Should Theatre Australia Members Only be allowed to post
Sat, 15 Mar 2008, 08:23 amalanm23 posts in thread
Should Theatre Australia Members Only be allowed to post
Sat, 15 Mar 2008, 08:23 amThere have been an increasing number of incidents where 'anonymous' posters have used the freedom offered by the ITA's website to be offensive and downright rude. Most of you who use the site from time to time will have come across the term 'not verified' next to a name used in a posting, this indicates that this person does not have an account or has not logged on.
Some people feel that the ITA's website is losing it's credibility by having postings which are offensive, others stand up for free speech.
Under a 'members only' scheme, people would be required to have an official email address (which would need to be verified)before they can join and post. This means that those in our community who choose to post 'knee jerk' reactive comments would be slowed down.
Although it is relatively easy to set up free email accounts, it still requires a degree of effort and it would allow 'offensive' posters memberships to be terminated or suspended.
Now there's a thought, I wonder what the general consensus is, no doubt I will find out.
While I agree that making
Sat, 15 Mar 2008, 01:58 pmWhile I agree that making people join would reduce 'bad' posts/members, I doubt it would do much.
Take the last few months: three people joined the site, and then proceeded very quickly to spam people via the internal messaging system. Another member signed up and suspiciously seemed to only ever do one thing: look at the female members' profiles.
Even spammers are taking their time to register, so I don't think it will make anything different on a great scale.
I am one of the few members on the site with special moderator status, and can check a number of backend things, so I can say without doubt the above is true - and I have reported the activities to Grant.
I think ultimately we must keep that in mind: while we do our best to be democratic and not censor people, we also have to rely on Grant's judgement and report anything we might consider extremely bad behaviour.
Perhaps we should also consider a set of terms and conditions, which include a small list of guidelines as to 'Theatre Australia etiquette'.
Ultimately, it's not a matter of making people register: it's making them be respectful. And you can't do that by making them register to the site. (Perfect example: at collectZing.com, one person from the European region kept signing up using different Yahoo accounts and IP addresses. He then proceeded to spam the site with links to other sites. His two flaws: always using a Yahoo account, and always using the same password. We banned the guy about 10 times, but still he kept coming back.)
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