12-24-2018, 04:14 PM
I do not want to run a forum again. Ever.
If I ran one, it would be a free speech forum where anons can post without their posts being approved. I'm not interested in being a nazi mod and telling people what they can and cannot say. I wouldn't consider it a case of "behave yourself in my house" or anything like that. It would just be a neutral public platform.
The problem with that is, there's no end to the grief the fuckwits dish out. Giving them total freedom to show their arses makes them spoiled rotten. No matter what the moderators do, it will piss off one faction or the other. When they get pissed off, they do their dead level best to destroy the board, get the hosting company to deplatform it, use SQL and HTML injection attacks, spam, and topic flooding to deface the board, etc. It's incredibly difficult to harden an open access platform against all of that.
Not to mention the constant whining about their freedom of speech being suppressed when they try to disrupt the board, even though you're literally letting them get away with 1000 times the shit a "normal" board admin would.
It's a whole different ball game from running a site that has front line defenses like registration and moderator approval, and enforces a more or less mainstream code of conduct. Yeah, the owners who succeed in making their boards immune to abuse end up with software that's vastly superior to off-the-shelf forum packages, but it's exhausting to cover every angle. That's why free speech anon boards usually don't last more than 2 or 3 years. The owners get fed up and quit.
If I ran one, it would be a free speech forum where anons can post without their posts being approved. I'm not interested in being a nazi mod and telling people what they can and cannot say. I wouldn't consider it a case of "behave yourself in my house" or anything like that. It would just be a neutral public platform.
The problem with that is, there's no end to the grief the fuckwits dish out. Giving them total freedom to show their arses makes them spoiled rotten. No matter what the moderators do, it will piss off one faction or the other. When they get pissed off, they do their dead level best to destroy the board, get the hosting company to deplatform it, use SQL and HTML injection attacks, spam, and topic flooding to deface the board, etc. It's incredibly difficult to harden an open access platform against all of that.
Not to mention the constant whining about their freedom of speech being suppressed when they try to disrupt the board, even though you're literally letting them get away with 1000 times the shit a "normal" board admin would.
It's a whole different ball game from running a site that has front line defenses like registration and moderator approval, and enforces a more or less mainstream code of conduct. Yeah, the owners who succeed in making their boards immune to abuse end up with software that's vastly superior to off-the-shelf forum packages, but it's exhausting to cover every angle. That's why free speech anon boards usually don't last more than 2 or 3 years. The owners get fed up and quit.
