Change and Reform for the...Forum!

[Red Phoenix]

too much posts get deleted sometimes if u ask me

and serious long posts dont work that well in threads with short 1 line posts

plus there is still tension between forumers from different political sides and so not much familial ties.

finally, there is an increase is new spammers (ppl who have no idea what discussion means but just want to keep repeating a couple of fews words and ideas and tricks regardless of the input of others just after they sign up)

[Lallous]

Originally Posted by Abou Sandal

Great forum.Great moderation.Participation is a little lazy lately,but probably mostly due to the political and social conjunctures.

I suggest the administration sends an E-mail to the old and valuable members who suddenly stopped posting,and try to get them back.

Keep it up.

Thanks.

Thanks for the cheer-up. We appreciate it.

Originally Posted by hannaalsayssa

i love the forum,it is like home away from home.
i would love to suggest some ideas though
1-allow our avatars to be active and to accept larger sizes of pix.
2-as we give thanks, allow us to also get no thanks ( but for each thx or no thx a min of 1 hour wait must be observed in order to limit abuse of it)
3-a bit easier on the moderating.
lately i must admit it is easier .
a bit of rough language during heated arguments sometimes adds spice ( many other foreign forums are looser in that field).
4-merge otv thread & the regional rooms too with the political one ( radical idea bass worth the try).
5-allow some threads for jokes in the local political forum, it will liven up matter, at least one thread that emcompasses all kind of jokes and funny stories
6-create a thread of world caricatures only , we have excellent members who can post wonderful links and stories.
7-try to engage members by trying to know each member kaza ( by the specific members posting a brief history about their kaza)and than select a kaza for each month decided by popular voting to be discussed..in all aspects ( political, cultural, posts pix, etc..)
8-a thread for rumours and stupid stuff , that will be a hit i am sure ( we lebanese thrives on that LOL)

finally i want to thank the administration, the mods and the members who make up the forum a lively place,ALSO the members who represent the other point of view.
u have no idea how this forum help us the expat keep in daily touch with home

1-2 no comment.
3- Hanna, in fact we already reached a bottom in looseness, so we recommend you not pushing it any further...
4-No, we already did that in the past and never worked. Activity was the same.
5-We're looking to improve the level, not to downgrade it any more.
6-I'll pass
7-Fair idea. We'll look into it. It has been done already, we could do it in a more original way this time.
8-See number 5.

Originally Posted by ceaoun

For instance (ironically), this thread and the negative responses ( or critics) are in violation of Rule # 18 of this Forum.

I suggest more pro-active roles of Mods/Staff in instigating debates and fueling controversies in relation to all aspects of life and all political spectrums to include FPM and its allies.

Relax the roles on starting a thread and make it start ASAP when submitted. Try not to merge a new thread with an old one ; it might inhibit people once in a while from starting a new one thinking it might get merged(some people don't like mergers).

I have read many posts lately telling people to go to their own Forums and play there instead of posting some unpleasant (politically) remarks here.

And most importantly, if you want more participation, there is nothing better than incentives:( P.P.P.) :Pay Per Post (of course just a joke)

Don't worry. Rule #18 is on hold in this thread.
That's what we aim for. However, mods' main job is to... moderate at first. We'll do our best however to have more initiatives in that matter. Unfortunately, as soon as a mod creates a thread and I could speak of my own experience, members are not that appealed as it is not a usual pissing contest, so there is a problem from the members too at some point.

Approving threads is a must. We're pretty fast on approving them and very few of them are ignored; the fact is it's not much about the subject itself as much about if the member has put some effort in it to have some rich content so it could be discussed with more then one-liners posts. We merge the threads also on the criteria I just stated and it's pretty rare to witness these things.

For some of the members' derogatory remarks, we would appreciate your efforts to report anything we could have missed. We are rather prompt on that and the posts are deleted.

As for the PPP, it's FPM's forum, not Mustaqbal's forum

Originally Posted by The Jade

Having seen the forum change in the past couple of years, here are my observations:

If this is to be FPM's official forum, why don't we have exclusive news from FPM's staff (cadres, MPs, etc).

By exclusive news, I mean interviews with MPs, leaders, etc.
A place where we could ask our MPs some questions and get answers from them.

