HOW Lounge Removed

[amalek]

Hi all - as you may have noticed, the HOW Lounge thread on our forum has become overrun with spam, ads, complaints and lewd comments alike. So in an effort to clean up our message boards and create a place where designers can come together to share ideas, we've decided to close the HOW Lounge. We're evaluating our next steps, but would love to hear your feedback as to whether you'd like a new HOW Lounge (a similar, non-design specific area) - or if you prefer the message boards stay design-specific. Please share your comments below and together we can make this forum a place that's viable for the design community.

[farined]

My main concern at this point is to get rid of all the spam that is invading/flooding this forum. I am actually not sure why you guys haven't taken aggressive measures to stop it to begin with. As far as moderating the Lounge section; your policy should be clear: no abusive language is to be tolerated. Again I don't know exactly what are the technical limitations that you're dealing with this forum in order to give you any kind of suggestions. Maybe you can add a rating system to monitor the conversations taking place on this forum, so that you can gage if a user is abusing her/his membership privileges.

[smutek]

Just wanted to point out a few things -

This has been going on for almost 2 years now.
They aren't going to fix anything.
They don't have anyone who knows how to fix it.
Most importantly - they simply do not care.

Seriously, look at their latest "solution". As a way of combating spam they removed the lounge for gods sake. I mean, seriously? Then Sarah asks if we'd like a "new lounge", knowing full well that the lounge was the lifeblood of this forum for years. If you are hanging on while they "look into fixes" and "work out solutions" then you are definitely wasting your time

My advice would be to either make your way over to the HOW facebook group, find another design forum with competent admins who actually give a shoot, or start your own forum. This was a really, really great place here once, but those days are gone and they aren't coming back. .

[smutek]

@ Amanda -

If you are looking for suggestions you could start with all of them that have been sent since this board was first switched over to phpbb. You could also look in the HOW inbox, where there's one thread, started by one of your volunteer moderators, with quite a few suggestions that have went unanswered (with the exception of a spammer) for almost a year now.

HOW couldn't have bungled this forum worse and, as a long time member and some one who knows what an awesomely cool place it used to be, the fact that they don't just take the damn thing down but instead just keep it going - along with a bunch of vague promises that they never, ever deliver on - quite frankly makes all of you look more than a bit ridiculous.

HOWs solution to spam in the lounge was to remove the lounge. Do you really expect anyone to take you seriously?

I wont even apologize if I've ruffled anyones feathers, I've exchanged more than a few emails with Sarah and others at HOW about this and they've followed through on not a single thing that they said they would. Why, now, should anyone believe that any of you are going to do anything at all to save this forum?

If you want to build this place back up maybe try starting with some transparency and stop trying to save face - that opportunity passed a long time ago. Let people know exactly what the problems are and if you make a commitment to do something then follow through with it.

[phoenix]

HOWs solution to spam in the lounge was to remove the lounge. Do you really expect anyone to take you seriously?

That's what I found funny! What about the Business section? Apparently it's all about golfing business! What about the other sections that have been similarly overrun?

The Lounge was the real lifeblood of the forum, its soul, one of the main reasons the whole forum thrived and evolved and maintained a heartbeat. Without it, this isn't really a forun, just a potential source of information, but that can be found in many places.

HOW, you stopped listening, the regulars couldn't log in but spammers could, you lost the momentum, you've lost the credibility this place had (not just the Lounge but the technical side, the critique side), you've lost control... perhaps you should remove more than just the Lounge because it really seems like you don't care and this place is just a thorn in your digital hide...

[Sarah Whitman]

Thank you for your comments. I agree that the Lounge is the lifeblood of the Forum, and we were reluctant to close it down. But it got hit so hard with lewd spam that it was having a negative impact on our search traffic across all of our sites, so we had to pull the plug for the health of the HOW brand.

I also realize that ever since we moved to this platform, the Forum experience has been diminished. You're right—we're having trouble keeping the spam out in the first place, we lack the resources to clean out what gets through daily, and we've had to put annoying safeguards like captchas in place to combat the problem. In light of this reality, we're considering shutting down the entire Forum and instead focusing our efforts on building the HOW community elsewhere. As we contemplate this decision, I'd like to hear from you about what other platform(s) you'd be most likely to use: Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+? It will definitely need to be some form of social media rather than a different Forum platform. I know that social media and Forum communities differ and that there are pros and cons to both—that's why we've tried to continue to support both—but perhaps it's time to face up to the fact that we're spreading ourselves too thin here at HOW HQ.

So, please, let me know how and where you would like to interact with the HOW community if not here. Some of the key decision-makers on our team are out of the office for the next few weeks, but I promise to follow up with information about our decision when we're able to regroup. In the meantime, thank you as always for your input and your patience.

[Ampersand]

Sarah,

As a somewhat infrequent and recent participant here, I hesitate to be too critical, but shutting down the HOW forum because it seems unmanageable would be a mistake. It's just not necessary and would squander a significant resource and opportunity.

Part of my work involves web design and development. I've designed, built, managed and sold several very successful forums over the past ten years — most of them built around phpBB and with two of them having a larger traffic base than the HOW forum.

So speaking from a decade of experience, phpBB is one of several good platforms, and controlling spam is just not that difficult. Hidden registration fields, captchas, IP range blocks, minimum post user group settings with restricted permissions, moderator activations of new accounts, etc., will reduce spam down to a barely noticed trickle. Back-end administration of the forum, as in software updates, coding and template modifications and database management, can be a bit tedious if an excessive amount of modifications are made, but even that's easily manageable (with the right skill set).

