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Necessity for screening forum contributions: too many spammers and idiots

From Philip Greenspun about forum moderating:

"All user-contributed web content needs pre-moderation"

In the mid-1990s when I started building online communities I didn't understand why publishers like Amazon pre-moderated all user-contributed content such as comments. The vast majority of users were intelligent and well-meaning and only a small fraction of material had to be deleted. It seemed like it wasn't worth interrupting the flow of conversation and exchange to ensure that an off-topic posting never saw the light of day. It would be intercepted within a day or so and deleted in any case.

The Manila software that Harvard runs behind these blogs shows the foolishness of my point of view. More than 90 percent of the comments posted to this blog are link spammers trying to increase their Google rank by adding comments to old and forgotten postings. Manila makes it impossible to delete this spams except one by one, each one requiring a several page process of confirmation. In the old ArsDigita Community System we had a "delete all from this user" and "delete all from this IP address" option that made it a lot easier. But in the Age of Spam what we really need is pre-moderation. Maybe there should be an option for a vibrant interactive discussion that content goes live for 24 hours without being approved but otherwise given the small percentage of useful non-spam content it seems that the only answer is that nothing goes public without approval.

Another reason to program in pre-approval only is that eventually the moderators of every online forum find other things to do with their lives. The server doesn't realize this and soldiers on processing postings. Spammers discover a happy home and the database fills up with crud. Software should be robust to the moderator disappearing and in an Internet that is mostly spam that means approval-required-before-going-live.

-- Edward Tufte

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Moveable Type guide on comment spam

Six Apart, which produces the unequaled, open source Movable Type blogging software, publishes the authoritative Guide to Combatting Comment Spam. Alas, like all security (antiterrorism, insurance, police, copyright), there isn't a one-sentence answer except to say every site must make, and continuously review, its own complex cost-benefit assessment and maintain a layered defense.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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What's best, not what's new

In Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance he frames his discussion as a focus not on "What's New" but rather "What's Best."

It is subjective and it would require more intervention by the moderator(s) but it would remove the recency bias and SPAM avalanche.

-- Tchad (email)

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An excellent comment moderation policy

Here is Philip Greenspun's recent "Comment moderation policy":

Comments on this Weblog are moderated by Ray Fraser, a kind-hearted volunteer, according to the following policy.

The most valued comments are alternative perspectives. If the posting is about a trip to Kugluktuk, Nunavut, a great comment would start "I took a trip there 10 years ago and my experience was ...".

The least valued comments are reviews of the posting, good or bad. The reader has just read the entire posting. He or she doesn't need someone else's opinion that "this was great" or "this was bad." Reviews make sense in the off-line world where consuming the book or movie happens after reading the review and takes a lot more time and effort. In the online world, the comments are usually read after the item being reviewed has been consumed.

Comments that attack another person's motivation, intelligence, or character are bad because they degrade the quality of the discussion and discourage thoughtful comments by others. For some reason, human beings often are confident that they can discern the hidden motivation for another person doing or saying something. Trained psychiatrists and psychologists, however, do very poorly at this task, so what hope is there for a lay person?

Cute/clever comments that are off-topic should only be published if they are very cute and clever indeed. Off-topic content breeds more off-topic content.

Attributed/real-name content is preferred to anonymous content.

Due to the fact that 90 percent of the comments posted on the former version of this blog were link spam, all comments are reviewed by the moderator before going live.

-- Edward Tufte

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Previewing contributions before publicly posting

See the essay by Alan Jacobs, "Goodbye, blog: The friend of information but the enemy of thought."

Several, although not all, of the problems mentioned can be eliminated by pre-approving comments before they go live and by regular purging of contributions that turn out not to advance a thread. Thus the focus is always on the quality of the thread for the reader, not on the opportunity for anyone to publish whatever they want. Lost is the spontaneous continuity of back-and-forth conversation; gained is a smarter, coherent, and civil thread over the long run--if there are some good contributors along with a firm editorial board. Thus the model for bloggers is that people are publishing on your board and that therefore you exert editorial control of what is published. This is especially the case on the internet, where there are innumerable opportunities to get anything up on some blog somewhere, or indeed to start one's own blog.

The director of Princeton University Press, Herb Bailey, once lectured the Editorial Board of the Press that our job was not to be fair but rather to publish good books. Of course a fair process might help to cause good manuscripts to show up to be published, but he had a very strong point, especially since there were many more manuscripts than could ever be published (the acceptance rate of the Press was about 5%-10%).

