Australian Diggers was launched on Australia Day, 2000, as an independent support site for currently serving and ex-members of Australia's army. Since then we've been through quite a few iterations and modes of operation, evolving into the site you see and can experience today.
What we often wrestle with, is how to make sure that Australian Diggers doesn't suffer the fate of so many web sites with loads of interactivity like discussion forums in the past: invasion by idiots, descent to the banal, and conversion of a conversation into a fragging.
Again and again we've seen it: a web site with a discussion forum starts up, people start participating, and initially the discussions are interesting and the people are polite. Then some whining, whinging arseholes show up and change the chemistry. The polite interesting people leave, more and more whining, whinging arseholes show up, and it becomes just one more thunderbox on the 'net. The medium is unimportant; this has happened in email discussion lists, chat rooms, in news groups, and to the discussion systems of web sites.
One thing in particular that site moderators have noticed is that if you take a thousand posters who use their real names and provide traceable identities, and compare them to a thousand posters who use pseudonyms and post anonymously, that the second group will have most of the wankers. Some of the second group will have good things, even great things, to say - but mostly they won't.
So we are not allowing anonymous posting here. We don't mind you using callsigns or nicknames as user names, as long as they are not used to hide. This will substantially impede (though not prevent) drongoes from getting new memberships if we've been forced to remove a previous one.
Inevitably this will silence a few voices worth listening to, and we sincerely regret that. But it will also silence a lot of voices we don't want here. Those who really do want to participate will find a way. The idiots won't; they'll mostly go elsewhere and become someone else's problem, and ruin someone else's forum. That's our goal. We cannot cause the drongo to cease to exist, but we can try to keep them out of our site and send them elsewhere.
We want Australian Diggers to be a place where there is lively and intelligent and polite discussion of all sorts of things military.
We have no intention of suppressing points of view that disagree with ours; what we will be suppressing is attitudes and styles, not opinions. An obnoxious person who agrees with us will get booted. A polite articulate person who disagrees with us is welcome.
So while we're on the subject, let's get the following out of the way right now, because it's sure to come up eventually:
Your right to free expression in a privately owned forum ... you don't have one.
We have the right to purchase a server and connect it to the web. We have the right to put on that server almost anything we wish. We have the right to put a discussion forum on it - and to offer to people the privilege of using that discussion forum. We have the right to offer other people the privilege of putting web pages on our server.
But your use of our server is not a right. It is our right to offer it to you and our right to withdraw that offer. You have a right to get your own server and run your own web site and discussion system, but you don't have a right to use ours. You have the privilege of doing so because (and only because) we have granted you that privilege. Just as you don't have a right to force us to use our printing press to distribute your writings, you don't have a right to force us to use our web server to distribute your writings. Since you can operate your own server, this does not prevent you from expressing yourself - and in any case your right of free expression is between you and the government, not between you and us.
We're going into this in detail here and now because this question inevitably arises when a moderator on a web site or forum suppresses an article about which someone feels strongly.
We have the right to suppress anything we want on this server. We don't have to permit anyone else to put anything on this server at all. We choose to do so, but it is our choice and it is neither absolute, unconditional nor irrevocable. No-one has a right to use this system except for its owner (us). Your only right is to ignore it and go elsewhere.
It's not that we intend to be draconian about this - we don't. We just don't want libertarian whining, whinges, wailing and gnashing of teeth when it happens.
We will suppress posts which we think damage the chemistry of what we're trying to create here. This will mainly consist of trolls and insults and other bad behavior. We will, if necessary, revoke use privileges for anyone we think we need to. But in general we're not going to justify our behavior and/or decisions.
There is occasionally a participant in a forum who has only one subject, and insists that it get discussed over and over again. That's an example of something we will be preventing here. Unless there really is a good reason to visit an issue again, we'll be killing repeats when they get obnoxious.
The other thing we hope will keep the general level of discussion here at a high level is the general principle that discussions in Australian Diggers should be about things pertaining to life in the services. Australian Diggers is not intended to be a general web site about anything at all; there are other places for that kind of thing, and permitting Australian Diggers to go in that direction increases the chance that it will crash and burn. People who find the various areas of the site to be interesting reading should find plenty to discuss in the forums.
Here's your mental model:
We are having a party in a mixed mess. We'll be talking about what's news military-wise as it affects Australia and Australia's defence personnel, and we'll be commenting on all manner of things military - that are not OPSEC. We'll talk about situations we've been in, we'll ask people if they know what happened to people we know and have lost track of. We'll yarn and gag and tell jokes. We'll be amongst mates, so we can ask stupid questions, play the fool and generally screw up without being attacked, flamed or fragged. We'll applaud and congratulate achievers and we'll sledge each other and take the piss out of anything too pretentious. We've invited you to come and be a guest at our mess party. We want everyone to have a good time. If someone starts ruining the party for everyone else, we're going to escort them to the door. As long as everyone's having fun, then we will too. Don't get drunk and barf on the floor, and don't start wearing lampshades. No character-assassination. No fist fights. Treat everyone else nicely. Act like a guest; this is our home and not yours.
