What Price Success? Improving Posting Quality on HPfGU

[Kelley]

Debbie:
> Thanks to everyone who posted comments.  

My thanks, too!  So much great discussion, so many excellent points 
made, ideas raised; I'm working on some comments myself, and am going 
through all the messages, saving bits for comment, and it's taking a 
little while to get together. ;-)  For now, will add some comments to 
Debbie's below.

I've had some ideas for How To Deal with HBP percolating, heh, since 
we started to recover from OoP, but mostly since last summer; they've 
gotten refined a bit, and I still have to get them all written down, 
but here's one:

Debbie:
> READ-ONLY PERIOD FOR NEWBIES
> 
> I personally think this is a great idea (though no more than a 
> week, or until they have sent an email confirming that they've read 
> the HBFile and VFAQs).  To make this work, though, all members 
> would have to be automatically set to "no posting" and I understand 
> (I do not know this for a fact because I am a Luddite), that Yahoo 
> does not allow this setting to be changed, so that we'd have to 
> migrate to a new list.  I do know that new Yahoogroups don't have 
> all the space etc. as the old groups.

 Yep, Debbie's right on both counts -- first, there's no 'automatic' 
read-only setting for new members.  It can be done manually, member 
by member, but like Debbie also said, right around the time of OoP we 
were seeing day after day of 100 - 200 (and more, some days) new 
members joining.  Apart from time list elves spent sending welcome 
messages, just going through and changing each individual to make 
them 'read-only' is *considerable*.  So, no, not feasible. ;-) Plus, 
then we'd also have to manually change them so they'd be able to post 
at the end of the enforced read-only stint ... eesh.

But, here's an idea I have:  we change the main list from 'open' 
membership to 'moderated' membership.  Open membership groups are 
those where you can 'walk right in'; moderated membership is like the 
way Feedback is set up -- you join and your membership is 'pending' 
until it's waved through.

Now, pending members can't read the messages before they're waved in, 
so that's got to be remedied somehow.  To do this, I can create a 
group (am thinking perhaps a Google group, to allow people to take 
advantage of the search function) that would be unlisted (i.e., not 
in the Yahoo groups directory, if it's a Yahoo group, or not in the 
directory for Google groups, etc.).

Also, the created group's message archive will only be available to 
the members of that group -- posts will not be viewable 'by the 
public', iow, no one will be able to do a Google search and come 
across one of the posts.  Furthermore, email addresses will 
be 'munged' so they can't be easily harvested.  (Munged -- like 
so "kelleythompson at g...")

There will be an id set up for both this created group and the main 
list, to be a member of both; this id will have a gmail account, and 
will be set to receive individual emails from the main list. Gmail 
accounts can be set to forward emails received, so this account will 
forward each main list post to the created group. With me so far? 
;-)  

This created group will not be a discussion group -- posts can only 
be made by 'moderators' and this would be the created id, plus a 
couple elves to keep an eye on the works, help with Yah issues, etc.

Okay, now when someone joins main, they'll receive the HBF with an 
added note at the beginning explaining what is going on, with a 
link to the created group: that for a period of ___ (one week is my 
thinking right now, though I'd like to hear other thoughts on this) 
they should join the other group to read messages (basically 
explaining read-only and why we're doing this). 

So, they'll be urged to join that group, they'll be able to read 
what's happening on main via that group, and they'll not be able to 
post to main for X number of days.  One week (or whatever) after they 
joined main (we'll probably go with UK time), they'll be waved 
through, (whether they've joined the created group or not?) where 
they'll still be new member moderated, the standard way it's 
happening now.

Now, I should add that I have *not* tested this yet; I have fooled a 
bit with having messages sent to a gmail account forwarded to me and 
to a Yah group, and that works, so I believe this could be done quite 
well.  

Decisions would still have to be made re a) what if the person 
doesn't check their email, doesn't see the HBF with the link to the 
created group, doesn't therefore join that group, etc. -- what do we 
do then?  Not let them join main at all? (I don't like that option, 
but I can guarantee the elves will be seeing the "I don't know if 
this has been discussed yet, but..." posts in pendings.) and b) there 
may be some list members who will object to their posts being 
forwarded anywhere for any reason.  Probably other decisions/issues 
as well that haven't occurred to me yet.

So, thoughts, comments, questions, complaints?

One question I have, to everyone, but particularly the folks here who 
joined main around OoP time, if this had been in place then, if you 
could have read anything and everything posted to main for one week 
(or X days), but could not post yourself for that week, would you 
have been okay with it?  Given up and gone elsewhere?  Thought we 
were out of our stinking minds? ;-)  And, further, what if it had 
been 5 days?  3 days?  Etc.

