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Vowels of rude posts beware, for your days are numbered.
As far as I know, the idea was first created by BoingBoing.com, but it's so effective that we've adopted it for use in Bonanzle's forums.
How does it work? You'll notice on your next visit to the forums that there is now a link to "report this" next to every individual forum post. If enough people click the link on a given post, the post is "disemvoweled," meaning it gets all of its vowels removed, while the rest of the topic remains as-is (unlike topic tagging, which moves the entire topic). Har har har!
We are proud of the Bonanzle forums. One of Bonanzle's most frequently cited attractions by new visitors is how unreasonably friendly the greeting is when they arrive. Every day, some 5,000 message posts are made, and 98% of them are funny, inspiring, or friendly. It is a remarkable feat, given how many disparate backgrounds are represented at Bonanzle, that our community has remained cohesive and uniquely upbeat from when we had 1,000 users through to today.
But this is still the Internet we're talking about, folks. There will always be a few trolls that want to stir the pot, and there will always be otherwise good people who have bad days. So next time you see a post that is rude, dramatic, incendiary, or any of those other fine things, you have a new tool at your disposal to squelch it.
In addition to this brief intro to disemvoweling, we've also added a help page that gives more specific details about how it works, when to use it vs. topic tags, and how we see this new tool vis-a-vis the free speech that we strive to promote.
Also new for Thursday is the ability to sort the hand picked lists by your own criteria, and to see your booth stats over a given interval, both frequently requested improvements.
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bharding
Feb 19, 2009
The Continued Adventures of Improving Forum Fun
Amongst a number of user-requested features that came online today, the one that Mark and I are most excited about is one that we can take no credit for: message forum disemvoweling.
Vowels of rude posts beware, for your days are numbered.
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53 responses to The Continued Adventures of Improving Forum Fun
Super new features this morning! Thanks so much!
A Troll Swatter, with people power. Great additions Bill.
wow…it gets better every day. I noticed something had been “brewing” in the pot when I checked my stats and seen that I can pick how I want to see them….
And I seen that there are other great features and can’t wait to dive into it tonight….oh man…gotta wait 12 hours to do that…..what a long day it’s gonna be
Thanks again boyz for listening to all our gripes, requests and so forth
ps…just had to check out the “report this” ..I think this is gonna be a cool feature. How I’ll see this done soon..well..just saying…wanna see how it looks
This is a fantastic idea. An early Christmas gift – thank you Boyz. It’s time to squash the trolls…
Great tool to disarm those trolls, we like it happy here!
Love it. Or should I say ‘lv t’ ??
Love the stats! It’s nice that I can say I want to see just yesterday’s count. Thanks!
Thanks Boyz — Bonanzle gets better every day!
Love the stats changes, especially the Yesterday count. Outstanding!
my stats have been thru the roof love traffic and now can see it more often and when I visit the threads instead of cringing at the trolls I gt t lgh t th psts !
just another reason to get a water proof screen for all the spittle on my laptop screen!
Lv t!! t’s prfct! Thnks!!
I love this place more every day. You rock, Bill Harding!
Bravo!! All positive changes for the good!
this is great… i like how it will keep an interesting / helpful / informative topic active, just sort of bleep out the distractions…
many thanks!
disemvoweling – what fun!
Thanks guys!
An excellent idea, thanks for being so responsive to this important issue.
Love the changes Thanks!!
S p r K wl…….. th nks
This site just keeps getting better all the time ! Thanks guys, your the best !
thank your for all 3
who do we buy vowels from if disemvoweled
is Vana here?
Glad to see the new changes, it doesn’t happen often that we will need to use this new disemboweled feature, but it will come in handy when we do! Nothing worse than seeing someone being rude to someone who simply asked an “off key” question.
Love the new changes. Thanks.
Yeah, down with the trolls! Up with the stats, go going!
Great Changes as always,you Boyz are the Best.Thanks
Cats
Lve t!!….But now more time spent buying Vowels!! LOL! Booth views is perfect!! Thanks!
