Peter wrote:
The European GA community is also quite tribal and this reflects itself on forums. Many people post on say forums X Y Z, posting nicely on X and posting deliberately annoying stuff on Y and Z. Then somebody upsets them on X so they switch and post nicely on Y and post annoying stuff on X and Z
You don’t have to be in aviation for that. There is a Russian joke about a pious guy shipwrecked on a desert island who built himself a home and two Orthodox temples – one that he goes to, and one he refuses to go to.
very funny…
Like the old joke about putting four pilots on a desert island. A year later they will have set up four pilot forums, four type specific forums, each with 20 members, and two splinter groups.
Peter,
if you think moderating a pilots forum is difficult, let me advise you to try
- a US political forum during the Trump election campaign
- a fan forum about a pop group/singer primarily visited by teenagers.
milder form: History forums, particularly such fighting long finished wars all over again.
I shudder to think of places promoting PETA or the likes. Had two looks at some parenting fora and ran very fast.
Done all of the above and believe you me, pilots can be pitas from time to time but nowhere close to any of the above.
I believe it…
The point which I probably made badly is that modding EuroGA is not difficult but the very few individuals which create the very few situations where it is needed tend to be really clever in the way they go about it, and then to the casual onlooker it looks like the whole place is falling apart, and the whole world’s right to free speech is under assault
Wow… that’s a great thread. Being an amateur reader of professional journals in psychology, this makes my day. Why someone would even think of running multiple characters in the same forum, is beyond me. And what’s even more beyond me, is how embarrassing it must be being caught red handed doing it. Ouch….
EuroFlyer wrote:
Why someone would even think of running multiple characters in the same forum, is beyond me. And what’s even more beyond me, is how embarrassing it must be being caught red handed doing it.
I would think there is a connection between doing the first and not feeling the second…
I can see valid reasons for doing it, though. As Peter points out, the GA scene is small enough that it is not too difficult to identify people who have been on a forum long enough. (Or their aircraft!) If you needed to write posts where you would be really anonymous, you would need a second user id. Of course that is different from regularly running two or more id’s.
Airborne_Again wrote:
If you needed to write posts where you would be really anonymous
That is not possible. You cannot be anonymous in the Internet, the opposite is closer to the truth.
Airborne_Again wrote:
If you needed to write posts where you would be really anonymous
Is there anything that you NEED to write?
mdoerr wrote:
You cannot be anonymous in the Internet, the opposite is closer to the truth.
Sure you can, if you know how to do it.
But anonymity in the strict sense was not what I meant. Rather anonymity in the sense that a reader of the forum would not be able to find out who you are.
Rather anonymity in the sense that a reader of the forum would not be able to find out who you are.
I agree. As long as the moderator does not reveal anything one should not be traceable by fellow forum members. And I guess that this is the most anonymity the internet has to offer (“darknet” apart).