Let's all have a good time.
What we often wrestle with, is how to make sure that Australian Diggers doesn't suffer the fate of so many web sites with loads of interactivity like discussion forums in the past: invasion by idiots, descent to the banal, and conversion of a conversation into a fragging.
Again and again we've seen it: a web site with a discussion forum starts up, people start participating, and initially the discussions are interesting and the people are polite. Then some whining, whinging arseholes show up and change the chemistry. The polite interesting people leave, more and more whining, whinging arseholes show up, and it becomes just one more thunderbox on the 'net. The medium is unimportant; this has happened in email discussion lists, chat rooms, in news groups, and to the discussion systems of web sites.
One thing in particular that site moderators have noticed is that if you take a thousand posters who use their real names and provide traceable identities, and compare them to a thousand posters who use pseudonyms and post anonymously, that the second group will have most of the wankers. Some of the second group will have good things, even great things, to say - but mostly they won't.
So we are not allowing anonymous posting here. We don't mind you using callsigns or nicknames as user names, as long as they are not used to hide. This will substantially impede (though not prevent) drongoes from getting new memberships if we've been forced to remove a previous one.
Inevitably this will silence a few voices worth listening to, and we sincerely regret that. But it will also silence a lot of voices we don't want here. Those who really do want to participate will find a way. The idiots won't; they'll mostly go elsewhere and become someone else's problem, and ruin someone else's forum. That's our goal. We cannot cause the drongo to cease to exist, but we can try to keep them out of our site and send them elsewhere.
We want Australian Diggers to be a place where there is lively and intelligent and polite discussion of all sorts of things military.
We have no intention of suppressing points of view that disagree with ours; what we will be suppressing is attitudes and styles, not opinions. An obnoxious person who agrees with us will get booted. A polite articulate person who disagrees with us is welcome.
So while we're on the subject, let's get the following out of the way right now, because it's sure to come up eventually:
Your right to free expression in a privately owned forum ... you don't have one.
We have the right to purchase a server and connect it to the web. We have the right to put on that server almost anything we wish. We have the right to put a discussion forum on it - and to offer to people the privilege of using that discussion forum. We have the right to offer other people the privilege of putting web pages on our server.
But your use of our server is not a right. It is our right to offer it to you and our right to withdraw that offer. You have a right to get your own server and run your own web site and discussion system, but you don't have a right to use ours. You have the privilege of doing so because (and only because) we have granted you that privilege. Just as you don't have a right to force us to use our printing press to distribute your writings, you don't have a right to force us to use our web server to distribute your writings. Since you can operate your own server, this does not prevent you from expressing yourself - and in any case your right of free expression is between you and the government, not between you and us.
We're going into this in detail here and now because this question inevitably arises when a moderator on a web site or forum suppresses an article about which someone feels strongly.
We have the right to suppress anything we want on this server. We don't have to permit anyone else to put anything on this server at all. We choose to do so, but it is our choice and it is neither absolute, unconditional nor irrevocable. No-one has a right to use this system except for its owner (us). Your only right is to ignore it and go elsewhere.
It's not that we intend to be draconian about this - we don't. We just don't want libertarian whining, whinges, wailing and gnashing of teeth when it happens.
We will suppress posts which we think damage the chemistry of what we're trying to create here. This will mainly consist of trolls and insults and other bad behavior. We will, if necessary, revoke use privileges for anyone we think we need to. But in general we're not going to justify our behavior and/or decisions.
There is occasionally a participant in a forum who has only one subject, and insists that it get discussed over and over again. That's an example of something we will be preventing here. Unless there really is a good reason to visit an issue again, we'll be killing repeats when they get obnoxious.
The other thing we hope will keep the general level of discussion here at a high level is the general principle that discussions in Australian Diggers should be about things pertaining to life in the services. Australian Diggers is not intended to be a general web site about anything at all; there are other places for that kind of thing, and permitting Australian Diggers to go in that direction increases the chance that it will crash and burn. People who find the various areas of the site to be interesting reading should find plenty to discuss in the forums.
Here's your mental model:
We are having a party in a mixed mess. We'll be talking about what's news military-wise as it affects Australia and Australia's defence personnel, and we'll be commenting on all manner of things military - that are not OPSEC. We'll talk about situations we've been in, we'll ask people if they know what happened to people we know and have lost track of. We'll yarn and gag and tell jokes. We'll be amongst mates, so we can ask stupid questions, play the fool and generally screw up without being attacked, flamed or fragged. We'll applaud and congratulate achievers and we'll sledge each other and take the piss out of anything too pretentious. We've invited you to come and be a guest at our mess party. We want everyone to have a good time. If someone starts ruining the party for everyone else, we're going to escort them to the door. As long as everyone's having fun, then we will too. Don't get drunk and barf on the floor, and don't start wearing lampshades. No character-assassination. No fist fights. Treat everyone else nicely. Act like a guest; this is our home and not yours.
Let's all have a good time.
English (AU) 