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The "control" I want to exert is over spam, personal attacks, vulgarity, and other things that are specifically only destructive to the conversations. That is also the only aspect I want CoB's controlling. I don't want them deleting posts only because they think they're wrong. Whether a post is wrong or right is a decision that should be left to the reader.
To me, the main criteria is objectivity. If the person has that, and proves it by their deletions and non-deletions, I really don't care whether they own the stock, are short it, or have never heard of it.
Wow!
And you said it here!
Kinda like walking into the local police station and announcing that your taxes pay for those cop cars, so you're taking one for a spin and gonna arrest some people while you're at it.
LOL!
Dennis Miller is one of my favorites. He's easily one of the most intelligent comics out there and has perhaps the greatest mastery of the language, and has an amazing font of knowledge from which to draw his wonderful analogies.
That some people don't understand him doesn't mean he's using words horribly or has bad grammar. He's just being him and you've really got to be on your toes to keep up.
That said, my dad hates him because he's "too snotty". I've never heard anyone accuse him of traits belying lack of intelligence before though.
said she should be allowed the post one time and if she posts it again, delete it. I did. I got booted for following Matts directions.
Incorrect, and you know it.
With your permission, I'd like to quote your PM's to me on the matter as they prove it's not remotely like what you just said.
Edit: Actually, I can see the contents of my PM's too. At least the ones to which you replied.
I think I would rather retire from the bashers paradise.
Or condemn it as such before seeing if it's really true. Not really the kind of approach most serious stock market people would take, but it's really your call. Although I see you've been posting over there and you all seem to be having a civil discussion about the company.
As Matt emailed me. Marys a pain in the butt. his words.
And I bet he's ever so happy to have shared that with you. :)
You gave the board to the basher. You live with her.
I haven't seen anymore deletions from that board yet. Have there been some that I'm unaware of somehow?
Correction: Bob boots off the founder of that board because posts were being deleted solely for containing negative opinions and because of the founder's insistence that all future negative posts would be deleted and that only shareholders should be permitted to post there. Then installs a person who assures him they will not delete posts simply because they do not share the new CoB's opinion.
Feel free to test the new CoB there. Post something you're certain the CoB will disagree with, but don't include obscenity or personal attacks, and let's see what happens.
I would expect that the current total of 3 people per board would be sufficient. Definitely better than 1 per board so that the board would have more complete coverage, but I don't know that I'd want more than 3. It's tough enough getting 3 people to agree, let alone 5.
Very helpful and I agree very strongly.
My position was developed based on my past experience in this line of work, and having to work very closely with lawyers on exactly these same issues. I'm sure the matters of law haven't changed that dramatically but I agree that we need to be publishing our own position, drafted by our lawyer.
If a post is about a company or company principals (including former ones) negative information specific to the person (or company) is very relevant.
Even if the statement is about a person who is not a company principal it can be libelous without being a personal attack. If I say that you're an ignorant moron, even if it's true, that's a personal attack. If I say that you're the IR representative for [OTCBB ticker here], and you're not, that could be libelous, but it's not a personal attack.
In the former example, the post should be deleted because it's a personal attack. In the latter, it should not be deleted because it's either relevant information about the company or evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the poster.
I'm interested in an opinion more educated than mine on a particular matter. Questions follow:
1. Am I full of hot air on my view of "libel"?
2. Can anyone but a judge determine that libel has taken place?
3. Should a CoB be allowed to remove a post because he asserts that it's libel?
4. Is the act of deletion (citing "libel") itself a potential libelous act if the deleted post is later proven true?
To paraphrase the example that was presented to me, if someone posts that "Bob Z has all of his ill-gotten gains stashed away in an off-shore account", my view is that the post is libel (because it's not true), but that I shouldn't delete it because:
1. Instead, I should refute it.
2. Evidence of my having been libeled shouldn't be removed.
3. My deleting it rather than refuting it sends a clear signal that I'm trying to hide evidence and/or am unable to refute it.
I believe very strongly that nobody on this site (not me nor any posters or chairpeople) should be allowed to remove a post citing "libel" as the reason. Anyone who knows this issue better agree or disagree?
Edit: If someone posts something that's libelous and the site refused to delete it when someone told us they thought it was libelous, do we then become liable for the statements because of our position of only deleting "libel" when a judge has told us that it's libel and to remove it.
We created this feature because of the wide-spread problem with spam, personal attacks, and bashing without reason or facts
No mention at all of "hyping without reason or facts".
I agree. I thought I'd perused the Terms of Service pretty thoroughly, but didn't see that. I'll look again and have it changed. As I've already told a few people, I don't agree with using "bashing" or "without facts" as reasons to remove posts. In any scenario, the best one can come up with is their *opinion* that information is and isn't factual.