-- Edward Tufte

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How to ask questions the smart way

Compare ET's kind, even gentle publication policies to this hacker classic by Eric Steven Raymond, How to Ask Questions the Smart Way. Here's a brief excerpt from the disclaimer:

If you're reading this document because you need help, and you walk away with the impression you can get it directly from the authors, you are one of the idiots in question. Don't ask us questions. We'll just ignore you. We are here to show you how to get help from people who actually know about the software or hardware you're dealing with, but 99% of the time that will not be us. Unless you know for certain that one of the authors is an expert on what you're dealing with, leave us alone and everybody will be happier.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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Managing rejection: You are coming to a sad realization--cancel or allow?

A rejection slip from a Chinese economics journal supposedly went this way (quoted in the Financial Times): "We have read your manuscript with boundless delight. If we were to publish your paper, it would be impossible for us to publish any work of lower standard. And as it is unthinkable that in the next thousand years we shall see its equal, we are, to our regret, compelled to return your divine composition, and to beg you a thousand times to overlook our short sight and timidity."

From long experience on this board, we have learned never ever to get into discussions with sulky rejected contributors (some become maliciously angry) or even to reply with a bizarrely gracious rejection slip. Our policy is identical to that of nearly all edited forums, beginning with the "letters to the editor" section of The New York Times, Science, Nature, and on down. Publishers have no obligation to publish, acknowledge, or reply to the thousands of unsolicited contributions that they receive. Life's too short.

Every day we receive partially meritorious contributions that are not published; even some of the contributions of our Kindly Contributors are not published. There are billions of other places on the internet where rejected contributions can be published, unreviewed and unedited. But not here.

-- Edward Tufte

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Which corporations, government agencies, and other network owners are editing Wikipedia? An excellent New York Times article by Katie Hafner:

"Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits"

Last year a Wikipedia visitor edited the entry for the SeaWorld theme parks to change all mentions of "orcas" to "killer whales," insisting that this was a more accurate name for the species.

There was another, unexplained edit: a paragraph about criticism of SeaWorld's "lack of respect toward its orcas" disappeared. Both changes, it turns out, originated at a computer at Anheuser-Busch, SeaWorld's owner.

Dozens of similar examples of insider editing came to light last week through WikiScanner, a new Web site that traces the source of millions of changes to Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.

The site, wikiscanner.virgil.gr, created by a computer science graduate student, cross-references an edited entry on Wikipedia with the owner of the computer network where the change originated, using the Internet protocol address of the editor's network. The address information was already available on Wikipedia, but the new site makes it much easier to connect those numbers with the names of network owners.

Since Wired News first wrote about WikiScanner last week, Internet users have spotted plenty of interesting changes to Wikipedia by people at nonprofit groups and government entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. Many of the most obviously self-interested edits have come from corporate networks.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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The wikiscanner that Niels Olson mentioned in a previous post is an interesting and clever application of happenstance data: who changed the wikipage? I think I have two thoughts on this:

1. People seem either amazed, or entertained, or alarmed that someone with a vested interest in information posted on a public site with open editing privilege would actually change the content. I just checked to make sure that there wasn't a 'Rafe Donahue' entry on wikipedia. There is no entry (yet?) but you can bet that if someone said something about me that was untrue or unbecoming, I would likely be changing that entry as fast as I could (as long as that change was in my best interests; if the lie made me look better, I might be less likely to change it...). Or maybe I wouldn't care; after all, as my Grandma Emma used to say, "Consider the source." What would you do?

What am I supposed to conclude if I find that someone has changed information about them? Does this make them evil? I suppose at an absolute minimum I need to find out what was changed. Are corporations and government agencies and other network owners assumed to always be running the spin machine in an unethical manner?

And if I don't know who changed it, does that make it better? What if the change is done without being about to track the ip address? How can the value or validity of the information (wikinformation?) be dependent upon not who changed it but only upon whether or not we know who changed it?

So, I know that I do not know what to think about all of this.

2. The result of the wikiscanner will not be that people will no longer change their own entries; it will be that they will be smarter about it. In the end all that it will show is that there are still some people who don't understand that others are watching and that there are other people who have gamed the system.

Should we be amazed or entertained or alarmed?

