In this session of study, I continued to use Mitbbs.com as my case study online community (OC). Mitbbs.com is a Chinese bulletin board system site. The majority of its users are overseas Chinese. Different from previous sessions, in this session, I used data collected from different forums on Mitbbs.com. Most of them exhibit similar governing rules. Some of them are imposed by the system, some of them are developed by the users over time, and some of them are originated from user contributions and have now become part of the official rules.
The Official Rules Governing the OC
Mitbbs.com provides a general set of rules that governs the site, and make these rules easily accessible to the users. These rule contain a wide range of guidelines. For instance in the “User Registration Obligations” section, it is stated the following.
- Provide true and accurate information when registering in Unknown Space (Mitbbs.com).
- Maintain and update registration information constantly to keep it true, accurate and current.
- If Unknown Space suspects that registered information is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, Unknown Space has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service.
- Unknown Space is concerned about the safety and privacy of all its users, particularly children. Children under age 14 are not allowed to register and visit Unknown Space without parents' or guardians' consents.
- do not violate any local laws and regulations of Unknown Space and of your location,
- do not infringe other's intellectual property or property right,
- do not reveal other's privacy and identity,
- do not contain harmful, abusive, hateful and obscene language,
- do not seduce minors or harm minors,
- do not transmit or upload advertisements of any kind, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation,
- do not transmit or upload virus or do anything that may damage the operation of Unknown Space,
- do not disrupt the order of Internet forum, chat room and other services,
- do not forge information or mislead users and the public,
- do not stalk another and store personal data of other users,
http://www.mitbbs.com/tos.htm
The User Developed Rules Governing the OC
These are the rules specified by the system, although whether or not the users would always follow them is another story. Besides these rules, the users could form their own “governments” and the system provides the “governors” different levels of higher privileges. These “governors” are selected from a pool of volunteered candidates. Usually each forum has a “government” with three or four “governors”.
For example, in the Mitbbs.com/CS forum, a veteran user who has shown a good knowledge in CS and has answered many questions would have a high rank and good “mileage” score. In other words, he would have a good chance in the “governor” election for the CS forum, assuming he would like to volunteer for that position.
One example of a “governor's” power is that he could evaluate and decide a post is not appropriate for this forum and delete it without the permission from its author. Another example is that a “governor” could judge a particular user's behavior and restrict his rights to post if necessary, e.g., spam accounts.
Examples of Rules Been Broken.
There are many cases when the rules are broken but usually they are not reported or punished, as long as the user does not have bad intentions and this action does not cost any inconvenience of other uses.
-- True Identity --
One of the governing rules stated that the user are supposed to always provide true and accurate information when registering in Mitbbs.com, as well as maintain and update registration information constantly to keep it true, accurate and current. In reality, very few people are doing this. And many people have multiple accounts. For instance, for my study, I registered for an account and it is different from what I have previously. I just need to provide a different user name and email account to go through the validation check. Since these days many people have multiple email accounts, having fake identities is common and allowed implicitly.
If I were in the administration's position, I would approach this issue a little bit differently from how it is treated right now. Sine there is not way to stop people from registering for multiple accounts, the OC could be more strict about deleting accounts. Of course, this is only applicable for well-established OC that already has a large user base.
Basically, I would go for two criteria of removing accounts. The first criteria is for accounts that haven't been used for a long time. A very possible reason for this to happen is that the user registered multiple accounts for various reasons at one time and he would not be able to remember all of them and use all of them in a regular bases. The second criteria will be discussed with the following section.
-- No Advertisements --
Another rule stated that transmitting or uploading advertisements of any kind, promotional materials, "junk mail," "spam," "chain letters," "pyramid schemes," or any other form of solicitation is not allowed. This rule is overall pretty strictly applied to each forum on Mitbbs.com. And it is done mostly by the forum “government” discussed in the previous section.