Essential to all of this, however, is an active group of respected volunteer moderators who have the authority to implement and enforce a forum-wide set of rules plus implement a zero-tolerance approach to spam that is dealt with quietly, efficiently and quickly. Do this, and I guarantee (from lots of experience) that the spam problem will go away.

Volunteer moderators are the lifeblood of a forum. They set both the forum's personality and, over time, steer the forum in the right direction by keeping it on the road, making the correct turns when choices come along, welcoming new members and making crucial decisions.

I'm not really a longtime regular here, but I see no real evidence of volunteer moderators. I understand that they exist, but where are they? Have they been given no real authority to actually run the forum? Is there no lead moderator or admin steering the ship? From my experience volunteer moderators are easy to line up by carefully recruiting them from the ranks of the longer-term forum members, but it's important to pick the right ones. Once in place, a good set of volunteer moderators is self-sustaining and requires little management or supervision.

Honest, none of this is difficult — I've done it successfully several times, but it has to be done the right way. It would be a shame to squander a resource that could greatly benefit HOW and HOW's readers by killing your forum and becoming just another Facebook or LinkedIn entity. There's potential here that exceeds anything that you might do on one (or all) of the major social media platforms (which isn't to say that you shouldn't do those things too).

Spam and abusive posts are easy to control. What's more difficult is giving the forum a personality that keeps people coming back through just the right combinations of information, drama, familiar people and excitement. Seriously though, it's easily doable given HOW's name recognition and reader base. Really, you've got a perfect forumla to make this work if you'll just take the right steps. Giving up and needlessly killing the place because the current people in charge don't know what to do and lack the necessary skills and interest would be a real shame.

Maybe HOW needs to find somebody to teach them HOW to manage a successful forum.

[Moderator 3]

This forum used to be a vibrant community, with many long-time users who had been here from the days when there were so few of us many used our first names as user IDs and topics unfolded like directory trees on vast white space. Design was always the hot topic and we got to know/respect each other. We became friends on and offline and in person, and many of us have done creative projects together. Volunteer moderators weren't needed until X redesigns later and those of us who were asked didn't hesitate to take up the virtual broom to help keep our favorite virtual hangout cleaned up.

Video didn't kill the radio star but Facebook has pretty much killed this forum. I don't remember the timing, it could have been concurrent that FB came alive as HOWtown began filling with spam. But as more users left and pumped up the activity on FB, more spammers filled the space they left behind and those of us who were reluctant to join FB eventually caved and drank the Koolaid and friendships continue. For a long while, there was enough quality interaction still going on here that volunteer mods didn't mind spending more and more time cleaning the streets of HOWtown. However, on the timeline of how long we have been OTJ, we have only recently been given the tools to delete spammers because doing so occupied more and more of HOW's time.

I can't speak for the other mods, but I was glad to know so many HOWies off-forum because housekeeping became more and more of a chore. We have jobs and lives just like the HOW admins do. It's been a long time since I've logged in as myself. I used to visit sev'l times a day -- it was fun! always design candy or something to LOL about -- but now I have to remind myself to stop by to search today's posts and delete new users. I feel bad for the real people who want to talk about design or get feedback.

This used to be a great place for that and a lot of other things. I am sorry it has changed so much, but it's not because the the HOW editors and volunteer mods were asleep. IMO, the forum would as active as ever despite FB if the last redesign hadn't left the doors open, and I miss it as much as the few who still come by for old times' sake, and the new users who know it could be better. I don't envy HOW the job of determining the value of a design forum and deciding whether or not and, if yes, how to turn it around.

[lobster]

White people problems.

Love you guys. K

[Ampersand]

Video didn't kill the radio star but Facebook has pretty much killed this forum.

I respectfully have to disagree with several of your conclusions. Both Facebook and LinkedIn have more linear formats that aren't well-suited for the complex, categorized back-and-forth discussions of good forums. As I mentioned, I've designed, built and administered several large forums. I recently sold one for a very good sum of money that was still growing rapidly and accumulating over a million visits per month. Admittedly, it was not a design-oriented forum, but I don't see a major difference in the underlying dynamics. Most of my forums have had Facebook counterparts that really only served to drive more traffic to the forum. Never have the Facebook counterparts stolen traffic away from the forums themselves.

Also, it is not difficult to keep spam at bay. As I already mentioned, there are many different ways to combat the spam problem, and if done correctly, spam becomes a minor nuisance — certainly not a burden on anyone's time except for the administrator who needs to know enough about making behind-the-scenes coding and .htaccess modifications to keep one step ahead of the spammers, but even that's not especially difficult.

I'll take your word for it that this forum did not need moderators in the beginning, but moderators (and a leader) with authority to make group policy decisions regarding forum participation and personality has, from my experience, been absolutely essential to a growing and developing forum. This is especially true as a forum morphs from a small, several-hundred-member entity into a large, dynamic community with several dozen simultaneous users logged on throughout the day. As mentioned, I'm a relatively newcomer here, but from my perspective this forum has simply died from neglect, and that neglect was likely caused either by apathy from HOW or them simply not knowing how to manage a dynamic and growing forum.

This forum would not be difficult to fix — including the forum management, the lost traffic and the login and software problems. Almost all the traffic is gone, but I'm reasonably certain that it could be rebuilt into something that would either match or exceed what it once was. The most important ingredients are still here: name recognition, a popular magazine to serve as an anchor and high (but currently undeserved) search engine rankings. However, this resurrection definitely won't happen under the guidance of the absentee landlords who are currently in charge.