-- rafe donahue (email)

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I actually moderate an internet forum on WatchUSeek, one of the larger watch forums on the Internet (we've got almost 15000 registered members with 79000+ threads and close to 475000 posts, with an average hit of some 20000+ hits per day. I moderate the vintage watch forum there. And yes, all we do is discuss watches and other timepieces. Surprisingly, we're not the biggest: there are other sites that are even busier that us, but we're nicer. :-)

The owner of the forum chooses people to be moderators based on maturity, technical knowledge (you've never known a geek until you meet a watch geek!) and willingness to be there and answer dumb questions: he vets those folks with existing moderators. Usually people are tapped to be mods when they have been helpful in the forums, have cooled down flame wars and fights by bringing things back on-topic, and generally acting like mature adults rather than loons.

WatchUSeek is fairly stringently moderated: there are no political discussions allowed, nor posting of any photos of weapons or the like. There are clear rules posted and everyone becoming a member agrees to them (at least pro forma). The key is that you have there a team of moderators, working world-wide (literally: we have mods from Australia to Canada and back again, in almost every time zone) who are committed to maintaining two things: high quality of discussion and the ruthless suppression of flame wars, trolling and the like. There are a number of supermods who can zap anyone anywhere; I can do that in my forum, but not in anyone else's forum.

It works well. Sure, we've had our share of problems, but given that you have to be a registered member in order to post anything, you can get rid of any troublemakers by simply banning them (and in the case of static IPs, their IP as well). We deal with spammers the same way: immediate ban on them and their IP. Dynamic IPs won't be banned, but we've hard by and large few problems with folks with dynamic IPs. There's banning, there's warnings, there are time-limited bans, etc: we have a number of options for punishment available.

It works because people want to be there and are largely willing to accept the rules to do so.

Clear rules and a clear hierarchy of responsibilities helps. We shut down political discussions ASAP and will delete the threads when doing so; we ruthlessly prune and ban trolls and troublemakers, and the mods all know each other via the forums and respect the decisions that other mods make, but there is also a moderator forum that is open and visible only to the mods for discussions about problem cases and the like. Abusive and threatening members don't last very long.

-- John F. Opie (email)

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Clear statement about moderating forums

Doug Reeves, who runs Van's Air Force, a big forum about home-constructed airplanes, gives potential contributors an earful about VAF posting policies:

My House, My Rules. I've noticed a sharp increase in people injecting talk of global warming, politics, economics, religion, gun control and other off-limit topics in the forums, acting like it's perfectly appropriate to do so. It's not. Posting 'sorry if this isn't appropriate' along with your text doesn't make it OK, either. I get it, lots of people have differing views on stuff. When you post something that doesn't abide by the rules, all that happens is you spend a lot of time composing a long, well thought out letter...then I or one of the many moderators delete it. Then you send me an email crying 'Censorship!!!', which I also delete.

Like it or not I am the Captain of this ship, and it's ultimately my responsibility to see that the rules are followed. Try to get (3) of your friends to agree on something - chances are you probably won't be able to. Now imagine a room with 7,100 people in it - that's the VAF Forums. They simply do not provide value to the RV [note added: a homebrew airplane design] community without clear- cut, defined rules of conduct. Period. My vision is one of a RV-only spot on the internet, completely civil and focused on the topic of RVs with laser-like precision. If you can't accept that, leave. I'm OK with it, I really am. There are PLENTY of spots on the web that are perfectly OK with no-holds-barred discussions, literally tens of thousands, but this is not one of them. The rules for posting are very simple and laid out clearly.

I'll leave you with my favorite rule of all....'if a moderator doesn't like it it's toast." With the Cowboys losing Sunday, my tolerance threshold is pretty low also (so fair warning). I really shouldn't type after the Cowboys lose.

His response to rejected contributors who proclaim themselves victims of censorship is particularly helpful in thinking about forum moderation.

Doug's full statement of forum posting policies is here.

-- Edward Tufte

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Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands

Xeni Jardin (Tech Culture Journalist; Co-editor, Boing Boing; Commentator, NPR; Host, Boing Boing tv) wrote a wonderful essay about forum moderation in her contribution to the Edge World Question Center collection of fascinating answers to the question "What have you changed your mind about?" The complete set of answers may be seen here.

Here is her answer to the question "What have you changed your mind about?":

Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands

I changed my mind about online community this year.

