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To: Jon Tara who wrote (17543)	5/24/2003 9:40:48 AM
From: SI Bob	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 32883

Matt's questions/comments were academic. I'm also not a fan of the Moderated board model, BUT can live with it because if someone doesn't like the way a board is moderated, they can create a new board. I dislike the word "never" and am especially reluctant to apply it here when I'm still getting a handle on the whole beast, so can't really predict exact ways things will/won't change, but I don't intend to implement anything akin to iHub's CoB model here. There are some broken things here (IMO) in terms of technological and philosophical approaches to being a message board, but this ship is largely in very excellent condition and there are many things that're under the umbrella of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" and deletion ability belonging only to an admin is definitely one of those things. I think the CoB model does work well on iHub, although as traffic increases, the model's limits are going to get tested. It would NOT work here and will not even be tried. So, consider this as coming straight from the horse's mouth (or whichever end each reader may equate me with): Users will never be able to delete posts here. Only I or any other admin that is hired will be able to do so. I don't want to fool around with the content too much even on a site-wide scale except for the signal/noise ratio I'd discussed earlier. And of course in the specific manner I have to as an admin. My first priorities are the technology and the business model. I want to fix the technology the few places it's broken (Search is the main example), port it over to the ASP/SQL Server/Windows world I'm good in, add features until both iHub and SI have similar available features, then develop new features only once and be able to implement them on both sites. On the business side, I want to open the site up (in a limited way that I haven't yet worked out all the details of) to free members, ditch the lifetime subscription model (while honoring existing ones, of course), replace it with recurring subscriptions, and add other revenue streams I'm not ready to discuss yet. Though our long-range (at least a year, maybe two, out) plans do call for merging the two sites into one, that's far from set in stone. There are several major issues surrounding that, not the least of which is that I like appealing to twice as many different kinds of message board users. Other than that, I'm not going to muck around with the place too much. It's lost marketshare to iHub, but it's been hanging in there just fine. It has its loyal userbase (myself included) and if I seriously thought iHub could continue to take its marketshare, we wouldn't have bought it. SI will remain what it is in most respects and iHub will remain what it is, and they'll both be different sites that appeal to different people.

To: Jon Tara who wrote (17543)	5/24/2003 11:56:58 AM
From: Rick Faurot	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 32883

IMO how well a moderated board works depends on how the moderator uses the function. I can understand how if a moderator arbitrarily deletes certain posters or deletes posters for whimsical reasons or because a poster is posting views that the moderator doesn't want to hear, that many would be angry or irritated or frustrated with this. I have especially noted a major outcry from people who have been moderated off certain boards. On the other hand, I have actively followed a number of boards that were frequently disrupted by posters whose sole goal was to deride, insult, abuse and even threaten specific posters on the board. In one case, we had a poster who regularly posted 20-25 such personal attacks every day for a period of years. These personal attacks resulted in a major uproar when they occurred, no doubt the exact result the disruptive poster was seeking. For those of us who are trading actively, time is a precious commodity, and having to wade through an extra ten or fifteen posts per hour that are about one poster's hate obsession with another rendered what had been a wonderful resource virtually useless. Even worse, regulars on the thread had to deal with seeing people we admired and cared about subjected to abuse that made us feel sick at heart. So for me the moderated thread is really a way to keep discussions focused on the topics, trading, the markets, specific stocks and other securities. I don't support eliminating dissent with regard to market views. If one poster is convinced the market is heading south and has arguments and evidence to support his view, and another person takes a bullish view and backs it up with arguments that make sense, then that is exactly what I am looking for from these boards. I know that many share my views on this. I don't follow a board to see fifty other posters say the same thing I am saying or thinking. I know there are boards like that, but I'd consider them a waste of time, especially if the topic is a particular stock and the majority are "long and strong" and don't want to hear any contrarian view. I don't know how long the moderated board feature has been around on SI. Perhaps someone can recall when it was introduced and by whom. I do know it has been around at least for a couple of years and therefore wasn't introduced by the new owners of SI. So I am a little puzzled why the sudden flap about moderated boards is occurring now. Can you enlighten me on this question? I also want to add that, unlike a few critics of IHUB whom I've seen posting here on SI, I have been a regular participant on IHUB for the past year or so and I have been extremely satisfied with the job Matt Brown has done as the IHUB admin. I have seen Matt going through a tremendous amount of stress and hard work to keep IHUB open to dissenting views of every kind while putting a stop to the type of flame wars that involve nothing more than personal attacks. Posters who are roundly detested by the "long and strong" crowd on various stock threads still have posting privileges and post their views whenever they wish. With regard to the charge that Matt supports touts, IMO it is ludicrous to think that you can run a message board about the stock market and not have promoters of every ilk present. SI is full of such people just as is IHUB, Raging Bull, Motley Fool, Yahoo and any other forum about the markets. Anyone who has hung out on these boards for any length of time knows these people when he sees them. It is easy enough to avoid the threads where these people set up shop and if they do their best to moderate critics of their stock off their threads, why is this such a big deal. If you really want to spend your time hammering penny stocks, you can always start your own threads for this purpose and SI certainly has some of those. Finding a middle ground between having moderated threads and not having them is a dilemma for board operators. If moderated boards didn't exist, the job of admins would be a hundred fold more difficult. I assume that was why moderated boards were invented, to spread the workload out and make it manageable by one or two admins. I've seen more than one person on both SI and IHUB threaten that this or that procedure would spell the death of the board. I find these predictions amusing. The boards fulfill some vital functions or there wouldn't be so many participants; and the site operators aren't asleep at the switch. Policies are modified on a regular basis and everyone has a voice.