Oh how cool! love it..so can I start an inflammatory thread to see how it works? or do I have to behave myself and wait for the real trolls?
HA! Brilliant!!
ok, who’s got vowels for sale in their booth?
great idea for the vowel removal! I’ve read so many threads that should Not be sent to drama, but because one or two posters it ends up there.. thanks guys!
Great idea to help keep our community the wonderful place that it is. Five stars to the Boyz.
I like it!
Thanks for the stats changes. That is a great tool to track with.
BTW…..if one gets disemvowelled do we dial 911??
LOL – things just keep getting better. Disemvoweller will be great for keeping threads up that would have otherwise gotten dramatized by one or two posters.
Love the new booth stats options.
Ths cld b ntrstng!
What I’d like to see, is a less dramatic way to tag posts that are put in the wrong forum. You know, the same old posters promoting THEIR products in the Items Wanted Forum. It doesn’t qualify for any of the tags – maybe a huge YAWN, or just another choice that says “WRONG FORUM”.
Kp p th grt wrk, byz!!
That’s a good point, Bookbin. I’ve put that on “my list.”
Aaaaaawesoooooooooooooome!
TY!
Amie
Bookbinetc I have been thinking the same thing. Like enough people tagging a post spam moves it to promotions. Just how the drama section works.
Wonderful additions. I love the vowel thing, thats just a cute idea. You said it wasn’t new, that another site uses it. I have never heard of it before, but sounds really neato
xcllnt!
Great way to deal with the problem. To many excellent threads go Poof! because of a troll or two.
Thanks!
Love the “Promo” tag idea. A perfect way to keep things organized without making a big Drama out of it
It was to be expected that trolling rats would arrive. As the rats flee the sinking ship of the other auction site they will squirm their way on to any floating log. Bonanzle may be that log for a while. It’s up to us to monitor the forums and make sure they stay sane. We may need to look into blocking certain buyers as well. Bonanzle is growing fast and fat quickly.
And I caught him in the middle of it last night…LOL…wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!
I lv t!
Question on views… If I go to say Pieper’s booth today 5 times – do I get counted as 1 or 5?
Read a post right now that had been disemvoweled. Whoa, that’s pretty effective stuff!!
Love the variable interval booth stats change!!
Thank you for always keeping Bonanzle fresh, exciting, fun…I look forward to coming here every morning to see whassup!!
I believe there should be a “reconsider” button for Disemboweled Users. That would flag the post and have an actual Bonanzle Worker take a look at it. All it takes is three like minded people and they can remove any comments they want anywhere they want. That’s a lot of power to give to potential stiff-necked individuals.
Wow, I am uber excited about that! Now if you get a troll rotisserie for the troll roast, all will be well!
Great added feature, but can tell me how to pay my seller fee? I know its only 50 cents but sure would like to know as the site and users grow, I am marketing both my company and bonanzle at the Worlds Largest RV and camping show in chicago this weekend, I am giving out over a 1000 flyers anyway I can, so sure could use some pity sales over here to pay for the bonanzle advertising I ama going to be doing this weekend
Another bunch of goodies….Thanks Boyz!
Bill you are so on top of everything, do you ever sleep? This is a great feature, and fun to boot, Just lovin Bonanzle. My new Tote has been out on the town, getting lots of attention. Shari
Love it, but some don’t, not now anyway
Thanks guys
Truly brilliant updates. You impress me with your continuously creative approach to dealing with certain issues. And, I really appreciate the ability to set a time period on booth stats. You guys are so good!
Thank you, thank you, thank you
Bill, :-(
Sorry to see that you go the way of mob rule, like Ebay is.
Trolling will not be solved with this disenvoweling tool (which makes posts unreadable) if the troll is a majority supported troll.
The only thing disenvoweling will achieve is mob rule where the mob (the majority) will be able to destroy any minority posting, regardless of its rationality, so regardless if it is truly trolling or not.
I actually liked your original innovative system, which relegated troll (regardless if perceived or true) drama to a drama section. It still left the reader the choice to read the messages.
