A forum clique is like a little group of forum members who always hang out and talk together, sometimes even shunning new or veteran members. Do you allow cliques on your forum? Or, do you try to break them up? If you go to a forum that has a very tight clique that won't seem to let you in, do you just automatically leave?
How do you handle cliques on your forum?
- Thread starter Beverly
- Start date
So like gangs, huh? XD Never saw something like that in the forum, but if I were a new member I'd feel rather uncomfortable, and maybe even leave. As an administrator I may not be able to do much about it since it's personal preference and if they make good friends then why not, but maybe I'll give friendly reminders if they're starting being rude to fellow members. Other than that I think it's beyond my limit of interference.
I've seen it a couple of times, and it's quite difficult to address. In the context of a political forum, you sometimes get groups of 'allies' who like to 'support' each other in debate (i.e. 'gang up' on people with opposing views and 'silence' them just be overwhelming threads with their side of the story). If they aren't actually breaking rules, there's not really much you can do about it.
You can't really prevent it from happening (sometimes people actually join political forums as a 'gang' - I don't know whether that happens elsewhere), but you can avoid giving them to tools to make it easy. One decision I made when starting my new forum was to avoid having 'Social Group' or 'Live Chat' functions available to members, for that reason. People can still PM each other, of course, but it's much harder for them to find each other in significant numbers, or coordinate such activities. From past experience, Social Groups were either mostly inactive, or places where like-minded members got together to work out how to 'win' debates, which isn't something a political forum needs at all! Another function to watch out for is tables of 'Top Reputation' and that kind of thing - people will 'game' those to try to prove that their group are 'winning', and identify like-minded people.
Political forums may well be a bit different from other forums in the way that such things develop and are used, though, because of the nature of the discussion matter and the opposing groups that are discussing it.
You can't really prevent it from happening (sometimes people actually join political forums as a 'gang' - I don't know whether that happens elsewhere), but you can avoid giving them to tools to make it easy. One decision I made when starting my new forum was to avoid having 'Social Group' or 'Live Chat' functions available to members, for that reason. People can still PM each other, of course, but it's much harder for them to find each other in significant numbers, or coordinate such activities. From past experience, Social Groups were either mostly inactive, or places where like-minded members got together to work out how to 'win' debates, which isn't something a political forum needs at all! Another function to watch out for is tables of 'Top Reputation' and that kind of thing - people will 'game' those to try to prove that their group are 'winning', and identify like-minded people.
Political forums may well be a bit different from other forums in the way that such things develop and are used, though, because of the nature of the discussion matter and the opposing groups that are discussing it.
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