Very good point. It was often repeated and we'll seriously work on it this time.

There are many strong elements in the forum, some of them related to the very organized team and the faithful members who keep this forum alive.

But I'll concentrate on the weaknesses here:

1) One of the main weaknesses of this forum is the lack of independant or rather anti-FPM voices. (there are a few, bit a time came where there were almost as many anti-FPM than pro-FPM people).

Some of the threads turn to cheerleading, which don't get us anywhere.

2) The fact that some threads with no added value are allowed to be opened and others that might be interesting, or critical of the FPM would not be allowed to see the light of day

3) The fact that some members are still kicked out depending on the humor of the Admins.

4) The fact that some rules are broken by the administration and nothing is done about it, but when a regular member does it he gets a warning

5) The fact that any opposing voice is quickly attacked by the members. And I know that the administration has nothing to do with it, but I think that it has to show the good example and lead the way by allowing people to elaborate on the ideas and organizing a good way to counter the critics.

1 and 5) Well we can't do much about it. We are even more lenient toward these members to let them share their POV. Unfortunately, some of them are not used to the dynamics of the forum and end up getting banned after some few bashing posts. We do appreciate our black sheep such as Joseph_Lubnan, chafic, zodiac, etc. Take that as a compliment as without you there is no point to debate. We're very grateful to have you as members.

2)I'll answer this point in my reply to Souss' post.

3 and 4)I guess you heard the expression : Yahokk li cha3er ma la yahokk li ghayrih. Even though this is FPM's forum, it remains the labour and hard work of the administration which represent themselves at first and not FPM. So I guess when you reach this point, you could afford it. No further elaboration. However, we always make sure there is no mzayadeh.

I'm not inactive now since it's elections time.

But when nothing was going on, the forum became so one-sided, so critical of opposing voices that it became a cheerleading forum, which is nothing related to FPM's teachings

Can't say a thing here

Because most of the time initiatives have been killed.

For example, we've been asking for more than 2 years now to have an interview with a cadre or an MP. And when we did that, the administration told us that it's either not the time or that it's taking care of it.

And since I was a member I saw 2 interviews one with Ziad Abs and another with Ghassan Mkheiber I think.

The forum is not using its full potential to get new things done.
It could for example propose for some members to gather all the questions that we need to ask for the MP and go to the MP's office, ask the questions and come back and post them on the website.

I think that the forum administration should start to delegate stuff to their members.

We're discussing all that. Some things you mentionned could be done post-elections. For the interviews, we're pushing for it.

Originally Posted by Souss

Sometimes, threads that don't conform with FPM's views are deleted and the mod team doesn't reply when asked about the deletion.

You can't censor people and not respect the time and effort they put in, and then ask for their contribution and initiatives.

Okay. Things aren't black or white. You always have to bear in mind that is FPM's official forum. It's not we don't appreciate criticism, but rather a pre-emptive measure to counter the yellow journalism and propaganda from the other side. We always try to safeguard this thin margin between censorship and freedom of speech, and the prefect example when you all saw how the discussions were with GMA's recent visit to Syria. We let everyone voice his concern. Add to that, some members push it too far and turn it into auto-flagellation mode, then no sorry don't expect us to sit and watch. This remains a public forum and an affiliated one too. Please, let's not dwell more in that issue. You made your point and we made ours. We would appreciate if you could rather have some other consensual ideas of threads we could enjoy.

Originally Posted by kappa273

threads with more than 1000 replies work negatively for the forum....

I am not talking about the Elections threads (Beirut, Batroun, Zahleh, Metn, etc....)

but when a thread reaches more than 1000, many will shy away from putting down their idea by far that it could have been discussed previously and it is impossible to review 1000 posts to check it out....

also, after 1000 replies, it becomes very difficult to know for sure what the topic is and what has been discussed so far...

Also I would like to see official FPM members discuss their ideas here... like it has been done in the past... questions are asked ahead of time and that member gets to answer them at his own leisure...

i wish FPM would use this forum to release non-official messages, stories....
this would bring more attention and can be used as a gauge to measure people's reactions...

kappa

The threads you are talking about often get closed when they tend to get too circular. Too bad some members just thrive on these threads. As for the second part of your post, isn't it that we all do in here ? Some members take a bribe of information or a rumor and discuss it somehow. Look around you ;)

We wish to thank you for your valuable replies. Please, keep coming the ideas, this is what we are looking for the most. So far, we had the cazas and the interviews.

