This is a blog post I did for my employer, Mzinga. It was originally posted on the Mzinga blog.
Imagine you had a magic button that could delete spam from all of your friends’ inboxes before they saw it. Would you use it?
On one hand, you’d be sparing your friends pitches for exciting work-at-home opportunities, male enhancement products, and advanced degrees that can be earned in one’s pajamas. On the other, you’d be denying your friends the chance to manage their own email.
While the engineering team at Mzinga has not invented a magic anti-spam button (yet), we at Delphi Forums recently found ourselves facing a similar quandary.
First, a little background:
Delphi Forums is a community of communities that I manage for Mzinga. We provide tools to our members that allow them to create communities within our network. These members take responsibility for building, managing and moderating their communities. There are six of us that make up the Delphi Forums staff, but our primary role is to help our members run their forums. We moderate our support forums, but we only get involved in the moderation of our member-created forums in rare, specific circumstances.
For those occasions when we do need to step in, we have some pretty powerful tools at our disposal. One of these tools, among other things, erases all messages in all forums from a given member. It’s a pretty dramatic step to take, so we use this tool sparingly. It’s reserved for cases where an account has been created very recently and has only been used to violate our Terms of Service in multiple forums.
In recent weeks, we’ve used this tool to eliminate messages from spammers posted across multiple forums. I presumed our forum hosts would be thrilled, and braced myself for the anticipated flood of thank you cards. So imagine my surprise when several hosts objected. Not because they like the spam, but because they take their responsibility to police their forums very seriously and they don’t want us interfering.
A debate about this issue developed in our host support forum. One member insisted that she and other conscientious hosts prefer to handle this kind of thing on their own, adding, “If you want to deal with an out of control or unmoderated forum, fine. Just not the rest of us.” Others were delighted that we were getting rid of spam in their forums. One wrote, “I heart the Spaminator!”
While I still think we’re doing the right thing by deleting the spam, I appreciate those who object. These people are proud of their forums and want complete control – and responsibility—for how their online communities are run. I respect that. Delphi Forums owes its success to these dedicated forum hosts.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to check my inbox for those thank you cards.