The screenshot above shows an example of the “governor's” power. The user with id “yidingjizhu” is volunteering for the leading “Governor” position in the Mitbbs.com/Pets forum. This indicates “yidingjizhu” is generally trusted by the other users due to his previous OC activities. He restricted the user with id “xiaopie” from posting any threads or comments on the Mitbbs.com/Pets forum for 14 days. This action is caused by the fact that “xiaopie” is suspected of abusing the forum for advertising purposes.
If I were in the administration's position, I would imposing a more strict rule for removing accounts. This is the second criteria following the previous section. Basically, I would attempt to remove an user account if it has violated rules and gotten punished for doing so repeatedly. Every time an account violates some rules, such as spamming, it would be punished by restricting reading or writing permissions. If a user has only one account then he would be very careful about committing inappropriate actions, since this would cause him not being able to use the OC. Only when the user has multiple accounts, he would not care about these punishments and hence not being careful with his actions.
-- Rating for Posts --
Just like Obfuscatocracy: A stakeholder analysis of governing documents for virtual worlds mentioned, the features provided by the SNSs are not always used as they are intended to. Some of them might get abused, and some other might get ignored.
The rating system on Mitbbs.com is in the second category. This rating mechanism is similar to the Amazon rating system discussed in the How Oversight Improves Member-Maintained Communities paper. Basically, when a user reads a post, he could comment on it and express his own opinion. But in many cases, the reader would not bother commenting if there's nothing special to say. This rating mechanism provides a way for a reader to still express his overall opinion by just one click on the “agree” or “disagree” button. This mechanism is not used at all on Mitbbs.com. In additions, the system can not prevent users from clicking the “agree” or “disagree” multiple times with their different OC identities. Overall, this feature is been ignored.
The screenshot above demonstrates this rating mechanism on Mitbbs.com. The “flower” button indicates agreement and the “foot” button indicates disagreement. As we see nobody rated this thread, although this thread itself attracted many responses and going through the responses I noticed many strong opinions, either agree or disagree. This thread is basically discussing whether or not there will be any major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence with in our lifetime. This author doesn't seem to think so.
If I were in the administration's position, I would delete this feature as it is not used.
Unwritten Rules
The “governors” would sometimes refer to the official set of rules governing the site for guidelines of his action. Many other times, he would tend to judge an issue with his own “human” opinion. So there are many unwritten rules. The following list give a demonstrations of such rules.
Unrelated discussion is not encouraged. For example, in the Mitbbs.com/CS forum, a lengthy discussion about Macy's shoe department would be considered appropriate, and it would likely to draw a warning from one of the CS “governors”.
Meaningless lengthy posts are not encourages. For example, A user made an ASCII art and it was accidentally scrambled when posting onto the forum. This would result in a long and non-sense post, which would draw the attention of the OC “governors”. Of course, if it is really an ASCII art, this user can easily explain the situation and not being punished.
Repeated information is not encouraged. For example, some one posed his resume template on the Mitbbs.com/jobhunting forum, and asked for suggestions. After some time there weren't as much responses as he had hoped. He would likely to post the same information again. Repeating once might be OK but a lot more than that would get him in trouble.
Posting violent or nude content without subject line specification is not allowed. Over time, the OC users developed this rule. This is a helpful, and can be imposed by human “governors”. This rule prevents cases such as accidentally opening such contents in front of children. Children under 14 are not allowed to register.
Sending private unrelated emails to other users may get reported and suspected as spamming. Basically, the private email account of a user is visible by all other users. If a user thinks there is any inappropriate messages through this email channel, he could report the sender to the “governor”.
There are yet many other unwritten rules applied on different forums of Mitbbs.com. Some of them are forum specific, such as the rules in Mitbbs.com/exchange forum, which was discussed in the Social role, capital and trust session. This forum is different as money is involved. Some of the rules are not often encountered. For example, users can commit “suicide” for his certain account. Basically, a user can announce that a particular id is not going to be used anymore. Sometimes, this is to stop people from contacting them this way. This action can not be taken more than once.