[Lallous]

Originally Posted by Ignatius

It's a very personnal opinion and it only explains my lack of contribution in the last couple of months :
- prohibitting copy/pastes of articles or analysis coming from other websites reduced the "raw material" that enabled discussion, but the legal aspect of such copy/pastes is an important thing to take into acccount
- I also understood that links are prohibitted unless accepted by the target site, this also reduced the number of potential starting points of our discussions and that on a legal level doesn't seem to be justified
- And last but not least, I had too much work in the last coupe of months which kept me away from the forum at least from contributing

I don't know what you mean by 'raw material'. If it is propaganda based as Al-Siyassa and Al-Chira3, then no thanks.
I didn't understand your second point. Most of the sources are cleared as long as they remain credible so we don't undermine our credebility
All the best Ignatius, feel free to post whenever you have time.

Originally Posted by SeekNirvana

Good initiative Lallous.

You guys have a lot of power in shaping the discussions in the political forum: the topics of discussion are one part, the quality of posts is another. By "quality" I don't refer to the Gemayelist one, rather a more basic one at the levels of politeness and decency. Perhaps a closer look at the bahwarjiyyeh posts can help.

rgds,

We try our best and that explains somehow the changes we made. We will stress on that point. Thank your for your feedback.

Originally Posted by Red Phoenix

too much posts get deleted sometimes if u ask me

and serious long posts dont work that well in threads with short 1 line posts

plus there is still tension between forumers from different political sides and so not much familial ties.

finally, there is an increase is new spammers (ppl who have no idea what discussion means but just want to keep repeating a couple of fews words and ideas and tricks regardless of the input of others just after they sign up)

I'll skip on the deleted posts as it remains relative to each one. We always gauge deleted post in an overall topic of discussion.

You mentionned however a good point about what you consider spammers. It's rather they are not familiar with how the discussions are shaped on the forum. That's why we invite people to read the forum rules and search some threads before they start posting.

[Mar1K]

Please keep this thread alive till after the elections, there's plenty to say

[Greg Davis]

A forum loses its essence when posts are deleted merely because a moderator politically disagrees with the posts contents. The Mod would just quote a forum rule , and that would be the end of it. Oddly enough, The same mod would write a simmilar post about his political foes, without realizing it.

Considering the fact that this is an FPM forum, one cannot be overly cincial if the forum management are biased toward the FPM and their allies, but I see no harm in appointing a non FPM moderator where questionable posts are referred to before deletion, or when FPM supporters break forum rules, and they just go unnoticed because they support the FPM.

Just a suggestion

[Comrade Bassam]

Great initiative indeed!

Many members will take care of the technical little stuff that relate to the daily management and member privileges...

I will speak of personal experience, especially being among the first members of the forum and having served, for a very long time, as staff member in practically all the various tasks available (political, community, moderation, board of trustees....etc).

The issue evoked over here has been, at several periods of time, the primary nightmare so I was focusing all my effort on the positive and negative factors of influence over that matter so here are my results:

1) The forum killer, par excellence, was specialization and division (of topics and of staff)! When the forum was concentrated in no more than two or three sections (political and non-political and news&articles), growth was exponential. Psychologically speaking, members who visit forums are, in general, global information seekers. In other terms, they are the ones who are to be targeted mainly. Also in other terms, they'd like to see the most interesting issues being brought up from different fields on their screen without having to go back and forth in different complicated pages. And in order not to lose the specialized minds, a certain form of labeling (either with logos or colors or I donno what) could be used to classify threads (not group them) within a minimum number of screens (1 would be perfect).

2) The second forum killer was the orange theme. That was a desastrous choice. My close monitoring of members and topics dynamics at the time of theme change showed me clearly the way things changed in matter of members quality and in matter of topics quality. Both became, to any mind that refuses to be insulted in his intelligence... sorry for the word... DISGUSTING. Instead of being a place for true dialogue for all of us to be able to better make up our minds on different issues, it became a place of exposure of "nawar w tatar w 7awach el tayyar" (sorry for the word but you have to accept it if you really are looking for change and reform).
You cannot imagine the amount of repulsion to smart minds (even including the forum administration itself!) that this shift in forum philosophy (and don't believe it's just a matter of look!) created...