I don't want people, acting as proxies for the site's admin, asserting on this site's behalf that someone's information is wrong, thereby asserting that all undeleted posts are 100% correct.
Refutation, not deletion.
I agree the boards should belong to the shareholders
I strongly disagree. Even vehemently. I find that statement more than a little offensive.
If I'm in the message-board reading phase of my DD (and that's but one part of the DD package), I want shareholders to tell me why they're shareholders and I want non-shareholders to tell me why they're not.
If I listen only to shareholders, I'm only getting one side of the picture. If a company were perfect, everyone would be shareholders and all I'd see is why they're shareholders. After all, they're shareholders because their opinions are positive.
Companies aren't perfect, and if I don't find out about the negatives, I'm not getting the whole picture.
And to add to what someone else said (and I've said a number of times in the past), shareholders post positively about a company because they want others to buy it and people who post negatively about a company do so because they don't want others to buy it. To say that the latter group is evil and the former isn't, by definition, is the worst kind of folly.
In fact, altruism is often (not the same as "always") the reason behind posting of negative opinions. You may or may not believe it (I doubt you do), but can you also say that altruism is often the reason behind posting of positive opinions?
I know when I've had negative things to say about companies (as I often did before accepting the position at Silicon Investor), my motives were 100% altruistic. I didn't benefit from prices dropping or not going up. I benefited from later seeing that I was proven right and that a number of people were saved financial harm.
That said, I personally do have a problem with the way "bashers" sometimes conduct themselves, but it's more a matter of approach than anything else. When I had something negative to say about a company, I didn't come down to the level of the more vehement posters and get vitriolic about it or engage in name-calling. Instead, I preferred to present my views in a level-headed, unemotional manner and hope that people who were intelligent enough to heed matter-of-fact posts more closely than emotional ones would pay attention and benefit from it.
I don't think that overly-emotional posting, be it positive or negative, reflects well on the poster or their opinions. Personally, I tend to discount anything market-related that's said too emotionally.
Questions?
and he is not a scammer?
I'm not going to go into any great detail on my opinions about A@P, but will say this:
I don't always agree with him, but when he speaks, I do listen with both ears and think people should. I don't believe he has any vested interest in seeing this site do poorly so I would not say he's "bashing" the site. If he's speaking negatively about it, it's because he honestly believes what he's saying and even though I think he's wrong on this one, I listen attentively.
In much the same way that a person who is long a stock (any stock) should listen very attentively to that stock's critics. They shouldn't just sell because someone says "sell", but they should pay very close attention, follow up with their own research (and that doesn't mean reading some "warm and fuzzy posts"), and decide for themselves.
To do otherwise is financial suicide.
I've seen it play out so many times where a large number of people get sucked into a frenzy of cheering and ignoring all opinions contrary to their own, and get ruined by it. It never gets any less heart-breaking to see it.
To the extent possible and appropriate for my position, I am going to see to it that both sides get heard.
The concept of threads free of critical discussion dooms this site to failure.
The opinions you're seeing expressed along those lines are those of a couple of users who started threads. They're not my opinions. In fact, they're quite contrary to my opinions.
Already we see stock touts on this thread stating that posts countering their hype will be deleted.
And you see me on this thread stating that I see all deletions and decide whether or not they stay deleted, and if those other statements get followed through, they won't be chairing boards for very long. If memory serves, one of them is currently chairing one less board as of a few days ago.
It appears to me that this site will be dominated by tout threads trying to suck in new buyers for OTCBB garbage.
Absolutely not! My supporters and critics alike will attest to the fact that I don't play that. And if I'm in a position to prevent that (I am), it's not going to happen.
But I fully understand if you want to wait until my actions say that rather than taking my word for it.
Copied this link to myself to go through it when I get a chance.
First thing that jumped right out at me is that if someone says "Telecom hardware", I think "Cisco", but there it is in Computer Networks.
Looks good to me. Thanks for checking. Also gives others a chance to see where I'm coming from on some of these things.
Bob
Yep. And deletions won't renumber subsequent posts, so an admin who doesn't like cheap grubs can't rob you of your prize.
Gonna back up that provocative statement, or are you just here to disrupt?
Something which is important to point out is the fact that if 5 of anyone's posts get deleted within a 30 day time frame
on IHUB, then that person's account can be pulled for an unspecified time frame.
I will not currently be enforcing that. In some cases, a suspension will happen with one deletion, in others it could be after much more than 5 deletions. It depends on the nature of the violation and the reason for the deletion.
