Care in the community

I'M IN A BAD MOOD this week because the online forum I've co-owned for some years, Fleet Street is suddenly in a mess.

The story goes like this. Once upon a time, in a country far, far away, oh, back at Christmas 1995, we were a CompuServe forum, founded by Rupert Goodwins ( see here), who named it Fleet Street in an attempt to convey the idea that we were a latter-day replacement for the old Cheshire Cheese, a hang-out for British media types. We were unruly and argumentative, and swore in a way that you really weren't supposed to on the system, but you can't tell British journalists not to be cynical and even downright nasty, and our view was that if people wanted to be nice there were lots of other forums on the service where they could do that. We were small, but our hangers-out were devoted and included the late John Diamond, who we like to think gave us some of his best writing, though we never told that to the Sunday Times.

Cut to February 1999, when CompuServe was being reorganised by AOL's accountants and decided it really ought to get rid of some of those "underperforming" areas. That would be us. My partner, Dominic Young ( here) found us hosting at Line One, where we could have Usenet-style access (offline readers!), plus a Web front end. It wasn't ideal - we had no moderatorial tools to let us delete idiot messages from morons who think spam messages are appropriate postings or to reorganise threads that had drifted from the eternal "bagel" vs. "beigel" debate to the question of whether wannabe journalists should study journalism (so they'd have the skills to do it) or something else (so they'd have something to write about).

But inertia prevailed, and anyway, the mix of offline reader capability and Web front end was a powerful asset.

We knew Line One had been bought by Tiscali and that the company had changed its focus. But we didn't expect that Tiscali would suddenly dump its old forum structure without telling anyone in advance. Figure Arthur Dent getting up in the morning to find out he can't get into his favourite pub. We've been migrated to a new Tiscali forum. But it has no offline access and they seem to be moderating posts for bad language. Er…

There was a time - oh, about three, four years ago now - when a lot of people thought that online communities were the future not only of the Net but of marketing, social interaction, and retail. Some of this was coming from old-time Netheads like Howard Rheingold ( here), who believed (correctly, I think) that the online world enabled rich, ongoing relationships between people. But as we hit the mid-1990s, some of it was coming from cyberjohnny-come-lately marketing gurus like the McKinsey consulting duo who wrote the book net gain espousing the future-of-marketing bit.

The Net's uniqueness as a medium does in fact revolve around its capability of supporting many-to-many interaction. Most of the time, we fail to appreciate this because the two most popular Net applications are one-to-one (email, like letters) and one-to-many (the Web, like traditional broadcasting and publishing). Usenet and gated communities like the WELL ( here) or CIX ( here) or real-time chat facilities like IRC are many-to-many, and enable something unprecedented outside of face-to-face meetings. Now, I know someone's going to bring up telephone conferencing, but anyone who's tried it knows it's clunky - difficult to tell who's speaking if you don't know the voices well, and everyone has to wait patiently and take turns to speak one at a time or no one can make any sense of what's going on.

The problem is that for online forums to work the users have to believe they're in charge. It's fashionable to talk about "ownership" in the context of changing a company's IT system, but it applies far more in online communities, where the barest hint of moderation brings rabid accusations of censorship. CIX has managed not one but several of these transitions (its current owner, Nextra, is being smart enough to leave the conferencing system more or less alone). But it's far more common for companies to completely undervalue the communities they have. AOL has dumped countless message boards in its career, some of them quite vibrant.

CompuServe, which pioneered online forums, systematically removed all the features that made them so useful and well populated. They just don't get it, as the lack of notice shows. You wouldn't repaint a pub without warning the customers if it was going to be closed for a week or two; the same should be true online. They didn't, they said, want disruption from wackos defacing the soon-to-be closed forums.

Fine, but what about telling the owners? (To be fair to Tiscali, we had completely vanished off their radar.)

As I write this, I don't know how things will come out with Tiscali, or what kind of a future we will secure for Fleet. I understand: we're small, unruly, and a public nuisance. But surely we can find a home for a forum that offers novices such good advice ( here) and is celebrating its fifth birthday. Merry Christmas. µ

Previous Columns
Remembrance of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
net.wars: Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.