3) The forum has excellent potentials behind screens. I know that perfectly and I can list more than 100 super-minds just now without having to do big memory effort. What's good is that at least this potential is mostly preserved (we lost a good part of it and I'll list how in the coming points). So what we need is to be able to drive that potential from "behind screens" to "on keyboards"!
For that to happen, don't waste your time thinking of technical stuff!
The only channel is through human networking!
Forum staff, as well as forum lovers in general (and those are usually by far more effective than the whole staff, so those have to be preserved at any price!), should be like "mkhetir" on this board. They have to know how to build a huge network of relations with members. When these come here, they'll come for you and not for the colored electrons. This human networking allows the creation of a forum "elite". As you can notice, since quite some time, this category remained steady and even decreased. Elite renewal is a must or else the forum will grow old with its elite.
And in order to attract such people, you have to lead the example. For instance, many among this class of members made what the forum is due to their admiration to the effort exposed by X. Take this example and try to think about it in deep...
Moreover, the forum staff should be like "moukhabarat" and know everything about every active member. This is not too hard with some effort and research and that should be a team as well as an individual kind of work.

4) The forum is not mainly a news source. News and information constitute support to the arguments of discussion indeed, but they're not what the forum is made for. Discussions and generation of ideas is what the forum is made for!
When the forum turned, with time and with specialization, a source of news, it got itself sinking in an ocean of competition, especially in the last couple of years with the news media revolution that occurred after the assassination of PM Hariri.
In order to get dragged to think, generate and post ideas, that potential behind screens needs to feel they're not just adding stupid news or adding great ideas that nobody will get to see because the clientelle is as stupid as the kind of news it comes to seek!
When the forum becomes a field of confrontation of ideas, trust me you will see a lot of great names coming back and the birth of new great ones as well!

5) Back to human networking... I'll tackle the issue of rules. Some moderators were unconsciously (even me included), in many periods and with many really good people, a pain in the a*s*s and pushed a lot of great minds away. Sometimes, we have to advance human intelligence over systematic work and that requires a lot of effort and a big spirit to attract critique in order to be able to improve and sense members feelings and attitudes towards staff behavior.

6) Professional and objective input is very important in the different threads being discussed. In times of absence of mass devotion, the staff has to interefere and provide that in order to maintain the forum alive, at least until a new wave of public devotion gets born. That was the idea behind my proposal once for the foundation of the research forum. Unfortunately, the idea was hijacked and turned away of its original purpose and that is what drove me to withdraw from the project.
The idea was to have a SECRET team of members that are close to the staff. Those would have a task to check on every thread and monitor the discussions. Wherever a good issue is brought up, a member of that team would go and do some research work on the matter and post the information he or she found in order to assist and improve the level of discussion (as that information could be thus used as support in argumentation). A SECRET section would be dedicated for that team in order to be able to easily coordinate their work and expose their outcomes. Unfortunately, the research forum that is there today is not anywhere close to the original idea.

7) The forum gained its momentum from exclusivity. When the latter decreased, the forum momentum and work decreased as well... dramatically!
That exclusivity comes from the fact that the forum, due to the love it attracted, became a 24/24 team of more than 10,000 active national and international ground reporters.
Whenever everyone of us saw an ant moving around, we felt the rush and couldn't wait to find any internet connection (and sometimes it was too hard to find back then) to share the info with the fellow members.
Now why very few still feel that and not all the members? I will not answer that question but leave it for the staff to think of it alone...
When the forum gets back to its identity as "Generator of ideas" instead of a "News recycle bin", it will be back to fit our aspirations for it.
For example, the documents that CedarLb used to spend hours to work and post online to share with members, were just tremendous. Why this is not happening anymore? Also I will share my answer but will leave it for the staff to think of it and try to find their own answers like I found mine...

[Ignatius]

Originally Posted by Lallous

I don't know what you mean by 'raw material'. If it is propaganda based as Al-Siyassa and Al-Chira3, then no thanks.
I didn't understand your second point. Most of the sources are cleared as long as they remain credible so we don't undermine our credebility
All the best Ignatius, feel free to post whenever you have time.