Examples for post removal include, but are not limited to:
1. Posting false information about a poster that can not be backed up by a link or other means of quick verification;
http://www.investorshub.com/beta/read_msg.asp?message_id=74686
My post (as usual) is long-winded, but among all that text is "One change that will be implemented immediately: It is no longer acceptable to remove a post because "it lacks a link to supporting evidence""
2. Calling another poster names or being vulgar and or disruptive to a board;
Cool.
3. Conducting a private conversation on a public board! (Use the "Private Message" feature of the board!)
Not sure what you mean by this one, but it sounds like you mean you want people to stay on-topic. Leave it in there and let's see how it goes.
4. Posting information you know to be false, unlawful, libelous, harassing, profane, abusive, threatening, vulgar, or
otherwise objectionable.
Get rid of the words "false", "unlawful", and "libelous" and the rest should be fine. Neither you nor I should be deleting posts because we believe them to be any of those 3. That's not our call.
The rest of it's perfect.
Bob
All, this is a question and answer thread for topics specific to InvestorsHub.
It's not the thread where you go to get your beefs with each other aired to the most readers.
In other words, take it to the Parking Lot. http://www.investorshub.com/beta/board.asp?board_id=37
Janice Shell just saved me a loss on a stock because I appreciate her views
If I had a dollar for every email I got that said "She may not be well-loved, but she sure saved my derriere on this one.", I'd have a lot of dollars.
For some reason many OTCBBs are young new invetsors and pump their invetsments and will not allow another point of view.
Agreed. Not all, but many.
Let me continue to play devil's advocate on this by posing the following questions:
1. Dismissing one side of the coin by never letting yourself see it (as many would do in a bull/bear segregation) is one of the most self-destructive things one can do. Agreed?
2. Postiing excessively positively or negatively in a venue where you know most of the readers aren't seeing "the other side" can be a pretty good way to make a lot of coin by not having your position directly challenged. Agreed?
If so, do I force bulls and bears to co-mingle for each other's sake and for the sake of inexperienced investors or do I stand by and let people destroy themselves because it's their decision to do so and not my call.
It's not a rhetorical question. Protection and help of inexperienced investors is important to me but very arguably it's also none of my business since my job (for purposes of this discussion) is strictly administrative.
I'll withhold my opinion of that for now until I see who's on the roster. Did I hear that Grbac's gone?
so in my mind it boils down to trusting your community or not and (right now) my perception is that you do not.
"trusting your community" is a double-edged sword. Yahoo apparently trusts their community implicitly, ignoring the fact that there are some truly bad dudes out there and a lot of people that really don't take such discussions seriously.
as recently as a couple hours ago by canning innocent posts (albeit probably off topic) by bob_john while NOT deleting her own off-topic pokes at him.
3 deletions from that thread in the past couple of hours, one of which was written by the CoB of that thread.
Are there others that should've been deleted that haven't been?
Do you see both down sides and up sides of that which I could be missing?
why doesn't matt address the issue of COB...
Because as of Thursday, this became a Bob issue.
All: After the close today we're going to try something that we think will likely fix the following problems:
1. Users getting logged out.
2. System not responding, resulting in dupe posts when you hit Submit again.
3. Some new threads/boards not working correctly after they're created.
We'll see what happens.
I should add that another concern of mine is this:
If you have two threads for a stock, one for the bullish perspective, and one for the bearish, can a bearish post be removed from the bullish thread because it's "off-topic"? Arguably so, and it'd be a strong argument.
And if a person has the bullish thread bookmarked and a bearish thread is added later, do they know there's a separate thread out there for the bearish perspective?
And if there are 4 threads for a ticker, and you post the same thing to each thread, is it spam? (to me, it is)
For now, I prefer to keep OTCBB threads at one per ticker, but I'm actively seeking feedback on this. All feedback welcome, but please try to think through all of the pro's and con's of the issue as I'm trying to do.
Thinking along these lines, what would you think of including from the controling party (director or
Chairman) a short reason for the post removal. Such as, DP = double post, PA = personal attack, SP =
spamming.
Geez, people sure like to steal my thunder. LOL!
I sent the main programmer an email over the weekend giving him that as one of a handful of things I want him to get on right away. What I want is a drop-down from which one of the valid reasons for deletion can be selected. Not only does this make the chairman more carefully assess his reasons for deletion, it also saves me the time it takes to check to see if a post was deleted because it was a dupe.
I think where you're probably going with this is including the selected reason in the public display that says that the message was removed. If so, I agree, and I'll email the programmer about that right now.
