Policies For Clueless Comments

1. All posts will be polite.

2. Blatant self-linking is not allowed. "Here's something relevant I wrote on my site" is OK. "Please come visit me; I have a great web site but no-one ever reads it" is not permitted.

3. The purpose of the forum is to respond to log entries posted on USS Clueless.

4. Membership is a privilege, not a right. Membership is confirmed by email. All users must have a valid email address which can't easily be gotten in five minutes. Members who abuse the privilege will lose their membership.

5. Handles are OK, but there will be no anonymous posting. All participants will be identifiable.

The problem I'm wrestling with is how to make sure that Clueless Comments doesn't suffer the fate of so many discussion forums in the past: invasion by idiots, descent to the banal, and conversion into a knife fight.

Again and again we've seen it: a discussion forum goes up, people start participating, and initially the discussions are interesting and the people are polite. Then some assholes show up and change the chemistry. The polite interesting people leave, more and more assholes show up, and it becomes one more cesspit on the net. The medium is unimportant; this has happened in chatrooms, in Usenet news groups, and to the discussion systems of web sites, not to mention online games.

Various people have tried technological solutions to the problem, and in my opinion none of them have worked. I've considered this long and hard and I think it is not susceptible to a mechanical solution. I object in principle to "rating" systems because I object to the tyranny of the majority, and because it encourages the development of cliques and voting blocs, and reprisals and wars. UBBS supports this feature and I have it disabled.

I've thought about this long and hard and realized that the only times I've seen where a forum hasn't disintegrated has been where there has been active moderation. (The classic example of this is "Risks Digest", which has maintained high quality for more than 15 years.) A moderator who is willing to delete posts and to kick out users can keep the quality high for as long as he's willing to do the work. For the moment, that's me. For the moment, I am willing. At the most extreme, this can involve requiring manual approval of new members. UBBS also supports that, but I have not enabled it yet. (I may do so in future but I'd rather not.)

But one thing in particular that I've noticed is that if you take a thousand posters who use their real names and provide traceable identities, and compare them to a thousand posters who use pseudonyms and post anonymously, that the second group will have most of the jerks. Some of the second group will have good things, even great things, to say -- but mostly they won't.

So I am not allowing anonymous posting here. (I don't mind "handles" as long as they are not used to hide.) All members will be required to have a real mailbox. Posting requires registration, and registration involves mailing a password to you, which forces you to reveal an email address. If I ever discover that your email address has gone dead, I will remove your membership. I am not permitting use of Yahoo mail, or Hotmail, or Eudora mail, or equivalent freemail addresses simply because doing so defeats the goal of forcing people to reveal an email address. Anyone who wants to can get a Hotmail box in about ten minutes -- and can get as many of them as they want anytime they want. So I have set up UBBS to refuse to mail confirmations to those kinds of services.

Instead, you have to use an email address which isn't easily gotten or changed: through a university, or where you work, or through an ISP that you pay for (such as AOL or Teleport). This will substantially impede (though not prevent) assholes from getting new memberships if I've been forced to remove a previous one.

Inevitably this will silence a few voices worth listening to, and I regret that. But it will also silence a lot of voices I don't want here. Those who really do want to participate will find a way. The jerks won't; they'll mostly go elsewhere and become someone else's problem, and ruin someone else's forum. That's my goal. I cannot make the jerks cease to exist, but I can try to keep them out of my forum.

I want Clueless Comments to be a place where there is lively and intelligent and polite discussion of all sorts of things.

I have no intention of suppressing points of view that disagree with mine; what I will be suppressing is attitudes and styles, not opinions. An obnoxious person who agrees with me will get booted. A polite articulate person who disagrees with me is welcome.

So while we're on the subject, let's get the following out of the way right now, because it's sure to come up eventually:

Your right to free expression in a privately owned forum

You don't have one.

A lot of people have only a cartoon understanding of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, so let's review it.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first words are the most critical: Congress shall make no law... The First Amendment restricts what the government can do to residents of the US. It doesn't apply to relations between those residents.

The First Amendment (and the Ninth and Fourteenth) have been generalized into a right of Free Expression, the right of residents of the US to say what they think in nearly any medium. When Canada wrote its Constitution, it adopted a similar principle (but made it even stronger in certain regards). Other nations have different principles. But Clueless Comments is located in the United States and US law applies.

Freedom of the Press means that