I wanted to immediately express some of my thoughts about the "Chairman of the Board" concept here, so here goes:
Overall, I like this concept quite a bit because, in a perfect world, it makes my job a lot easier by making the site more self-policing, and will usually result in posts that don't belong here getting deleted much more quickly. When I submitted a detailed proposal to SI a couple of years ago about how to make threads more self-directed, what I proposed had a lot more in common with how InvestorsHub does it than how Silicon Investor does it.
While the potential benefits of this feature are dramatic, there are many potential downsides:
1. Puts community members in the position of being "the bad guy". I'm accustomed to being a site's "heat sink" (get mad at me instead of your fellow community members) and feel it's an important element of a community's overall well-being.
2. Opens the rules up to a large number of different interpretations and implementations, all of which are potentially biased.
3. Makes it possible to silence critics of a stock, on really shaky ground. For example, deleting a relevant but critical post because a line from it was stated in another post, then citing "spam" as the rule that was invoked.
4. Situations that require admin intervention might not come to the admin's attention.
5. Since the chairperson is, in a way, acting on behalf of the site and its administration, it's important that the chairperson conducts himself accordingly.
Because of this, the Chairman concept and its implementation will be under the microscope for quite a while and will get changed as needed. I anticipate adding things to it (such as the ability of a Chairperson to temporarily suspend a person's ability to post to that thread) and possibly taking things away from it. From a big-picture perspective, I prefer to limit the number of rules a chairperson can invoke for message deletions.
We'll see how it works out.
It's important to note the following:
I will personally review every post that is deleted and it will not remain deleted unless I agree that it should be deleted. So if, after about 12 hours, your post is still deleted, take it up with me rather than the chairman.
If I see rampant abuses of deletions, I won't hesitate to remove the chairman.
The Chairman feature is important to me and I'll be watching it closely because I have no interest in seeing this site being viewed as a safe place for scamsters to work their magic or getting a reputation for intolerance of dissenting views.
In general, I ask that each Chairperson ask themselves one specific question before deleting a post and do the deletion only if they can answer in the affirmative: "Would Bob delete this post?".
If it's really spam, a personal attack, vulgarity, or invasion of privacy, zap it and don't give it another thought. If, however, it's critical of the stock you like or even critical of your motivations, be sure you can give good reasons for it being deleted, because you'll probably be asked. If I find myself undeleting a lot of posts in a thread, it'll have an impact on how the Chairperson concept works in the future and could result in that Chairperson's removal.
Any changes to the implementation of this feature will be as a direct result of how it's being used, so if there are no abuses, there will be no changes. I think it's too liberal right now. Prove me wrong.
One change that will be implemented immediately: It is no longer acceptable to remove a post because "it lacks a link to supporting evidence" or because "it's libel". I've seen this applied in a one-sided manner to remove relevant negative information, and it's not always possible to link to supporting evidence on the internet; especially if you're expressing an opinion. If you post something, stating it as fact, and it isn't true, you could find yourself answering to a judge over the matter, but neither chairpeople nor admins should decide that what you've stated isn't true and remove it. The responsibility lies with other members to refute anything they don't believe is true, and the evidence of the untrue statements, if they're proven untrue by other members, should remain intact.
Members agree not to post libel here, but nobody here is (or should be) empowered to determine that a post really is libel. Judges do that; not site admins and certainly not people with a financial interest in the company being discussed.
To sum up, the Chairperson concept is one of the reasons I accepted this position, and though I think there are potential problems with it that need to be fixed, it is a good idea and will be an important factor in the success of Investors Hub if we all take it very seriously and use it only in the way it was meant to be used.
Regards,
Bob Zumbrunnen
Operations Manager, Investors Hub
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