I co-edit a blog that attracts a large number of daily visitors, many of whom have something to say back to us about whatever we write or produce in video. When our audience was small in the early days, interacting was simple: we tacked a little href tag to an open comments thread at the end of each post: Link, Discuss. No moderation, no complication, come as you are, anonymity's fine. Every once in a while, a thread accumulated more noise than signal, but the balance mostly worked.

But then, the audience grew. Fast. And with that, grew the number of antisocial actors, "drive-by trolls," people for whom dialogue wasn't the point. It doesn't take many of them to ruin the experience for much larger numbers of participants acting in good faith.

Some of the more grotesque attacks were pointed at me, and the new experience of being on the receiving end of that much personally-directed nastiness was upsetting. I dreaded hitting the "publish" button on posts, because I knew what would now follow.

The noise on the blog grew, the interaction ceased to be fun for anyone, and with much regret, we removed the comments feature entirely.

I grew to believe that the easier it is to post a drive-by comment, and the easier it is to remain faceless, reputation- less, and real-world-less while doing so, the greater the volume of antisocial behavior that follows. I decided that no online community could remain civil after it grew too large, and gave up on that aspect of internet life.

My co-editors and I debated, we brainstormed, we observed other big sites that included some kind of community forum or comments feature. Some relied on voting systems to "score" whether a comment is of value—this felt clinical, cold, like grading what a friend says to you in conversation. Dialogue shouldn't be a beauty contest. Other sites used other automated systems to rank the relevance of a speech thread. None of this felt natural to us, or an effective way to prevent the toxic sludge buildup. So we stalled for years, and our blog remained more monologue than dialogue. That felt unnatural, too.

Finally, this year, we resurrected comments on the blog, with the one thing that did feel natural. Human hands.

We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone's misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.

Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction—no software fix I know of. But I'd underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn't cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are.

For our board, the solution was to eliminate direct posting; every potential contribution, before it goes live, must pass through a non-public approval queue that is reviewed by our editors. IP blocking of spammers, weeds, and trolls has also proved useful.

-- Edward Tufte

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More on moderating comments at BoingBoing. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, a moderator at BoingBoing posted about BoingBoing's moderation policy.

-- Ed Manlove (email)

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Paul Graham's essay How to Disagree.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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Language Log forum moderation policies

Mark Liberman, "A comment about comments" writes:

Earlier today, someone calling himself (?) Baishui submitted this comment on Victor Mair's post Burlesque Matinee at the Max Planck Gesellschaft:

"My comments were deleted twice here. Apparently, someone is offended by me saying 'this incident shows how ignorant the West (and its academics) are of the non-Western world'. What pettiness!"

I deleted this comment, just as I had deleted the same individual's first attempt, which consisted only of a one- sentence indictment of Western academics, and the second attempt, which added the accusation of censorship.

In an attempt to maintain a reasonable signal-to-noise ratio in the comments section, I'll continue to be skeptical of comments that lack specific and relevant content. To put this skepticism into context, though, you need to understand something about how comments work in a standard WordPress blog.

Go to link above for much more.

-- Edward Tufte

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Paul Graham's Hacker News is a forum for start-up entrepreneurs. If there was ever a forum with a cultural consciousness of their own forum culture, and how to maintain it, Hacker News is it. These are all people trying to build user groups with a sustainable culture. Here are some of pg's recent thoughts on implementing forum controls:

Rapid banning of trolls seems to be an effective troll guard. It also works well with spam.

Trolling and spam are both self-perpetuating problems. Users are ruder on sites where everyone else is rude, and spammers are more likely to submit links to sites they get traffic from. So you can prevent both problems by never letting them get a foothold.

Deletion doesn't have to be manual, especially in the case of spam. Spammers smart enough to measure the traffic they get from HN quickly give up. And the dumb ones obligingly continue to post from banned accounts and IP addresses. So currently 80-90% of spam is killed by software rather than humans.

Flagging turns out to be a feature that saves a lot of work. So does rate-limiting submissions from newly created accounts (and, obviously, the IP addresses they use).

One general approach I've found very useful is not to protect against a certain type of abuse till it arises. Aside from obvious things like not letting people vote more than once, you don't need much protection when you first launch.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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There seems to be an almost bizarre difference between the worst of the net and best: the best forums almost universally have members who use their real names. The worst of course, don't.

It doesn't appear to be related to the quality of the carbon-based life form at the keyboard either. Yale Law is abroil with accusations of slander on AutoAdmit.com, a forum for law students (eg, Google for Brittan Heller). Our experience at Tulane Med convinced us, as students, to pull the plug on our own forum, even though it proved to be our best source of information after the storm. People weren't using their real names.

