As an attempted remedy for my digital saurianism, I belong to a computer club. One of the things I have become acquainted with through that club is the amount of information that can be gathered on a website in relation to the surfing activities of users and/or visitors to that site for subsequent analysis by its designers or operators.

There has recently been a call for a user filter facility to be added to the OLO Forum site. See these links:

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1189#21843 to the topic "What about 4 posts a day as the limit?", on 5 November 2007, and;

http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1277#22917 and following posts to the (loaded?) question/topic "Who is the most active member on this forum?", on 21 November 2007.

As can be seen in the following posts to the link above, I have expressed some concerns as to the desirability of such a feature being added. I wonder whether the most active member's posting activity has been found to be attracting a significant, if not disproportionate, number of hits from visitors, and lingers from regular posters, to the Forum?

Should site statistics be showing such, there would still be no way of knowing as to whether such hits/lingers meant that visitors viewed with favour or hostility the subjects raised or views expressed by this member. Perhaps it might be felt that if a user filter was made available to posters, posters themselves may provide a means to sampling visitor reaction to what is already known to be attracting hits.

Whether this call for a user filter is just a spontaneous reaction from one poster, a kite being flown on behalf of the Forum administration to assess the acceptability of such a feature, or an indication that the OLO site is already an unwitting source of information for some other entity that has penetrated its information security, I know not.

I simply remember the problem with those differential post-recency flag falls that OLO could not explain.

Thoughts?

1. i'm not sure i know what you're talking about, but if you're saying you don't like what 'x' is saying, why not say so?

2. then others could join in, opinions exchanged, ideas formed, and olo would be doing what it was designed to do.

3. maybe you're spending too much time in the computer club.

DEMOS I'm not certain thats whats meant?
I have a mac and have set my OS so that each time I shut down, the
places I have visited "the history" is cleared?
I trust No one can follow me!
fluff4

fluff4,

This is not about anyone intruding into YOUR computer. It is about the ability of others to record your surfing of the pages of a website such as OLO. Information such as which pages you looked at, how long you spent on any one page, which links you may have clicked whilst there, etc, are all capable of being recorded by the owner of the website in question; in this hypothetical case, OLO. Which is not to say that that is necessarily what OLO has chosen to do.

The point is that anyone in possession of such information may obtain insight into what they think to be your opinion, or at least into what appears to interest you most among the available topics. In OLO's hypothetical case, that would mean the Forum administration, which includes an editorial function.

My concern is that if a user filter was to be installed on OLO, then information as to the use of that filter by users could be accumulated and in turn used as the basis of some form of subtle editorial censorship. If such censorship, or suppression of particular views, was ever to occur, I would consider it self-defeating of the concept of such forums. Forums like OLO are one of the best ways of circumventing the biases, whether of the profession of journalism, or of the proprietorship, of the mainstream media.

I suggest it is always wise to be on the lookout for possible editorial bias, even in as well run a forum as OLO. Click this link to see what effect an editorial decision to re-title an article had upon a regular contributor to the articles area of the forum: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=6512#97127 .

In this particular example I am not trying to suggest any secret agenda was being promoted by the OLO editoriate. It is just that it can be a very sensitive area, and one in which data from a user filter could constitute quite a temptation to editors as a means of steering discussions or surfing.

DEMOS,

I guess I am obliquely querying in some depth just what OLO was designed to do.

Obviously, OLO was designed to elicit opinions from the socially and politically opinionated/observant among the internet (and time) enabled part of the community, in response to articles submitted to, and subsequently published by, OLO. Now anyone can study the articles, how articles are titled and summarized, and the responses to those articles (and subsequent comments) so long as the forum discussions remain up on the web.

OLO, as the site owner, is in the best position to gather and collate information as to the degree of interest shown as between articles, topics, and general areas of concern to forum participants (which comprises both lurking surfers and forum members). If it wants more insight into participants perceptions and concerns, OLO is in a position to install a new tool that may elicit that information.

Anyone else wanting to collate and analyse has to do it the hard way from outside with a relatively restricted set of tools, unless, of course, they have cracked the OLO site and can surreptitiously use the OLO tools and data.

You are quite right to suggest that, as a member of an open public forum, if somebody says something with which I disagree I should simply say I don't agree, with or without explanation. What I am concerned about is the collection and collation of such responses from multiple users possibly becoming to be used as a basis for one form of censorship or other.

For example, if enough members were to use a proposed user filter to prevent display of particular members' comments, it could come to be that the Forum editoriate, having collated the extent of resort to such a site feature, may decline discussion topics proposed by those particular members. Such declining would not be for reasons known or knowable to all other participants, but would be based upon knowledge of inferred unpopularity of a particular poster, a knowledge exclusive to OLO.

It may facilitate the playing of the man, and not the ball.

OLO is, contingent upon a poster observing the forum rules, either an open forum, or it is not.

The suggestion of introducing a user filter supplies the seeds of excuse for a user to evade Quality No.6 in jpw2040's excellent top ten countdown of good post(er) qualities: that of reading the other posts in the discussion before posting. See this link for that list: http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=1277#22707

Posts by posters with which one may not often agree sometimes contain surprisingly useful or illuminating perspectives.

When it comes to a sense of humour, Quality No.5 in the list, it is sometimes the case that the humour is not discernable in the absence of the post that may have elicited its display. Users may rob themselves of a bit of a laugh should they have resorted to a user filter. Which brings me to the question as to whether a user who had used the filter would be able to bring back up posts previously suppressed in the event that they found a discussion had become interesting and it had become politic to know all that had been said beforehand?

Should such a feature be introduced, how would it inter-relate with the email alert feature, whereby a user posting to a thread is notified each time a comment is added to a thread upon which the alert is activated?

If, after all is said and done, a user wants to play the man, and not the ball, and the particular ball in play is considered not worth kicking, what is wrong with simply not responding?