"Online communities aren't easy"
Make sure to enforce your behavioral guidelines -- and yes, this can mean banning people temporarily or permanently from your community. I recommend warning people first before banning them. ... (And/Or) Wait for participants to make an emotional investment in your online community, and let them police it themselves. (Grier, E-Media Tidbits)
I used to play an online roleplaying game on a popular server visited by literally hundreds of people everyday (the server limit was about 50 people playing together at any one time, a limit that was often reached), and as one of the administrators for the server, it was also my job to handle problems in our community.
Our programmers coded some tools into the game that allowed administrators to perform various tasks that made this easier, such as banning players temporarily or permanently (permaban), disabling players' ability to send lines of chat through to the server, or even sending players' characters to a miniature jail area (which would tie their character to that area, so that logging off and back on simply forced them back into a holding cell until we had time to deal with them).
It could easily become a stressful job, particularly when groups of people from rival servers logged on for no other reason but to stir up trouble and try to damage our reputation by provoking the administrators into harsh treatment of the players.
Fortunately, our community was so faithful that they eventually started to police the server and take care of most problems on their own, without our interference.
There was always an unspoken tension between the administrators and the players. It was a prototypical civilized society--the players gave up a certain amount of power and freedom in exchange for protection and a concrete system of justice and law intended to make the game more enjoyable for everyone involved. At times, the balance of power shifted one way or the other, but throughout most of the server's lifespan (I participated for about 2 years), both sides shared responsibility, much like a government and its citizens share responsibility for a political state.
Comments
Chris, at the moment I'm reading a book called My Tiny Life, by Julian Dibbell, which is all about the athor's experience in LamdaMOO. Much of that book is dated, and he is more of an observer/journalist than a researcher (so he is likely to repeat generally accepted knowledge instead of trace it to the source and critique it), but his writing flows nicely and he's an accomplished popularlizer of technical details. (His more recent study was an attempt to make a living selling, for real-world dollars, virtual objects that he won while playing a MMORG.)
Posted by: Dennis G. Jerz | February 4, 2008 10:54 AM
oooh, cyber-jail....I like it.
I just don't understand why people feel the need to use rude language over the internet. I mean, they probably do not have a personal relationship with the receiver, so who is really going to take what they say to heart. There definately needs to be a better policing of the myspace community, because it's full of sexual predators.I heard one girl murdered herself over harassment from a myspace contact who didn't turn out to be a "friend" after all
Posted by: Daniella Choynowski | February 3, 2008 8:17 PM