On our new site, TMedWeb, we have a secure site for reviews of residency programs. Everything is encrypted and password protected (using the university's directory), but it's still remarkably sensitive information: these are students who are commenting on the residency programs they apply to, and we enforce real names by publishing their university account aliases (eg, Niels Olson is nolson). The reviewers still don't shy away from commenting on the quality of programs, but the students provide well composed essays instead of the filth that some of the same people wrote on the old, more public, but pseudo-anonymous forums. The utility of the information is yet to be fully realized. For example, the University of Chicago hospital got some rather negative press recently, due to layoffs, and we had a well written review from a student who had recently spent four weeks there, which provided balance for students considering whether or not to keep Chicago on their Match list for residency.

Ask ET is actually more heavily moderated, but is nevertheless open to the public. It is easily the highest quality public forum I know of.

Paul Graham's Hacker News allows anonymity but every comment goes live first, and the system relies very explicitly on the community to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. And, as it happens a lot of people use their real names, even people who might have good reason to not hang their reputation out on a public forum:

• pg: Paul Graham, inventor of what the first e-commerce site builder, which he sold for gobs to Yahoo. The ups and downs of Yahoo's advertising revenue may provide a lot of material for the news, but the Yahoo Store operation continues to provide an underlying cash flow.
• paul: Paul Buchheit, inventor of GMail.
• dhh: David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails
• aaronsw: Aaron Swartz. Helped write the RDF specification while in middle school and wrote the RSS specificaton before college.

I think there is a general sense on the Internet that young people in particular favor anonymity and are also more prone to the worst public behavior when they go anonymous. I wonder to what extent this is at least partially a function of self-preservation: the young know they're young.

It would be interesting to find out how, exactly, young people behave differently on secure forums. Will they use such forums at all? What if we get into a realm of speech-to-text? A 1st grader can read but probably doesn't type much. We might find out some interesting patterns. High-integrity authentication systems, like LDAP and Kerberos, are becoming more understood and more widely deployed in progressively smaller institutions, so it's something to keep an eye on. Certainly our recent experience at Tulane Med suggests the upshot can be richly rewarding.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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Eliezer Yudkowsky has a good essay encouraging moderators to actively defend their communities: Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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How to write an incendiary blog post

A brilliant essay by Chris Clarke:

This is the title of a typical incendiary blog post

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers' attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people. This sentence expresses the unwillingness of the writer to be silenced despite going against the popular wisdom. This sentence is a sort of drum roll, preparing the reader for the shocking truth to be contained in the next sentence.

This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence claims that there are many people who do not agree with the thesis of the blog post as expressed in the previous sentence. This sentence speculates as to the mental and ethical character of the people mentioned in the previous sentence. This sentence contains a link to the most egregiously ill-argued, intemperate, hateful and ridiculous example of such people the author could find. This sentence is a three-word refutation of the post linked in the previous sentence, the first of which three words is "Um." This sentence implies that the linked post is in fact typical of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence contains expressions of outrage and disbelief largely expressed in Internet acronyms. This sentence contains a link to an Internet video featuring a cat playing a piano.

This sentence implies that everyone reading has certainly seen the folly of those who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence reminds the reader that there are a few others who agree. This sentence contains one-word links to other blogs with whom the author seeks to curry favor, offered as examples of those others.

This sentence returns to the people who disagree with the thesis of the blog post. This sentence makes an improbably tenuous connection between those people and a current or former major political figure. This sentence links those people and that political figure to a broad, ill-defined sociodemographic class sharing allegedly similar belief systems. This sentence contains a reference to the teachings of Jesus; its intent may be either ironic or sincere.

This sentence refers to a different historic period, and implies that conditions relevant to the thesis of the blog post were either different or the same. This sentence states that the implications of the previous sentence are a damned shame. This sentence says that the next sentence will explain the previous sentence. This sentence contains a slight rewording of the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.

This sentence contains an apparent non-sequitur phrased as if it follows logically from the reworded thesis of the blog post. This sentence is a wildly overgeneralized condemnation of one or more entire classes of people phrased in as incendiary a fashion as possible which claims to be an obvious corollary to the thesis and non-sequitur.

