May 1, 2000
Raging Bull Beefs Up Staff To Police Its Message Boards
By AARON ELSTEIN
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION
Soon there'll be less raging on Raging Bull.
The popular stock-chat Web site, which has a reputation for allowing no-holds-barred
discussions about technology and OTC
Bulletin Board stocks, is beefing up its staff of message-board moderators in an effort to
clean up the often-colorful
discussions.
Raging Bull recently increased its staff of "community advocates" to nine from four. The
advocates, who respond to
complaints from members about insulting or obscene messages, are permitted to delete
offensive messages and suspend,
or even terminate, the memberships of posters who fail to tone down their language.
Advocates also will crack down on
individuals who litter the boards with junk messages -- commonly known as spams.
Janice Shell, an art historian in Milan who has frequently posted on Raging Bull and other
online stock-chat forums using her
real name, recently experienced firsthand Raging Bull's efforts to rein in the use of profanity
on the boards.
Ms. Shell was suspended for three days in late April when a message-board participant
complained about an
expletive she used on a board dedicated to Amazon Natural Treasures. The Las Vegas
company, which plans to
make health-care products with ingredients harvested from Brazilian rain forests, in
February sued Ms. Shell and
other online critics for defamation.
"I think it is sad that you enjoy spending your time reading and writing crude remarks," the
Raging Bull
community advocate told Ms. Shell in an e-mail. "We don't like it and we won't tolerate it."
Ms. Shell responded, "This is Raging Bull, not a board meeting at Goldman Sachs."
Raging Bull has since permitted Ms. Shell to rejoin the board using the alias "Janice123."
The increase in supervisory staff reflects the rising popularity of stock-chat message boards,
says Raging Bull spokeswoman
Tara Burgess. Raging Bull, which is owned in part by CMGI, the Andover, Mass.,
Internet-investment firm, gets more than
60,000 messages a day, up from 25,000 six months ago.
As traffic has increased, so too have complaints that members are saying inappropriate
things to one another. "As we grow
we are committed to maintaining the quality of the community and our members'
experience," Ms. Burgess says.
Advocates, she says, can sanction new members and delete their postings if they determine
their conduct doesn't meet the
standards spelled out in the board's "terms of use." If the offender is a long-standing
member, then the advocate refers any
decision to a group manager "to ensure consistency." Ms. Burgess says.
"We have three main rules," she says. "Don't believe everything you read on the boards.
Don't break the law. And be nice."
"Nice" is not a word ordinarily associated with many Raging Bull messages. The site, which
was started in the summer of
1998 by two college students in the basement of a Freehold, N.J., home, is popular for two
reasons: Membership is free,
unlike some other chat sites, and the site permits free-wheeling discussion about stocks that
other boards disavow.
The most consistently popular discussions on the site revolve around stocks that trade for
only a few dollars, or even pennies,
a share and are quoted on the National Association of Securities Dealers' OTC Bulletin
Board. Until recently, the companies
quoted on the Bulletin Board weren't required to disclose any financial information to
shareholders.
The Bulletin Board reported record volume of 25.1 billion shares traded in March,
compared with just 5.2 billion a year earlier.
Dollar volume also rapidly expanded, reaching $28.4 billion in March compared with $5.4
billion in the year-earlier period. But
volume dropped sharply in April, to 7.6 billion shares on dollar volume of $7.1 billion, as
market turmoil diminished investors'
appetite for these speculative stocks.
Because most Bulletin Board stocks are ignored by Wall Street firms, they are especially
susceptible to manipulation by
promoters and insiders. Such people frequently appear on Raging Bull to talk up the stocks,
and often are countered by critics
who question the supporters' motives. The frequent results are obnoxious online
free-for-alls that can last through tens of
thousands of messages.
Because of this, rival stock-chat sites either have shunned discussion of Bulletin Board
stocks or have taken steps to
minimize the online screaming matches.
Yahoo! of Santa Clara, Calif., whose boards rank among the Web's busiest, says
discussions about Bulletin Board stocks
were dropped in November of 1998. A Yahoo spokeswoman says the boards were
dropped due to lack of interest --
participants preferred to talk about more-liquid stocks that trade on the New York Stock
Exchange or Nasdaq Stock Market.
The Motley Fool, an Alexandria, Va., investor-education site, has never permitted talk on
its message boards about Bulletin
Board stocks or any penny stocks, which generally are defined as shares that trade for less
than five dollars a share. "We
think they're horrible investments," says spokesman Chris Hill.
Silicon Investor, another stock-chat site well-known for its often-heated discussions, does
permit talk about Bulletin Board
stocks. But the site's hefty annual $120 membership fee for those who wish to post
messages tends to weed out individuals
whose intent is simply to be disruptive. The site, owned by Go2Net in Seattle, also retains a
sort of online inspector, Bob
Zumbrunnen, who monitors its online discussions and sanctions members when they get out
of hand.
Write to Aaron Elstein at aaron.elstein@wsj.com |
