Week 3 Reading - Web Forums

A web forum being a more tradional version of a bulletin board system. In the lecture there was discussion over two forums on the web, www.well.com and www.craigslist.com . There was a question that was raised about the issue of flaming - which is whereby someone responds or puts a hostile or derogatory comment in forums or via emails.

The second website was rife with flaming and yet 'The Well', even at first glance looked more professional, with people being polite with one another, more like a community. I think the differences stem from the fact that if you sign up for 'The Well', there's different type of membership options and as a member have to pay. So ultimately why would someone pay to flame. Even though with craiglist you have to register, it would be easier to be anonymous and therefore some people might take this as an opportunity. Also it seems like any information can be accessed and lurked on a larger scale with 'Craiglist'. I started looking through the website and within seconds i was able to reply to someones post by clicking on a link, which then opened up my hotmail account, with this persons email placed into a new email ready for me to send my reply. So it seems that you dont really need to register, unless you want to use the site properly.

Surely this would also bring up the issue of spamming. With the email available to a non member and no details entered into the site, all that could be used to trace me would be my hotmail account, but then again i could set up a fake email and use it for these purposes. If i wanted to it could be easily achieved.

Therefore you've got these two forums, who are completely different, as 'The Well' can't be accessed at all, unless there's a payment and a registration, the homepage states that theres 'non-anonymous here'. 'Craigslist' however brings up many issues; spam, flaming, trust, do these people feel a sense of a community and so they feel like they can trust people and stay logged onto the site? who knows. Maybe this site is a place where people like to mess around and cause arguments or maybe this is a culture thats been accepted. I know that i wont be using it.