The way you are going now, you have taken away the choice for a reader to read the ‘perceived’ troll posts.
I have never disagreed with your choices in public before, but now I do. This is antithetical to the culture of ‘choice’ you started with on Bonanzle.
It is a bad tool and doomed to start a a bad trend for Bonanzle if this mob rule principle is what is going to be the culture, sort of like the vicious French Revolution where the majority was chopping off heads. You just gave the mob a guillotine.
If your desire was to have a ‘popularity’ valuation of individual posts instead of whole threads, why not simply do that and state the grading at each posts like a thumbs up or thumbs down. It is quite common on boards nowadays and leaves choice to the reader instead of taking it away like you did.
Also, why not instead create a ‘safe place forum’ for ‘sellers only’, where they can happily or unhappily share their ups and downs? It would have allowed again choice whom to associate with.
If you want to create a ‘happy image’ of Bonanzle, on the surface you may think this is the way, but it will only be an incentive of the mediocre delusional type of ‘happiness’ of a mob.
Peter
PS
To give you an example of what will happen: The mob is very religious, they then start creating threads here with religious propaganda (starting with ‘religion related titles’ etc), a minority criticizes this religious zealotry and request that it stops (this site should be about trading as it is its core goal, not philosophy, religion, politics). The minority gets disenvoweled so guillotinized and the site gets even more religious, chasing away buyers and sellers who are not. Same if there is propaganda here by a majority about a recently elected communist political leader. The minority will be silenced with disenvoweling and you will be left with only commie users.
Peter & Boondoggle,
I understand your concerns that a group of people might conspire to remove posts that don’t objectively warrant removing. I shared these very concerns when we implemented forum tagging. Would a vocal minority take control and irrationally move posts to the “Dramatic” forum? Would it jeopardize free speech to allow people to censor forum posts?
But after a couple months and hundreds of threads that have ended up marked as “Dramatic,” I believe the community has been spot on in choosing which threads belong on the main message boards and which don’t.
Disemvoweling posts plays by the same rules, so I have a hard time believing that the reasons posts get disemvoweled will be any less just than the reasons topics are moved to the Drama forum or deleted altogether (in the case of venemous threads).
Even if there were an occasional false positive in posts being disemvoweled, I feel that the marginal benefit of being able to reduce trolling on a widespread scale far outweighs the marginal drawback of a non-incendiary post being disemvoweled now and then.
There are plenty of other message boards and sites on the web where people can have dramatic discussions if that’s their bag. It’s our objective to have Bonanzle stay as drama-free and negative-free as possible—not because we want to pretend that drama and negative feelings don’t exist—but because for the purposes of building a marketplace, we think they dilute from the joy buyers and sellers can experience in their absence.
Bill
Bill,
The ‘drama’ tool and the ‘disenvowling’ tool are not comparable, therefore NOT playing by the same rules.
One tool merely relegates a thread to a different forum but still keeps it public, so readable for anyone choosing to read it.
The other tool, disenvowling, destroys the posting. It is the difference between ‘flagging a posting/thread as ’controversial’ and ’killing the posting, thus censoring a minority.
Therefore your consideration above is no addressing my stated concern. We clearly disagree about the identity of either tool, and therefore about its effect.
Of course it is your privilege to make mistakes with your site.
I hope some day you will remember my words and reconsider.
My best wishes with your endeavors, although I will take not part of it as it is contrary to my fundamental values of ‘freedom of choice’. I am not willing to have ‘mob rule’ in my life. We’ll see in the end whose ideas get validated as sole truth in reality, since contradictions have no place there.
Peter
Peter,
The concept of allowing members to judge what topics are in the spirit of Bonanzle is not a new idea — the venomous tag has long performed the function of removing caustic topics. And this tag has been used judiciously by the community, we usually only have one or two topics per week vile enough to get the boot.
But it seems that perhaps the real difference between what you’re seeking and what we have to offer is that you seek out a forum where people can post comments however negative/dramatic they please without fear of having those comments censored by the community (or “mob,” if you’d rather). As I’ve said before, I think there are plenty of forums where this is possible (PSU comes to mind, they have lots of “lively discourse” over there), but we don’t feel it’s conducive to the spirit we’re looking to foster at Bonanzle.
