I'll try to give my thoughts in a sort of ordered way...
Important Info
I think one question you have to ask is, once something develops into a useful resource that the community depends upon then is a forum the correct place to hold that information? There are a few factors here, and a lot will depend on the site in question, so it's maybe useful to compare and contrast the MOUL site with OpenURU.org.
Important topics on forums usually end up being "stickied" so they appear at the top of the front page (although I have used one forum that had so many stickied threads that you needed to go the second page to find an unstickied one
). On the MOUL site, once a mod edits a post it can no longer be edited by its original author, and making the post sticky counts as an edit. That is a serious nuisance. I suspect that's really a limitation of phpBB2: I'm not sure whether the same limitation exists in phpBB3 - I've not had the opportunity to test that out.
Unstickied threads with important information will tend to stay near the top of the topic list if they still attract regular posts, like the "KI List" thread does for example. But often a thread listing something like external resources will only get updates for a limited period of time after it is created. As the new posts of suggested additions dry up then the thread slides off the front page. Editing existing posts won't "bump" the thread (although phpBB3 gives some user classes a "bump this topic" option).
The MOUL site is a basically a forum supported by a few website pages. That means that the forum is really the
only way that users can contribute any content. It's Cyan's website, not a fansite so that's quite understandable and I don't mean it as a criticism. On OpenURU.org we've tried to provide a number of resources in addition to the forums, and the one that I'd like to focus on is the wiki. The wiki gives another means to contribute content, and I've
explained elsewhere how I see the wiki and the forum interacting. The reason I mention the wiki is that unlike most forum software, it has the facility to rollback unwanted edits.
But then you get into the issue who decides which edits are acceptable and which are not. Wikis tend to have people who act in the role of "editors" (that is "editors" in the sense used in the publishing world). There are similarities to the moderator role on forums, but possibly less visible to the public. Generally wikis have some statement that says "anything you write may be edited by others" which basically implies that there's no real concept of an "author" in the conventional sense and that all material is publicly owned. So if the original contributer decides to remove something they wrote then then another user can re-instate it; there's no problem in that as it's "within the rules", but cases do arise on Wikipedia were edits are repeatedly reverted by one person and re-instated by another. In these cases the editors have to make a call and frequently a ban of one or other party will result. This takes me on to the next item.
On the MOUL site, it is likely that the forum is all we will ever have to work with. Even if the users could compose some useful resource like an FAQ or User Guide that may be better placed on the main site, it's unlikely that Cyan would feel it worth expending the effort to move it from forum to website. We have a bit more flexibity here, as do most other fansites, allowing us to better protect user contributed assets (server wipeouts notwithstanding).
Vandalism
Possibly an emotive word, but fundamentally the example alluded to in the original post of this thread was a case of this. I'm not talking about bogus accounts created specifically to vandalise a site - the response in those cases ought to be pretty clear - but where an established user does something disagreeable. That there may be mitigating circumstances that warrant "cutting some slack" does not change the fact this is effectively what happened, so in that I agree with what Nalates said earlier. But the question then posed by Nalates is what do you do about it - to challenge the negative behaviour, discourage it in future? Well, first you need to ask if a "rule" has actually been broken. Now, it may be an oversight, but reading the MOUL forum rules, I don't actually see anything that says that a poster cannot substantially revise a post. Our discussions on
Post Revisions address this sub-topic, but we generally seem to agree that altering posts in way that deliberately invalidates the thread is not something we want to see.
But we come back to the point that JWPlatt raised, about the legitimacy of a mod or admin re-instating edited material against the original author's will. We get down to the question of who actually "owns" the post - the poster or the forum entity? If forum rules or the TOS make a statement on that policy, then it can clear up a lot of the potential dilemma over whether or not a mod or admin can re-instate something, assuming that it is possible in the first place. However, even without such a policy there is generally nothing to stop another
user re-creating the lost material in a new thread.
As to the action to take against the user who makes such negative revisions: That becomes difficult, and requires some knowledge of circumstances, but may also be influenced by the membership size of the forum involved. First you have to assume that there's rule you can show has been broken, and that there is an associated sanction, otherwise it becomes difficult to
do anything.
For a very large forum, like MOUL, it is not possible for the mods to know every user's "typical" behaviour to spot the out-of-character incidences, which may indicate either a third party using someones account, or emotional disturbance, etc., but at the same time there will be well known posters. The temptation is to be a little more forgiving when you know that an action is the result of some outside influence, and is probably a one-off. It's the "humanitarian" reaction but that then means that the moderators may be seen not be even-handed. Let's say the sanction was a time-limited ban: Don't apply the ban and you'll get complaints from some users that "Xyz did a heinous thing and should have been banned immediately"; apply the ban and you'll get "I can't beleive you banned Xyz for this, he's been a good friend to many of us". No-one is 100% right or 100% wrong and the question is infinitely debatable. It can get into personal/private issues and is partly the reason why most forums do not allow open debate of moderation/administration actions.
Hiding behind the mechanical application of rules is almost as dangerous as having no rules. Rules
do help the moderators make decisions on what is appropriate, but in some cases judgement calls are necessary and a mod just needs to stand by his decision. In any case, applying sanctions is often beyond the moderators own remit and needs to be referred to an administrator, who will then act on the moderators recommendations after reviewing the case, so there's a form of safeguard there. On a small fansite forum it is likely that the moderator and the admin are one and the same so no such oversight will exist, and I think that is a very big problem (
as an aside, that's why a lot of people have fallen out with certain fansites in the past).
"Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men."
Summary
Things a forum/site might need:
- Policy statement on ownership of submitted material (and I note that we don't seem to have a written policy on copyright here yet )
- A definition of "vandalism" (e.g. deliberate defacement or removal of posted material)
- A policy (rule) for dealing with vandalism
Revision tracking/reversion might be a good thing too, but possibly beyond what is practical on most forums.