[DisgustedofSwieqi]

My 81 year old mum had a cataract op last week, she’s doing fine now.

I’ll be thinking of you over the coming days.

[MartynSinclair]

Thanks appreciate the thoughts. Nice news about your mum doing fine after her op.

Martyn

[LPPSKrisflyer]

Well done Henkel for raising this issue. It has been festering for months and I’m glad it’s out in the open.

I have grown very weary of the constant dragging everything back to one airline and one mantra and the straw poll conducted suggests thus far that most of don’t even use said airline. (I’m adhereing to your suggestion of not mentioning it by name for the rest of March which I think is a great idea and will give everyone a fresh focus).

If a new BT board is to be moderated, may I respectfully suggest that Henkel would make an excellent moderator? His posts are very balanced and measured and he is perceptive about people and their intentions, seeing through nonsense and bad behaviour very quickly.

[Bucksnet]

It would help if the white forum box on the home page was expanded to show more than the last 5 updated threads. Below it is an advert, which is repeated to the right and further below as well.

This box could show the last 10-12 threads, and make this ‘bumping’ a lot more difficult if not impossible.

[Swissdiver]

@Bucksnet: Funny, never realised there were a advert there (I am using Firefox with an add-on called Adblock Plus and don’t see any advert ever…) and wondered (naively I admit) why there were an empty space…

[IanFromHKG]

I am not sure that user-moderation would work – it would be too open to manipulation. Although if we are to go down that road, I vote for MartynSinclair, probably the most balanced (and I mean that in both senses of the word) regular contributor on the forum

[DisgustedofSwieqi]

I’ve been a user moderator on another board, in the past.

Some observations

1 – It is very time consuming

2 – You give up the right to have an opinion, restricting your self to (a) removing potentially defamatory remarks, (b) removing offensive remarks and personal attacks and (c) removing adverts or very off topic posts

3 – Everyone thinks you have it in for them 🙂

[MartynSinclair]

Ian_from_HKG – thank you very much for your kind comments.

I am more than happy to donate as much time to BT and the Forum if asked, for any purpose (pre or post launch).

However, as has often been pointed out, my posts do tend to verge, on occasion, on the emotive side which for a moderator does not bear well.

If moderators were to be appointed, I would for that reason politely decline.

[MartynSinclair]

I have received several “update emails” this morning, advising me that threads have had a new post when in fact they haven’t been touched.

Is this a problem that BT need to be made aware of?

[IanFromHKG]

Martyn, someone was spamming the board – I suspect these have been deleted so that it appears as though there are no new posts

[LPPSKrisflyer]

It seems like the spammers are still alive and well.

[BusinessTraveller]

We have now banned the account in question and deleted all posts. Hopefully they should not reappear, but do let us know if they do.

[IanFromHKG]

I have looked in vain on the site for a set of guidelines that posters are expected to abide by (some time ago, when one of our regular posters – who has contributed to this thread – insulted me). Perhaps we could all propose some guidelines for BT to consider adopting. Here are some suggestions:

No spam

Show respect to other users. Feel free to disagree but refrain from insults

Keep to the topic – if you want to digress, start another thread

Do not “bump” threads to keep them at the top of the board or to push other threads off the top of the board

There are really only supposed to be a code of conduct. It would probably be helpful if BT also clarified what sort of behaviour would lead to deletion/banning (which should include a general “discretionary” backup, I think)
No pride of authorship in these – feel free to disagree/comment/supplement!

[SimonRowberry]

Ian,

I agree. However, it’s putting a lot of pressure and responsibility for subjective judgment on Tom, Mark et al.

In a civilised society, one would expect pure decency and societal norms to hold sway….

Simon

[MartynSinclair]

Ian_from_HKG

I think the key is “guidelines” because 95% of the time, we have no problems. Yes it get lively, but very rarely do any of the regulars get involved with unacceptable abuse and insults.

It has often been said that the BT Forum has a uniqueness in the freedom and sometimes openess of posts. Some time ago in BKK, I used the forum for some support over a particularly lonely weekend, crazy as it seems, this was where I turned to first, perhaps in part because it is cyberspace. One Forum poster in particular helped because, he was able to provide “personal” advice, purely down to the cyber relationships built.

If NF becomes stuffy and hell bent on strict rules, with moderators marching through posts with delete and yellow and red cards, I know that the feel of the forum will change.

I do not believe it is in any of our interests to formulate any thing more than a set of guidelines.Thread drift within reason, should not be a crime – it is generally due to the thread drift that new topics are created.

I do like LP’s (I hope it was his) idea of the more regular IN POSTING you become, the more control one has over the forums functionality.

I think the minority of unruly behavior occurs because of the lack of ID checks. There could be a very simple solution for ensuring posters are genuine.

At the sign up stage, if the posters prove to BT their genuine identity, any handle or name could have an icon to confirm identity known to BT. This does not mean that this info will be published, but for example:

By any posters name, could be a small v with a circle to confirm verified by BT.

Email addresses, not for one minute suggesting these are published, but most posters if not all, should have be able to provide a web site with their details on. If for example, BT can verify a picture, a name on a company web site, without giving those web site details away, it can give confirmation that the person or handle is genuine.

Any sign up via a public isp should require additional checking, because there is no way in verifying people are who they say they are.

Key is to ensure the freeflow of information continues and posters have credibility in which case, the guidelines and moderators (if appointed) will have very little meaning.

[Author]

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