Forums are one of the oldest ways for people to use the internet to connect, and for many, they remain the stomping ground of the most vocal and passionate of followers or fans.

Last week, a post came to our attention about the closure of one of the most prolific atheist forum sites on the web, written by Peter Harrison, an ex-moderator on the site.

As you’d imagine, RichardDawkins.net forum isn’t actually run day to day by the evolutionary biologist himself. Instead, he pays a team to handle it alongside a team of moderators. The moderation team developed the rules of the forum, and worked hard to introduce improvements and incentives for members to join stimulating discussions – on unpaid time. According to Harrison, it seems that the management of the site is somewhat of a sticking point (which you can read about in full here), as those in charge were less than communicative with the rest of the staff.

Last year, the forum ran into major technical problems due to extremely high volumes of traffic, and the servers couldn’t cope. There were issues with archived posts. The search function was removed from the forum in an attempt to ease the stress on the database, and this obviously affected the functionality of the forum. Harrison and other moderators apparently attempted to drive the tech team – headed by Josh Timonen – into action, but received no hard and fast response about what was being done.

There’s a basic lesson here in terms of what happens when you don’t listen to your staff, but what’s more disturbing is that Timonen instead chose to vent his feelings on Twitter. “Using a forum as a substitute for a real website is sloppy and lazy.”

As time progressed, a whole new site seemed to be being created, despite the moderators explaining that the  forum structure helps the cause. As Harrison writes; “we had to explain that the forum gets 8-10 times the traffic that the front page gets, and that they had to take this into account when deciding on a new system.”

In the end though, the moderator roles were almost wholly cut out of the new site, with the existing team being thanked for their work but given a strict warning, “Please do not attempt to inflame the users, start any petitions, or “relocate” groups of users to a separate forum. Do not use any of the data held by the foundation (such as email addresses) through the control panel to cause any trouble. Any behavior of this kind will not be tolerated”

What’s more, the announcement then made to the forum’s members was entirely different, citing that the new RichardDawkins.net will have a fully-integrated discussion section – similar to the current forum, but not identical.

Obviously, users were upset. A thread sprung up to deal with complaints specifically, at first blaming the moderators. Then Josh Tinomen stepped in to deal with things, first deactivating private messaging (which caused problems in terms of users contacting each other). As members started to post personal details on where they could be found after the forum had closed,  viewable access was locked. Any posts criticising the decision were then apparently deleted, before the forum was reopened in a read-only state. Nobody could post anymore, and the complaints thread had been completely deleted.

The final update stated that; “we had intended to leave the forum fully-functioning for 30 days, but due to the inappropriate posts by some users and moderators, we have decided to leave the forum in a read-only state. You can still download and archive your posts and private messages, but the ability to enter new posts has been disabled. It’s unfortunate that it had to come to this.”

This is a terrible example of how to evolve, communicate or work with a community. Instead of taking the advice of the moderators, maintaining the forum-like aspects that made it so successful, valuable insights were ignored. Not only that, but those in charge decided to commit the cardinal sin and delete user-generated comments from the site.

Whether the new structure of the site works is yet to be seen, some people are responding well. Richard Dawkins has stepped in to offer an apology, and this has soothed some of the anger surrounding this issue.  Whatever happens, this is an example of how not to communicate change that needs to be learned from.

Image via Times Online.