Posted by Rick on March 14, 1999 at 22:05:19 {MWSZV6.08fSjY}:
In Reply to: About this FPP! posted by a7p on March 14, 1999 at 21:02:16:
I appreciated your candor and thoughts expressed about the FPP. Some of those who helped conceive and start H2O in Australia feel very strongly the FPP is enforced. I personally can't see why an occasional topic on the Bible and science hurts, because it stimulates our thinking about the Bible as a real historical record. Unless we can accept through a combination of faith and knowledge that the Bible is a real historical record inspired of the true God, how can we look forward to endless life in God's kingdom of the future? Nevertheless the points you raised are well taken about this board being for the purpose of helping JWs work through organizational issues and discussions dealing with the focus in the FPP. Many who helped start H2O this way, and many JWs through private email, want the FPP to remain focused. Notice with the FPP's narrow focus that we still have a huge volume of postings. Less focus would mean more posts to the point where the board would self-destruct. People couldn't find anything sifting through a jumble of disparate topics, sort of like if usenet were to merge its 30,000 newsgroups into a single newsgroups containing over 100 million postings per day.
If you would like to volunteer as a moderator please let me know. Others who have volunteered and not heard back from H2O, please email H2O again offering to volunteer. (I have been overwhelmed with email and can't even begin to catch-up with responding as I should, for which I apologize to all.)
Everyone wants the impossible: a board that covers only the topics they are interested in, and discourages other topics. Everyone is free to start their own boards to cover areas they feel H2O has missed. Unless we remain focus, or even narrow the FPP (which is still wide enough in focus to generate hundreds of postings per day), then we risk self-destructing. H2O to be manageable needs a level of traffic that allows topics to remain up for at least 5 days. We're at that level.
If we grow further then the board could grow to 500K in size -- not in 15-21 days as at present but rather -- in 2-3 days. This would mean that before the average person could return to this site to reply to a topic, and carry on a discussion, their topic would already have been archived to reduce the board's size! Right now, they have 15-21 days on average to reply. 5 days of postings is about 1/3 of the way down. Further growth will cause 5 days to quickly move postings all the way down to the bottom of a 500K board, meaning that 1/3 of the way will be 1-2 days. That's significant because people usually don't scroll all the way down unless they're following a really important topic.
I don't want to waste time having H2O become like a daily chat area where so much irrelevant conversation occurs that relevant topics are pushed off the board in less than a week. Without immediate measures to prevent the off-topic growth, the board will become useless to those for whom it was designed. I, and other contributors, will basically be contributing funds and effort to entertain people with the gift of gab, who want to shoot the breeze about anything and everything. I'm no saint, obviously, and don't have it in me to entertain a bunch of thankless gabbers who carry on as if this were a free bar or nightclub. I doubt anyone is so altruistic that they would be willing to sacrifice their time and money to open a nightclub and declare "free drinks and admission!" because they perceive some sort of social vacuum and are the philanthropist type that wants to fill this societal need. I'm not ashamed to admit that rather than helping to start the board "for the whole world," I -- like anyone else who starts bbs's -- has a specific area of discussion in mind. I have complete confidence that I've been more than generous, as have others who have supported this board and those who helped start it with lots of effort, in allowing the "fringe elements" to stay. The assumption has been that those who are drawn to a JW board have a reason for being drawn here. If they're just using the board for their own purposes, and we tow the line and enforce the FPP, they'll get discouraged and be driven away. The problem is that really "nice people" drop in and get acquainted, think it's a free social "Woodstock" in cyberspace for all religions, and get comfortable. Then they leave in a huff when we tell them about the FPP. Others, having made new friends, feel the vacuum of their departure. If we allow these popular personalities to use this board for every whim of theirs, just as a social gathering place at other peoples expense, then eventually the board will self-destruct. It will get too big and unwieldy, those for whom it was designed will leave, and I'll be left stuck with a bunch of ingrateful people who believe my purpose in life is to serve them with a board...then predictably I'll shutdown the board and that's the end of the story.
I'm throwing out these thoughts because you seem like someone who can think of solutions to enforcing our FPP as transparently as possible. Nobody likes to feel they live in a "police state" or as one brother put it in private email, "communist China." I want the board to be more user friendly and enforcement issues to become subjugated to the benefits JWs. Visible should be JWs from around the world gathering to derive personal benefits from discussing their faith without fear of reprisals from elders or the Society.
Thanks for your thoughts. I look forward to reading and perhaps implementing more.
Rick