Friday, September 19, 2008

Tough Calls and Conflicts of Interest

Okay, I figure I may as well finish the week off with a subject that's something of a continuation from yesterday's discussion of black-and-white dealings with members. As "nowhere" said on Monday, this is the sort of thing all staff should already know, although in my experience this is not always the case. Anyway, sometimes things aren't so clear, even for the more levelheaded staffers out there.

If an argument occurs between two established members, it can be a difficult call to make. The best choice with heated discussions is to lock or delete the thread in question. If the thread is locked, include a simple post saying something like "this discussion is getting out of hand". Don't take sides. Usually, this is all it will take. It's the topic's fault, not the members'. If necessary, send each involved party a cautionary message. Don't get into a "who started it" game, or allow the members to pull you into one. Depending on the circumstances, you could caution one member against baiting others and another against rising to the bait. Warnings are rarely necessary where otherwise-upstanding members are concerned, since they have a stake in the community and should understand that they should behave accordingly. However, repeat offenders should be officially sanctioned no matter their status.

That's still something of a no-brainer. Here's the bigger point, and the one where I slipped up as I'll tell you in a minute: don't get involved. Even if the subject of discussion is concerning the site, do your best to remain impartial. If it's a topic of some concern to you, step back and ask another staff member to deal with it. Similarly, don't use the locking method I described above to foreclose debate. Unless a subject is clearly inciting a polarized and heated debate (as in the example I gave on Monday of the "What do you think about homosexuals?" thread on Facebook), it should be allowed to run its course unless it gets out of hand. Just because you may not like the way the discussion is going doesn't give you any right to bring your extra powers to bear.

Sometimes, you just want to leap into the fray. Hey, a good argument can be fun, so long as it remains civil. However, if you're going to join up, leave your badge at the door, and make it clear to the members that you are doing so. If necessary, message a fellow staff member asking them to keep an eye on the thread and moderate any or all participants if necessary, even you. If you bring your powers into a discussion, your relationship with members will change forever. It can't be undone.

This is the point where I bring in my own painful example, where I became involved in a discussion and a user ended up leaving the site for good as a result of my behavior. During a political debate, I brought up my rather polarized views against Israel's foreign policy. The other user responded with equally-polarized view in support, and we fell into discussing the country's enemies. Eventually, I felt that the other had become quite offensive, both to the Islamic religion and Arabs themselves. I issued a summary ban. I realized almost immediately that this was an overreaction, so I scaled it back to a warning. Here's the worst part: I then asked one of my fellow moderators to send a message explaining the reasons behind the warning that I had issued. I didn't want it to look like I had become emotionally involved in the discussion, and didn't believe that I had. In retrospect, that was certainly the case. The other member reacted in an understandable fashion towards myself and my middleman: he sent us both indignant messages, deleted all his torrents, then his own account. I had, in the end, effectively banned him from the site.

The biggest lesson to take away from this example is that there's a right and a wrong way to involve other staff members. Asking another to do the work I didn't feel comfortable doing myself should have sent up red flags that what I was doing was not a good idea. Part of the problem is that I don't think he had quite internalized The Moderator's Bible that I posted on Monday, and didn't feel comfortable enough to say no to me. That's another reason that mods need to be relaxed and comfortable in their roles, since they may need to call you out when you behave improperly yourself. Hey, we're all human. Well, we are under a layer of internet, anyway.

13 comments:

Michael Stephenson said...

I have been enjoying reading your blog so far, and your articles on community management are very insightful, but they could be applicable to any forum, when do we get the juicy stuff on operating a tracker and creating the website?

CurlyFries said...

Patience, grasshopper. I've got some topics in mind for the next couple of weeks that ought to keep your interest a bit.

Simon T said...

I must start off with saying I'm fascinated by your blog. I find it very informative and has given me a great deal of insight on all the bits and pieces of running a website/service. With every post I read, I feel like I could tackle a project with much more confidence.
Thanks a lot.

CurlyFries said...

That's good to hear. I'll have to add you to my testimonials page. ;)

Xexr said...

Thoroughly enjoying your blog, its very insightful, like a reader above mentioned, the way you compartmentalize each problem / situation inspires confidence. I've found myself being extremely bored lately, in need of a project I think, maybe this is something I could look into.

I have a few questions for you, possibly topics you could address in later posts.

1. I see from your graphs that you are experiencing growth in the 20k users per month range, when do you anticipate that your site will need to be scaled across multiple servers and how large of a job is this?

2. Leading from the previous post, I am extremely interested in the financial aspects of the site / tracker. You mentioned advertisements and donations, are you willing to disclose an average monthly income / costs of currently running the site?

3. What sort of role does this play in your life? Are you working as well, or do you get by on the proceeds of the site alone? How much time commitment do you give basically?

Hope those questions aren't to prying, for some reason I find it all incredibly interesting.

CurlyFries said...

1. Not for a while. We're currently tracking about 25,000 peers, which isn't a huge load. At the moment, we're running a dual Xeon beast with 4 GiB of memory, and we're looking at about 10% utilization.

I've never dealt with multi-server environments, but the logical course would be to move the database to a separate server. Outgrowing that, the tracker (announce and scrape) could be separated from the web server, followed by redundancy among the various servers. For an idea of what large trackers use, take a look at The Pirate Bay's setup

2. I'm planning a more-detailed post regarding the day-to-day finances of a tracker.

3. I spend at least 4 hours a day on the community, plus whatever technical stuff needs doing. That has eased up a bit thanks to OnionRings and Ketchup being around.

I make no profit off the site, although I know some admins do so.


If I was concerned about keeping my tracker operations private, I wouldn't be keeping a blog, would I? ;)

gipsy_scholar said...

I fell into the same trap with my own tracker. During the Olympics I got into discussions about the broken promises of the games and a Chinese national (to whom all such material is censored) decided to play the nationalism card and take offense. What was worse was that he was a great contributor to the site and was a very promising mod. Fortunately, as information becomes freer thanks to more and more torrent trackers, hopefully these political disagreements will become less and less.

CurlyFries said...

I wouldn't count on it. For all the information that is available, global society is becoming more polarized, not less.

anonymous64 said...

great blog! thanks for shareing your info, just curious about something, when i registered my domain name my name shows up on the whois records, is there a way to make it not show?

CurlyFries said...

A lot of registrars allow you to enable some sort of privacy protection service on a domain name. They put their own name and address instead of yours and set up a proxy email (like torrentfries.com@registrar.com) to ensure that people are still able to contact you.

Even so, I would strongly recommend against using your real name and home address in registering such a domain. Nobody's going to be contacting you by mail, anyway. ;)

anonymous64 said...

aye thats what i was thinking, prolly not a good idea to have my real details associated with it, do you know if one can just give a fake name etc or do they do some kind of check

CurlyFries said...

There's no check when you register a domain or change your details, but you don't "own" the domain name unless you use the correct registration information.

The important thing is that you be able to be contacted by email.

anonymous64 said...

Cool, thanks for the help.

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