people because their motive is to feel powerful by antagonizing people into retaliating. Another appalling use of unpleasant language is cybersex (or cybering). This involves a user conversing with another, whether welcomed or not, and engaging in a sexually explicit conversation with them. Although the unnecessary use of offensive language is the main instance of deviant behaviour in online communities, there is usually a form of “blocking” or reporting system to combat this issue. The other major form of deviance is the practice of hacking, While some hacking is dangerous to an individual’s security and identity, other versions are done just for the entertainment of the hacker. These are mainly mischievous pranks designed trick or confuse other users. The most common types of hacking seen in online communities are flooding, crashing, and hacking for user passwords. Flooding is the process of deliberately spamming or repeating an action, in order to overload the system and cause a large amount of lag, frustrating other users.
As most of these cases (in my opinion) can not necessarily be prevented in such a matter, that administrative uses need to provoke that user from the continues of hacking an online community. Spamming,flooding,cussing,cybersex'ing are all apart of the online world, whether you think you are not going to encounter one, you are absoloutely wrong. You will without a doubt. But again, this is just my opinion.
Hacking concludes of the following, still, in my opinion,DDosing, getting unfair advantages to gain success over others, etc. This is done mainly to get attention or to disrupt the social interactions in the rest of the community. People who use this method can target a specific individual and personally overload them with spam to make them lag. Similarly, some people can hack into servers and communities and crash (overload) them, simply to stir up trouble and cause other users problems. Hackers are also traditionally good at hacking for passwords to people’s accounts. This is used throughout countless online communities, particularly in online games.
Scammers are a big issue as well, though not as dangerous as hackers. They could impersonate an admin in the community to ask members for information which is needed for an important reason, They may request the member’s credit card number, real name, phone number, etc. to be used to steal from them or invade their privacy. In other scams, they may befriend users, only later to make some unusual requests. These types of anti-social behaviour endanger other people’s ability to socialise safely in a “third place” and are a constant problem for such communities.
If you've gotten this far, I appriceate ur time and concern on this matter. I hope it helps some and I hope aswell you gain some knowledge off this thread. Feel free to share you're opinions.
Thank's too Networkconference for most of this information.
Originally Posted by GamerProist
