To Thread or Not to Thread

Within the realm of message boards, there are a couple of different ways to organize the messages. Many people don't realize this, but it can make all the difference in the world in how people interact on your message boards. Some people have a strong preference for one or the other, but either will work. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. Even if you prefer one style, the needs of your community may dictate that you at least consider the other style.

There are two basic ways to view message board posts: threaded and conversational.

Conversational (Linear, Chronological) View

In conversational view, also known as linear or chronological view, posts are placed in chronological order, one after the other. This organizational method is good for a group of regular participants engaged in free-flowing, deep conversation. For example, this might work well with a health-related community in which there are groups for various illnesses and members are providing support to one another. It's harder to reply to individual messages, and more difficult to find "the answer" out of the bunch, however, so if you need to be able to find needles in haystacks, you might be better off with a threaded organizational structure. Conversational mode is more of a many-to-many discussion.

Threaded View

In threaded forums, the posts are arranged like an outline, with one post immediately following the one to which it is replying. Threaded organization works well in situations where people need to be able to find a particular piece of information in a hurry, such as in technical support forums. Threaded organization fosters multiple small one-to-one conversations rather than one group discussion.

A Comparison

While threaded conversations might seem more organizationally intuitive, forums generally get more participation when they use conversational mode. This is because people tend to find conversations straightforward and easy to follow.

If you have not experienced both modes, I would encourage you to do so, to get a feel for which one you prefer. Quite frankly, I have a strong bias toward conversational mode. Threading works well for newsgroups and other non-Web-based applications, but I feel that it's more difficult to use it on the Web.

Webcrossing Settings

Whatever you decide is best for your community, Webcrossing's got you covered.  In the Control Panel > Discussions page, you can choose from:

• Default to threaded, but user can choose conversational in their preferences
• Default to conversational, but user can choose threaded in their preferences
• Mandate threaded
• Mandate conversational

And whatever you choose can be overridden for an individual discussion on the Edit Discussion page, even in mid-discussion.

My favorite combination of settings is to set the actual discussions for conversational view (mandate it), and then in the "Tabular Message View" settings, turn on the option to show replies.  This puts links between the message and the message being replied to.  At the bottom of the message being replied to is a list of all the replies.  At the top of each reply is a link back to the one it was a reply to.  In that way, you can still enjoy the advantages of conversational view while still being able to follow threads if necessary.

Feel free to experiment!

5 Tips to Prevent Flames

Some amount of disagreement among community members is probably inevitable. Just as in face-to-face communities, sometimes people get on each other's nerves. Rather than hoping against hope that it won't happen in your community, it's better to plan for problems from the outset and have a strategy in place for dealing with them.

What You Can Do

You can minimize the unpleasantness -- and help douse the flames when it happens -- with a judicious application of software tools and common-sense people skills. Here are five strategies you can use:

1. Choose software that allows you to deal with -- and prevent -- problems. One approach is to use moderation, which is when some or all posts are read and approved by a moderator before they go live. Reading every single post is obviously time-consuming for your community staff, but some software allows you to specify a list of objectionable words, and then it queues for moderation only posts that contain those words. Webcrossing allows you to set a different objectionable word list for each folder, if you wish.

Another tactic is to deny problem users access to some or all of your site, or to withdraw certain privileges. These users can either be denied access completely (you delete their existing user name, and they can't register again), or they can be denied access to a given area within the site (since they're logged in, the software knows who they are and can be programmed to not let them into certain areas). Or you can set it so they can read posts but not post anything themselves. You may not need these tools often, but when you do, they can be lifesavers. You can do this with Access Lists with Webcrossing.

A third approach puts the responsibility in the hands of the users by giving them filtering tools that allow them to block postings from people whom they find difficult. Webcrossing provides a "bozo filter" if you use the default Tabular Message View.

2. Write a watertight "terms of service" document. Require your participants to agree to the document when they register. It doesn't have to be legalistic and scary, nor should it discourage the discussion of issues. But it should specify that attacks on individuals are not permitted. The advantage of having something in writing is that if someone gets unruly and you need to take action, you have an existing document that you can direct them to, and your enforcement actions won't seem arbitrary.  Webcrossing's Register Plus plugin allows you to require agreement to your Terms of Service in order to register.