This sentence proposes that anyone who might disagree with the wildly overgeneralized condemnation is, by so disagreeing, actually proving the author's point. This sentence explains that such people disagree primarily because of the author's courageous and iconoclastic approach. This sentence mentions the additional possibilities that readers who express disagreement with the wildly overgeneralized condemnation are merely following political fashion or trying to ingratiate themselves with interest groups. This sentence is a somewhat-related assertion based in thoughtless privilege and stated as dispassionate objective truth. This sentence explains that if the scales would merely fall from those dissenting readers' eyes, they would see the wisdom and necessity of the author's statements.

This sentence invites readers to respond freely and without constraint as long as those responses fall within certain parameters. This sentence consists of an Internet in-joke that doesn't quite fit the topic.

[This parenthetical sentence was appended some time after posting as an expression of gratitude for the post's many visitors and an apology that server overload has prompted the owner's closing of comments, at least for the time being.]

And the accompanying comments are often delightful.

-- Edward Tufte

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And, for a thoroughly different, though not inconsistent view, reddit:

"Posting personal information is the Internet version of vandalism and abuse and will not be tolerated. If you see it, report it..."

-- Niels Olson (email)

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Jeff Atwood of the highly popular Stack Exchange (SE) sites has some recent comments on dealing with troublesome accounts:

Our method of dealing with disruptive or destructive community members is simple: their accounts are placed in timed suspension. Initial suspension periods range from 1 to 7 days, and increase exponentially with each subsequent suspension. We prefer the term "timed suspension" to "ban" to emphasize that we do want users to come back to their accounts, if they can learn to refrain from engaging in those disruptive or problematic behaviors.

The above is fine for minor infractions, but for more disruptive individuals it may be necessary to escalate tactics, the first (of three) stratgies mentioned is:

A hellbanned user is invisible to all other users, but crucially, not himself. From their perspective, they are participating normally in the community but nobody ever responds to them. They can no longer disrupt the community because they are effectively a ghost. It's a clever way of enforcing the "don't feed the troll" rule in the community.

His post has a few other tidbits:

Suspension, Ban, or Hellban?

The folks at SE have really thought a lot about how to keep their community well run:

Avoid the Streisand Effect - be clear about the reason when suspending an account

They've tried to consolidate the rules of everything that's come before (Usenet, Slashdot, web forums, etc.) into a their software eliminating what doesn't work and keep what does.

-- David Magda (email)

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If journals are the original forums, this may be the most significant way to elevate discourse on the internet: elevate the quality of accessible content.

Princeton bans authors from yielding all copyright to publishers as part of open access policy

Prestigious US academic institution Princeton University will prevent researchers from giving the copyright of scholarly articles to journal publishers, except in certain cases where a waiver may be granted.

The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.

At a September 19 meeting, Princeton's Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the "nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles."

"The University authorizes professors to post copies of their articles on their own web sites or on University web sites, or in other not-for-a-fee venues," the policy said.

"The main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal."

Having prestigious universities such as Princeton and Harvard fly the open access flag represented a step forward, said open access advocate Professor Simon Marginson from the University of Melbourne's Centre for the Study of Higher Education.

"The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions," he said.

"Essentially, this approach - if it becomes general - normalises an open access regime and offers authors the option of opting out of that regime. This is a large improvement on the present position whereby copyright restrictions and price barriers are normal and authors have to attempt to opt in to open access publishing, or risk prosecution by posting their work in breach of copyright."

"The only interests that lose out under the Princeton proposal are the big journal publishers. Everyone else gains."

-- Niels Olson (email)

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Further encouragement for authors to at least make their work available online—read the entire piece for further elaboration on each point:

Why Academic Papers Are A Terrible Discussion Forum

I won't try to argue that papers aren't worth publishing. There are many reasons to publish papers - prestige in certain communities and promises to grant agencies, for instance - and I haven't looked at them all in detail. However, I think there is a conclusive case that as a discussion forum - a way for ideas to be read by other people, evaluated, spread, criticized, and built on - academic papers fail. Why?

1. The time lag is huge; it's measured in months, or even years.

2. Most academic publications are inaccessible outside universities.

3. Virtually no one reads most academic publications.

4. It's very unusual to make successful philosophical arguments in paper form.

5. Papers don't have prestige outside a narrow subset of society.

6. Getting people to read papers is difficult.

7. Academia selects for conformity.

8. Papers have a tradition of violating the bottom line rule.

9. Academic moderation is both very strict and badly run.

-- Niels Olson (email)

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