The Sociology of Online Communities ( Forums)
The question of forum moderation is an interesting one. For commercial ventures, we probably can’t leave it open slather. Joel Spolsky has done some interesting work on this for this www.joelonsoftware.com forum. It’s very smart. Basically, the poster can always see his/her post, but if it is moderated and removed, no-one else can. The poster think it is always there from the moment they submit. They never know that it isn’t. They don’t get bummed that someone has censored them. But no-one ever sees their dubious posting.