Thanks,
Bob
Something Jorje said disturbed me a bit - multiple threads are permitted for stocks, but only for stocks
other than otc-bb traded issues ... and presumably pink-sheet promotions as well .... is this correct, can
you confirm, Matt or Bob - are non-listed securities restricted to a single thread?
This is correct. I want to see how the multi-thread approach plays out on other threads first, and I want the CoB issue to be dealt with head-on in the OTCBB threads. If a chairperson is abusing their power, I don't want another thread started up in response. I want it to come immediately to my attention, which has happened twice already. I've removed one chairperson from a thread and another is currently suspended.
If you post something on a thread and it gets deleted, but shouldn't have, it will get restored and I'll talk with the chairman about it. If it persists or if the chairperson indicates to me an unwillingness to let non-violating posts remain, they won't remain the chairman.
There are only a limited number of reasons a post should be deleted (more on that later), and "because they're a basher on RB" or "because this thread is only for shareholders" aren't even remotely valid reasons.
Bob
Something Jorje said disturbed me a bit - multiple threads are permitted for stocks, but only for stocks
other than otc-bb traded issues ... and presumably pink-sheet promotions as well .... is this correct, can
you confirm, Matt or Bob - are non-listed securities restricted to a single thread?
This is correct. I want to see how the multi-thread approach plays out on other threads first, and I want the CoB issue to be dealt with head-on in the OTCBB threads. If a chairperson is abusing their power, I don't want another thread started up in response. I want it to come immediately to my attention, which has happened twice already. I've removed one chairperson from a thread and another is currently suspended.
If you post something on a thread and it gets deleted, but shouldn't have, it will get restored and I'll talk with the chairman about it. If it persists or if the chairperson indicates to me an unwillingness to let non-violating posts remain, they won't remain the chairman.
There are only a limited number of reasons a post should be deleted (more on that later), and "because they're a basher on RB" or "because this thread is only for shareholders" aren't even remotely valid reasons.
Bob
This is the only account I'll use.
The "SI Bob" account is the one I used before accepting the position here.
Bob
A 4th (or is it 5th?) thing jumps out at me: My inability to tell the difference between "3" and "4". :)
I'm not sure if anyone asked me <g>, and I'm still catching up with PM's, so won't know for a while, but let me be devil's advocate here for a bit:
At first blush, this looks like a good compromise approach, but three things jump out at me:
1. What if a post not only *should* be deleted, but *must* be deleted immediately? For example, because it contains someone's personal contact information.
2. To me, a big plus of the CoB concept (and a facet I don't see discussed) is that it serves as more of a deterrent to violations because of its speed. Not only "should" it dramatically reduce my workload by requiring me mostly to just read deleted posts, but because violations are dealt with so swiftly (within minutes or even seconds), fewer violations should take place because the violator doesn't have "Well, it'll at least be out there for a few hours" in the back of his mind.
3. What if the reason for the deletion is "off-topic" in a non-stock thread with very low tolerance of off-topic posts, but another thread gives a lot more latitude? Does that make more work for me (determine what the level of tolerance is on each thread and what the precedent is) or does it really change anything. I haven't thought this part through yet as I'm only on my 2nd cup of coffee.
4. Though all deletions go through me ultimately, I'm somewhat averse to anything that disempowers the community and puts more of that power in my hands, and this smacks of that to me. I like the empowerment of the CoB concept, with me in place to prevent abuses of it, and would rather not see that power reduced until we've given it a fair chance and have proven that the current model doesn't really work. I'm nowhere near convinced yet that that's the case.
Personally, I'd rather discuss most possible changes to CoB as mostly a "what if it proves unworkable" exercise, while giving the current model a fair chance and giving us enough time that we can more accurately gauge the extent to which it needs to be changed, if at all.
Bob
Exactly. We're in agreement on that, so I'm going to ask that they be handled that way unless enough people pipe up saying they want them to stay put, in which case we can make it a user-configurable option. Don't want *too* many user-configurable options as it does have a minor cost in overhead.
Just noticed the ads. To me, those are fine, as long as they go away for subscribers when/if we go subscription.
It doesn't assault the eyes, is obviously not something the writer typed in, and takes very little of my precious bandwidth.
Thoughts anyone?
Question for everyone regarding PM's.
When you reply to a PM, do you want it to go bye-bye after you've done so?
The post is restored, and thanks for the heads-up on noting that the header isn't my text. Just took care of that.
In your case, 1. :)
Bob
Matt, what marcos and Josef are talking about is exactly what I was talking about in my email about the timeouts. And it's what's causing the dupe posts. The site basically disappears from the internet briefly and very often. Our good friends who are babysitting our equipment need to earn their keep by getting all over this one.