Posted by Racer on June 11, 2005, at 13:15:31
There seem to be so many conflicting perspectives on the administration of these boards. Every time I come to the Administration board, it seems that there are a large number of posts regarding the decisions which Dr Bob has made in his role as administrator of these forums. Having administered a much smaller set of bulletin boards online, with a much, much smaller group of posters who represented a much less diverse -- yet no less passionate -- population, I can only say that -- speaking only from my own perspective, extrapolating from my own experience, and reminding everyone that I am mentally ill BUT CONTINUE TO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY OWN ACTIONS -- Dr Bob must have a great deal of energy to continue running these boards.
Since so many people seem to have such strong opinions about how these boards *should be* administered -- and because so many of these opinions seem to be mutually exclusive -- I have a Modest Proposal to offer.
Dr Bob has created the specifics of the functioning of the bulletin boards at this site, but the framework on which he built is a Common Gateway Interface script written in a language called "perl" and is available -- for free -- from Matt's Script Archive at http://www.scriptarchive.com/ It is called WWWBoard, and is fairly easy to set up. If you have a regular ISP, you probably have access to space on their server, where you can set up the necessary files to run your own bulletin board. If you need help setting the files up, I will make myself available to you for assistance in doing so. Free of charge.
Once your own bulletin board is up and running -- with such options as password protection for viewing or posting, etc -- you can administer it as you choose, with your own rules, your own administrative schedule, your own time limit on such things as how long before a questionable post is addressed, closing or leaving open as you will the unaddressed posts. You can choose whom to invite to your own board, and you can ban those you do not like, or do not agree with, or those who wear the wrong color underwear. Just as you like.
That, my friends -- and anyone else -- is my Modest Proposal for the day.
poster:Racer
thread:511041
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20050530/msgs/511041.html