That isn’t to say that we don’t want people to be able to intelligently and dispassionately disagree, but we trust that our members have the savvy to discern level headed disagreements with dramatic and incendiary ones. So far, people’s relatively moderate use of topic tags seems to justify this trust.
And of course, we always listen to comments, however direct, when emailed to us rather than posted in the forums.
Bill
You know, we are good community members of Bonanzle and don’t intend to be disruptive in any forums. In fact, we don’t use the forums much except to keep up on the Bonanzle update threads like this one. I think I tried once to get some information there and within an hour the post I had posted sank down into obscurity and never resurfaced. We do like to see different points of view. Dramatic threads don’t bother us at all, in fact, sometimes disagreements bring up thoughts that would have never occurred to you, so you get a whole new perspective on a topic. Understanding other people’s perspectives shouldn’t threaten us, it should encourage us to see the world through other people’s eyes. That’s a good thing, if we can manage our own hotheaded haste in responding before looking at what the original poster meant (I am as guilty of that as anyone). However, that being said, I must add that we do not seek out the forums much, so our history of the Discussion boards here is rather limited.
In all honesty, the thing that is hard in the forums is to find answers to difficult questions without having to wade through thousands of social threads. Perhaps we just don’t understand using the forums here yet. It is confusing to search for a topic when really needing a TECHNICAL bit of info and end up out in Google instead of Help pages here. I have questions all the time about how to do something, but I would like the answers to come from those who actually put the platform into place, not just a lot of social answers that may make people feel like they are giving you “support” but not the answers you need. They are certainly not wrong for giving support, but this can be frustrating when you just need to have a simple question answered.
That darned Mark has spoiled us. He is SO fast to respond to questions, but he must be dragging his sorry buttinsky home some days due to the fatigue of answering the same questions he has answered 30 plus thousand times.
Also, I do feel just a little nervous that, if someone doesn’t like you and they have friends OR if they are a competitor seller with friends, they could do this disemvoweling to you just out of snarkiness. Actually, I was afraid to post to this thread because of that specific fear. I’ve been reading it and I can understand both sides of the issue. I hope that you guys will be liberal in your tolerance of the free flow of thoughts and ideas. It should be something pretty awful that justifies this public rebuke. I hope specific guidelines are in place to check the intent of people using disemvoweling as a tool to make strikes against other sellers here. I mean, you WILL check to make sure it isn’t just competitors trying to ding their arch-enemy sellers, right? I’m a worry wart. Some of us have had the begeesus beaten out of us at other well known forums by nasty gangs. Hope that doesn’t end up happening here.
And I certainly hope the readers of these comments do not take offense. There are probably a lot of people feeling the same discomfort. They just don’t post in the forums.
Hey STB,
Thanks for your comments! I’ll try to briefly address your points as best I can here.
Though it doesn’t pertain to disemvoweling, per se, we are always looking to improve the availability of technical help on Bonanzle, if for no other reason, than that Mark is only one person and it becomes increasingly difficult for him to be quick in his responses when upwards of 25,000 different users per day visit with potential questions! So we are definitely in your boat here, and you can expect that finding answers in the help section is something that is going to continue to improve over time.
As far as arch enemies disemvoweling posts, I wouldn’t sweat it too much. It takes more than just a person or two to agree before a comment is disemvoweled, and in the several months since topic tags were introduced, we have yet to have a report of a coordinated effort to sabotage a particular user (which isn’t to say that certain users don’t get censored more than others, but the reason they get censored isn’t because of competition, but rather the content of their comments). We’ll be continuing to monitor how this new tool is used, and as always, we’ll make adaptations to it as necessary to strike the right balance between letting people say what they want to say, and keeping our forums a respectful and upbeat environment in which to post.
Thank you everybody for your comments on this new tool! If you have additional feedback, feel free to drop us a line at support!
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