In fact I thought we weren't supposed to publish, here in the forum, articles taken from other websites (annahar, alakhbar, lemonde, etc.)
Such articles are usually the starting point of a discussion

Anyway, keep up the good work and thanks for everything :-)

[orange infection]

- deleting too many posts and giving so much stupid reasons for these post might make a member stay out of a certain section to avoid some mods :p ......at least it happened with me for almost a year ,some mods here bimayzo between users , sometimes ppl start to joke in a certain thread (wich is not wrong) , so if someone else participated in that his post will be deleted while other posts will not be touched , that's mainly because the other member might be forum celebreties or known users

as for the forum being number one in the middle east , you are wrong my friend
the first forum in the middle east , at least the one i know about , is an arabic forum forum for softwares and warez :p , i am not advertising , just clearing a point
that forum is ranked "628" on alexa OMG .....
but anyway this forum is really great , the only reason why i don't nag about things is that it's tayyar's forum

[taifoon]

Good initiative, shows a mature level of awareness, caring and the will to always want to improve.

However, I generally don't see a dramatic decline anywhere which is not part of a natural process on this kind of cyber clubs. Unlike other more specialized internet arenas, like for example motorcars, music or IT (NOT International Tribunal :) related forums, where one gets used to a constant flow of homogeneous activities, political forums in general are by nature mostly boring spaces for half-boring politic nerds who enjoy to participate in intellectual dueling over ideas, opinions and ideals. Not at a lebanese forum however, including FPM's, where the nature of such forum has been almost exclusively event driven, for the last 4 years.

At such forum, life is usually maintained by core members, but activity fluctuation is derived from what happens on a day by day basis, in the outside real world. Get an assassination, a Batrak statement or an exciting - or inciting- piece of news, and you'll notice a quick increase of forum activity. For now, forum activity spins around the elections, and naturally the number of people who find this issue of more or less interest will also be reflected in the members participation in the discussions.

I personally think it's a waste to overdo something in order to try to achieve what, by design, can not be done. We can not overlook the nature of our current reality, it is a tense and fragile one, a troubled reality that constantly seeks to finally settle down on something less exciting than the news and risks of luring death and destruction .. The election preparation and campaigns are currently considered to be the center of this reality.

Another factor to not belittle is normal and plain fatigue. People, from all intellectual and partisan categories, get bored and tired from chewing our same lebanese gum, over and over again. Add to this different life engagements and other personal activities that affect members, and you get different engagement levels in the forum discussions..

I still do have a couple of points I'd like to share on this subject:

A Forum is a public place for anyone to voice an opinion and have others discuss it. In order for this forum to flourish even more, I believe we need to (re)attract as many FPM opponents and other non-FPM, non partisan, non-lebanese folks, as is possible. Diversity of opinions is mandatory for this.

Consequently, comes the level of discussions/posts & replies. I noticed that all-too-sarcastic and/or disrespectful replies -even when they are within the boundaries of forum rules- may repel many of those people and I have promised myself that from now on, I personally will try to suppress such cheap and non constructive urge in order to gradually tame it and get rid of it. Good valid arguments always win in the long run, even against the hardest nut, because they work more smoothly on both the conscience and the subconscience of an opponent. Hard, disrespectful words only repel, scare off and push away those with different opinions.

[General my General!]

I very much agree with Tai regarding quality of some replies. It is often very insulting to waste time reading sectarian swearing and smart*** one-liners. Those who can hold rational discussion are known, although on rare occasions perhaps any of us is tempted to swing away.

I have myself questioned some posters about this, and interestingly some people post things they do not believe in, just to provoke or give the other side a 'taste of their own medicine'. But that in itself lowers the quality of the forum, as well as the impression of FPMers to the outside world, since the overwhelming majority of visitors read rather than post.

A few years ago, I would tell anyone to go check the FPM forum, and compare it to the other Lebanese political forums, just as a glimpse to the quality of FPMer thinking and principles. I don't know if this is just my impression, but the forum was at a peak in 2005-2006, then had a dip for a bit when a lot of new members bashed too often in 2007, but since then things seem to have improved a lot. Still, clamping down on regular bashers is a constant need.

Cheers!