Beware of confirmation bias! The people who feel outside of a ‘clique’ will probably not want to take part in a poll which shows how you voted. Assuming they have a user name that is.
So, a good question but I personally doubt this poll will help answer it. From an anecdotal perspective I would say that the whole verification process is off putting to many and may well give an impression of a clique whether justified or not.
I’m not sure how this poll will help as I know quite a few people just browse (& are not members) to see what local events are taking place, to check rail updates etc. The ones I know of find this really useful though wouldn’t be able to vote in the poll as they’re not members.
I suspect (and it’s just an assumption) that the casual browsers you describe would be put off by cliquey / individually-dominating banter more than the regular visitors?
Over 20% of our membership is now verified (thanks mostly to @Pauline’s tireless efforts).
I remember when people posted negatively about our verification model on TOSS and suggested it was a way of restricting or controlling who can participate here. If other people have similar doubts about the verification system I’d be keen to understand this and improve it (maybe it’s just a case of improving the documentation).
(This poll is anonymous)
The verification system makes me feel happier to participate
I’ve never really been sure what the point of the verification system is… Surely if you didn’t live in SE23 you wouldn’t be interested in this forum anyway? Being verified wouldn’t stop people being eejits online if that was what they fancied doing (and then the mods could block them?) and if posting for sale or wanted ads wouldn’t the usual common sense rules of EDF and Gumtree apply? (don’t pay before you’ve seen the goods and don’t take payment for pricey electronic goods in unlit carparks on your own).
Totally happy for someone to explain the point of them though as I may have missed it. I think I’m verified now (?) which is handy for DMs.
I find this site much easier to use than TOSS but it does seem that the conversation is dominated by a small group of pals / local traders. It’s irritating but hopefully when the site gets busier it won’t be as noticeable.
The point of verification in the first instance was to make the forum more friendly, and make users more accountable for their actions, which helps make an inclusive community that feels safe. People WILL be eejits online. But they are much less likely to be if they are represented here as ‘real people’ not just user names and avatars. It’s about making a shift in people’s perception about how they behave online, in the cause of making a forum that’s truly local.
Any forum of this nature is going to have an 80-20 law or 90-10 or some other Pareto formula. Meaning - a small number of contributors will be responsible for a large number of the postings. I’m not sure that makes it cliquey.
Possibly the existence of the verification process makes it ever so slightly off-putting as it’s not the way most forums work, as far as I know. The anonymity that comes from using a pseudonym can be used in a negative way - hiding behind an alias and therefore not being accountable for your postings - or it can be a kind of legitimate self-defence mechanism, enabling people to say honest (but not inflammatory) things that perhaps others might not like (eg, “I’m all in favour of more big shops at Bell Green”) but because you don’t know who your audience is, you feel protected from any direct encounter with people who are upset by such views.
Also, I suspect the success of role-playing computer games shows that people like being able to go online and be a character, possibly different from their public persona.
Anyway - it’s far too nice a day to be banging on about this. I’m going outside to inspect the gardens.
In terms of the poll, it’s an interesting jumping off point that can test the temperature of this issue. Should @anon5422159 want to get a better reading of what’s really happening, he’d need to think about polling ‘lurkers’, which is probably the sort of interaction such users don’t want.
It seems to me there are two key reasons why people read but don’t participate:
They have no interest in being part of the forum, just using it as a resource (which is of course fine);
They feel the forum as it is is too cliquey and doesn’t provide the broad base of discussion that would make it feel welcoming.
It’s a really hard balance to strike. I know some people love a good gossipy forum. But that sort of interaction can drown out what this forum is really for - being a local resource. At the same time, we don’t want a sterile online noticeboard.
Existing users can really help by thinking about the topics they post. Are they relevant to the purpose of the forum? If things get chatting WITHIN locally relevant topics, that’s fine (to a degree!)
Personally, threads like the one about ‘favourite quotes’, for example, don’t sit well within the context of the forum as a whole.
Another way of thinking about it is the difference between a parish council all meeting together to discuss things that are good for the local community - and a conversation down the pub, which can be as wide-ranging as you can get. Personally, I’m not sure I always want to be talking about shops, traffic, schools and crime.
Totally agree with you Rachael, and to pick up on one point in particular:
I think this topic and the “favourite movie” topic could both have been really friendly and fun topics that included everyone.
But instead they were both used to broadcast from within the clique and were dominated by a single person. I almost removed my reply (about my own fave movie) because I felt so frustrated by the way the topic went.
I know also that I dominate Politicos and have started the vast majority of topics there. This is something I’m trying to tone down (and certainly will tone down when I’m back in full time work).
On the movies topic, my post was drowned out amongst quickly buried by 12 posts from someone else. Maybe others wouldn’t mind this, but it annoyed me and made me feel like the topic wasn’t a sincere attempt at finding other people’s favourite movies, but instead was an excuse to broadcast loudly about one person’s preferences. 12/15 replies were from one person.
Now it doesn’t matter what I feel, particularly, but if other members felt the same way, this matters to me and the forum.
I think ‘broadcasting from within the the clique’ is puttting it too strongly. Perhaps in simple terms, if a thread turns into someone talking to themselves, the mods should step in. Luckily the movie thread did turn into a conversation (I very much liked some of the recommendations).
How about an automatic temporary brake on a person posting if they post more than, say, five posts in a row in a single topic? Is that something the forum software can handle.
This is probably a separate issue from general cliqueness which, as pointed out above, there is always a tendency towards in forums. I once removed myself from a forum after discovering I was the third most frequent poster there, although I had been there months and other years!
The software will present warnings about domination and sequential posts, but only on desktop / iPad. I don’t think there’s room for this in the UI on smartphone screens. As for a harder limit, I’ll look into the software features, but offhand I don’t think this exists.
I think a private nudge from moderators could work here, provided the people involved are willing to accept this. My nudge was ignored last night.