3. Plan a "seeding" period. It's amazing how many new sites skip this step.  But it can be crucial for setting the stage and settings expectations for behavior.  Before you open your community, invite a couple dozen people to come in behind the scenes. These should be experienced message board participants and people whom you can count on to help you get some interesting conversation going. Besides simply making it seem like "somebody's home" when the public arrives, these folks will set the stage for what will come when the doors open, including being role models for your users-to-come about what kind of behavior is usual and expected.

4. Use facilitators to shape the discussion. Faciliators can model civil disagreement and discussion and deal with problems when they arise. They can deal with your participants via private e-mail and encourage them to work out their issues with each other without making your community an unpleasant place to be. When all else fails, they can use the software tools available to them, as outlined in strategy #1, above. A good facilitator is worth his or her weight in gold!

5. Resign yourself to the fact that you're never going to please everyone. Taking action when things get out of hand is sometimes the only way to prevent your community from self-destructing; your "good" users will usually appreciate your taking action against people who are causing trouble. Otherwise, the positive contributors will get disgusted and may start to spend their time elsewhere. But at the same time, when a facilitator acts with a "cop hat" on, he or she is going to raise the ire of those in your community who have problems with authority, no matter who is wearing the hat. You may get complaints about First Amendment rights and censorship. The trick is to not take it personally and remember that for both you and your participants, everything online feels more intense than it would offline. Thus, if you can encourage people to take a "time out" of a few days to get perspective, it's likely to help a great deal.

Using a combination of Webcrossing tools and good facilitation, you can minimize the flames in your community.

What to look for when you hire a community manager

Great article here. Most job ads ask for some degree of technical skills plus experience with social media. In this blog post, Richard Millington explains why that's exactly the wrong approach.

http://www.feverbee.com/2011/05/hiringcommunitymanagers.html

Why I prefer online conferences

We’ve been running online conferences using Webcrossing Community for eight years now. We were the first in the UK to run them, and we still run the largest. These are short (typically four days), but highly intensive conferences. We now run two a year – one series known as Innovating e-Learning, for UK universities and colleges (now in its fifth year); and one called Supporting Deaf People (SDP), aimed at professionals, primarily interpreters, working with the deaf, now in its eighth year. So, why do we like online conferences? Many people would say they aren’t as good as face to face conferences, but we would disagree. Here’s why.

1. For participants, the convenience of being able to attend from anywhere means that you can get to experience events virtually that you could never attend physically. Our SDP conferences in particular have participants from numerous countries – the 2010 conference had 332 participants from 17 countries giving participants across the work the opportunity to discuss with world class presenters, and share their own knowledge and expertise.

2. As I discussed in another post on this blog, they are extremely cheap to participants – not free, everything has a cost somewhere, but far, far cheaper than if they had to attend an equivalent physical conference.

But, and it’s a big but, cheapness and convenience don’t matter if the conference experience is no good. So that brings us on to the next reasons why we prefer online conferences.

3. In our experience, the level of participation in an online conference is far greater than in a face to face one. At a physical conference, you go to a workshop, listen to a presentation, and, if you’re lucky, have time for a few questions afterwards, but, at least in the workshop, very little time for discussion. That isn’t true in our conferences. Our 2008 Innovating e-Learning conference had over 180,000 words of postings in just four days – an incredible amount (and, of course, far too much to absorb at the time, which is why we leave the conferences open, for reading only, for a couple of months after). And a majority of the delegates made some postings, so the level of participation was very high. (More recent conferences have fewer postings, because we now use a model which combines the asynchronous element of Webcrossing, with live presentations using a platform called Elluminate).