Regarding Debbie's other point that newly/recently created Yah groups 
don't have as much message archive space as old groups, that's true; 
last I heard was that groups are now getting 32MB for message 
archives (main has/had 512MB).  However, for the purposes of the 
created group, I don't *believe* this would be a problem (and again, 
if we go with a Google group, it's not a problem at all). 

My thinking is that this created group would only have messages 
forwarded to it from beginning of July (maybe even June?) until the 
end of August, and the read-only status for new members would only 
operate for that time, too.  Iow, I wasn't thinking this would be 
something we'd begin doing permanently, but just through the HBP 
crunch.  This could be in place for all of June, July, August, which 
might be a good way to go, if we do end up going with this.

I have another idea, that's sort of related to the list-closing and 
posting volume discussions, but I'll post that separately.

Quick comments on the below:

> POSTING AN FAQ BEFORE REOPENING THE LIST
> 
> The OOP FAQ was published within 3-4 days, and was written for us 
> for someone who was not on the admin team. 

Yep, that was Grey Wolf who took it upon himself to create that, and 
I'm still grateful to him for doing it. :-)

> (We were too busy handling the hundreds of new members each day and 
> the 300 or so pending messages from moderated members.)

Lol, *yes*.  Boy, was that...something. <g>

> If we could get a HBP FAQ out within a day or so of reopening the 
> list (otherwise we would strip some sharp-eyed member of the glory 
> of discovering the HBP equivalent of the thestrals!),
> and insist that people read it, that might be a big help. <snip>
> There's also the problem that some of the elves might totally miss 
> some of the big issues, so that whatever we did, the FAQ might be 
> deficient.  I had never given a moment's thought to Dumbledore's 
> gleam before I read it in the FAQs here.  We would need much help 
> from listmembers to spot things, and even more help to brave 
> Yahoomort and search for previous relevant posts.

Yep; before I got to the above paragraph was thinking "So, we'll just 
make our best guesses as to what should be in an HBP FAQ and modify 
as needed, or what?"  But, what a good project for Feedback. ;-)

Lol, re The Gleam and the idea that something in the FAQs could not 
be brought up for discussion on main -- I actually don't remember it 
being said that a topic in the FAQ *couldn't* be discussed, but we 
did just want folks to read through it first, in case they were going 
to ask something that had been asked a hundred times already.

It was kind of funny at first, all the "Hey, I was wondering if 
anyone else noticed this, but did you all catch that gleam in 
Dumbledore's eye?  What was that about?" -- now, I personally 
consider this to still be a worthwhile topic, but the annoyance was 
more that people had come in, obviously not read through any past 
discussions and threw the idea out there in a "I bet lots of people 
missed this" kind of way. <g>  Anyway, that was the inspiration and 
intention for the FAQs (I know Debbie knows this, but just tossing it 
out for those who'd not known). :-)
 
> Many people enjoyed the post-OOP posting frenzy.  I admit that I 
> couldn't keep up with the volume, but that was partly because I was 
> spending a lot of my limited spare time on messages from new 
> moderated members, many of whom clearly had not read the posting 
> rules in advance.  

YES.  Me too-ing Debbie again here as I so often do, but yes, this 
has gotten to be more and more of an issue.  My theory is that people 
join and, because they can post immediately, they do (though, yes, 
their posts go into pending rather than straight to the group).  
Doesn't occur to them to check the email account they joined the 
group with, they have no idea they've received anything from us, no 
idea we have posting rules.

For the elves who handle pending messages, it's easiest to spot this 
when the messages are top-posted.  Or *no* capital letters are used.  
At all.  Or used Randomly. Or apostrophes arent used. Or so many 
exclamation points and/or question marks are used they outnumber the 
words in the post. (My personal peeves, all those. <g>)

Anyway, the messages are returned, with explanations about our rules, 
or they're edited, in hopes the person will see the changes made, 
explanations given, and we hope and hope that the person sees them.  
But, quite possibly they're not thinking to check the email account 
they joined the group with, so never know they've been contacted, 
never know what happened to their post.

So, if anyone has some good ideas on ways around this, I'd sure love 
to hear them; my best idea on this is to just regularly post the 
rules to the group in the form of an admin, as that would have to 
increase the chances they're seen, though I understand sometimes the 
admins get skipped over. <g>  
 

More to come, I promise, 

Kelley