4. The user experience is always excellent, with many people saying they get more from these events than from physical conferences. Typical feedback from recent conferences includes:

• This has been my first SDP On-Line Conference. It has been incredibly informative as well as providing opportunity for more thought.
• This is definitely my favorite conference to attend, by far! You can attend in your pyjamas with your own coffee and the discussions are fascinating.
• This was one of the best conferences I have ever experienced – whether in person or online. The calibre of the presentation materials and conference participant posts far exceeded my expectations.
• Clearly, I really enjoy this conference! The flexibility, easy-to-navigate style and non-threatening interaction with fellow delegates keep me coming back year after year. The presentations are thorough and relevant to my work. What an asset SDP is to the learning process of interpreters worldwide!

Are there any disadvantages? 

Well, yes. Not everyone likes interacting online – though with the growth of social networking, this is less and less true. But what is true, up to now, is that the social experience and networking, whilst still there in an online conference, hasn’t been as good as in a face to face conference. There’s nothing quite like sitting in a bar till early in the morning for building up (or, maybe, sometimes wrecking) good relationships. There are plenty of social networking tools now, which we could try to incorporate into Webcrossing, though that would probably involve a lot of work for us. But given the model which we currently use, of short, intense, four days conferences, it’s hard for us to build a space within the conference where people can network socially. Nevertheless, I think this is an issue which we will need to deal with soon, particularly as people’s expectations increase.

Ah, I nearly forgot the real reason we prefer online conferencing! As the organisers, we can do it from anywhere, so we can, literally, sit on the beach in Spain whilst running a major international conference. Brilliant … that is, until the sand blows into your keyboard.

Environment and financial benefits

My company, Direct Learn Services, has used Webcrossing Community for about eight years now. We use it to run short, time limited online conferences – typically, they last around four days. These are hugely popular, and I’ll describe in another post a little about how they work. But in this post, I want to illustrate a couple of points about the financial and environmental benefits of using online conferencing systems. The figures I’ll use aren’t mine – they come from an Athabasca University study, published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, Spring 2009. The paper can be seen at http://www.cjlt.ca/index.php/cjlt/article/view/521/254.

The study looked at our 2008 Supporting Deaf People online conference. This is totally online, and had 241 participants from 18 countries – a truly international event, running 24 hours a day. The cost to delegates was £50 each (at the rates at the time of the study, about 69 USD). The study examined the carbon footprint and costs which would have been generated by an equivalent physical conference.

Environmental costs

I don’t want to go into the detail of how these were calculated – those interested can refer to the paper linked above. The paper assumed that if held as a physical event, the conference would be in London (we are a UK-based company). So, calculating emission costs for airplane travel for non-UK delegates, travel within the UK for UK delegates, and hotel emissions, the total CO2 emissions would be 431.09 metric tons – or around 1.79 metric tons per participant. (The equivalent in US tons is around 475 and 1.97). So – given that emissions from attending via your computer at home or your normal workplace are very minimal indeed - this represents a massive saving. To put it into context, the average annual emissions per capita in 2005 for a US citizen were 19.52 – so the conference would represent a large proportion of that. In fact, for less developed countries, the proportion is much higher – Brazil’s per capita emissions were 1.76 metric tons – less than emitted for the attendance at a four day conference held in London!

Financial costs

The financial cost, averaged out per delegate, was calculated as 2168 USD – this was primarily travel and accommodation. This compares with the actual cost to delegates of 69 USD – another huge saving.

Was the experience as good?

It could be argued that whilst the physical event costs more, delegates would get a lot more from it. In fact, we don’t agree with this, and I will, in another post, demonstrate that levels of participation in our online conferences, and satisfaction with them, are generally higher than in physical conferences (though, of course, you don’t get the chance to spend a few days being a tourist in London!).

Conclusion

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. The reality is that had we decided to run this conference physically, it would never have happened. It would have been way too expensive in terms of both time and money. Our delegates are not highly paid businessmen used to jetting around the world. They are ordinary people, not paid massive amounts of money, and not able to afford to pay nearly 2200 USD for a short conference. And this brings us to the real benefit of online conferencing – it enables people who could not go to a physical conference to attend online and to get first class professional development, at a minimal cost to themselves and to the environment. It gives them opportunities they would not otherwise have had.