Ben Ruset

Ben Ruset May 16th, 2008

I think a lot of us thirty-somethings look back to our teen years and reminisce about how we used to get online before the Internet became prevalent. At least to me there’s something special about the sound of two modems handshaking before falling silent and the ANSI characters of the BBS began flowing across a terminal. That’s something that’s entirely alien in today’s world of instant-on connections. QModem Pro has been replaced by Firefox. The local BBS has been replaced by message boards. Now the friends you have online are just as likely to be on another continent as they are being down the street.

I remember the day I got my first modem. I was a freshman in high school and somehow I managed to save up enough money for a Best Data 14.4 ISA modem. I installed it in my ALR 486SX/20 and loaded the floppy disk for Prodigy. I signed up for an account and used it for a few times, not really knowing what I was doing. A classmate then told me about another online service… a BBS. Unlike the primitive graphics of Prodigy, this was totally text based, but it was easier to navigate and understand. I fired up whatever the terminal emulator was in Windows 3.1 and dialed the number that he gave, and connected to The HoT SpoT BBS in Long Branch.

I signed up for an account using my real name - a terribly newbie mistake, and navigated around the BBS for a little while before my “time limit” expired and I was kicked off for the day. The HoT SpoT was a multi-line BBS running MajorBBS, which allowed it to multitask and hence let callers interact with each other. The sysop of THS was Terry Perkas, a Monmouth University student who’s parents owned a diner somewhere up in North Jersey. To get more time on THS you would have to buy credits — N number of credits was equal to X number of minutes. From THS I branched out to other local boards - The Twilight Zone, Ironhorse BBS, and a host of other boards.

The best part about the BBS’s was that the people you’d meet were local. I was one of the very few people from my school who went online, but I met a number of kids from Ocean Township High, Wall Township High, and Long Branch High. We were all the usual socially awkward computer nerds, but it amazed me to see how these people acted online. What we take for granted today - the concept of people’s online persona being radically different than their real life persona - was something new (to me, at least) then.

Being a broke kid, it was hard to afford credits for the site. I eventually became friends with (read: kissed the ass of) Terry, and would pester him for free credits. I befriended a lot of the other sysops — I got “elite” access on a few of the local pirate boards. On other sites, I had unlimited downloads of shareware. One site let me become co-sysop, and I was responsible for validating all of the new uploads, scanning them for viruses, and adding the board’s FILE_ID.DIZ file to each of them. There was a connection between all of us online — something that’s hard pressed to be found in most web boards or chat rooms.

Then, in late ‘95 the Internet hit Monmouth County. Monmouth Internet (now Monmouth Telecom) opened, and offered shell and SLIP access on their BSD box. I found them by seeing an ad in the Asbury Park Press. I signed up for an account (I was bruset@monmouth.com) and through some fluke of their billing system was never charged for more than 3 years. Around the same time, the Asbury Park Press opened up InJersey.com. This was a combination BBS/PPP internet gateway. Many of the kids from THS and the other boards flocked over to InJersey, which was free. I loaded Trumpet Winsock on my PC (now a home built 486 DX2/66) and fired up Netscape Navigator .99N and was transported to an entirely new world.

Web 1.0 killed the local BBS. For a time the local BBS’s resisted the change by claiming the same things that I now think were great but previously thought were dumb — a sense of community, speed of communications, friendships, etc. Boards either had to change or die, and sadly most of them did the latter. THS, feeling the squeeze, bought the module that would allow for incoming telnet requests to be handled by MajorBBS (later upgraded to Worldcomm), email (username@bbs.hspot.com), and I think even newsgroup access.

By the end of 1996 I was mixing my time on Monmouth Internets shell (shell.monmouth.com) and their PPP connection. I also surripticiously used a router at Monmouth University that was set to allow dial in access to telnet out to other sites (the odd BBS, MUDs, etc.) I befriended a girl, Meredith Borakove, who went to school at UPenn, who taught me rudamentary HTML. (She was also the first person I met who used a Mac outside of the writing lab at Monmouth Regional.) Meredith had a personal website (Meredith’s World of Queso), the concept of which absolutely fascinated me. Here was the ability to inexpensively make a presence online. Fortunately, Monmouth Internet offered a whopping 10MB worth of space for web pages on their shell box, and I quickly took advantage of it.

Web 1.0 — maybe this all predates Web 1.0 — was an interesting time. For the first time people from disparate geographic regions were able to talk to one another freely (as in beer.) The barrier to entry was still very high - connections were hard to find, and most people on the ‘net at that time were from academia, so the collective IQ of the bunch was higher. Things would affect the community as a whole. If Mae East was having problems (and when was it not?) the Internet was insufferable. When the Communications Decency Act passed in 1996, everybody turned their homepages black in protest. Everbody had the EFF’s Blue Ribbon Campaign logo on their site. We all bult sites for Netscape browsers, listening to MP3’s on Winamp.

I’m not really sure what killed Web 1.0. Maybe it was when AOL allowed their userbase to go on the internet at large and post in USENET. Maybe it was when Windows 95 hit, and the Internet Browser Wars took off. The more people that went online, the less of a personable place the web became. By the late 1990s, high speed internet had taken off. Wired Magazine was the hottest thing out there. The revolution happened. And then the tech bubble burst. All of the kids who grew up on BBS’s and were in the right places with the right startups made (and mostly lost) their fortunes. The web became a darker, more cynical place as corporations took over.

The web of today is sterile and clean. AJAX has taken over, and the personal homepage has been replaced by the blog or Twitter feed. I never ran a BBS (although I set many of them up locally on my PC), but today I run a fairly large (larger than The HoT SpoT BBS was) online community.

There are days when I look at my PuTTY window and dream:

[bruset@atsion ~]$ telnet bbs.hspot.com
Trying 216.35.197.68…
telnet: connect to address 216.35.197.68: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host: Connection refused

*sigh*

Here’s to The HoT Spot, InJersey, Terry, Meredith, the kids who ran the pirate Oblivion/2 boards, and everyone who made Web 1.0 possible. Godspeed.

• Ben , Internet , Online Communities
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Ben Ruset May 15th, 2008

Just about the only time that I see my co-admin is when we’re out exploring, and even then it’s pretty rare thesedays. But usually when we’re out, we’ll have a conversation to the side and I’ll ask him his opinion on various things going on with the site. Generally there’s some form of drama going on, and I’ll seek his sage advice on it. Invariably, he’ll give his opinion and say:

“But it’s your site, you should run it the way you like.”

It’s taken me a long time to really “get” that simple message. You see, one of my biggest faults is getting upset, or caring too much, about whether or not people are upset with me. So running a forum is like walking a razor thin line - do I enforce a rule and risk annoying someone? Do I ban someone who is constantly annoying other users, or posting useless nonsense? What sort of fallout am I going to have to endure if I do ban them?

I recently banned a user who had about a two year posting history. He came on the forums and posted some interesting threads on the Long Island Pine Barrens. Hey, it’s pretty cool to learn about new places, but after a while, it was just non-stop LI talk from this one user. He was uploading copious amounts of pictures onto the server, and every time someone visited the front page of the site where a random image from my image gallery displays on each page load, there was a risk that a user would see a Long Island picture. It bothered me, but I let it slide because I didn’t want to offend anybody. Eventually I made a subforum just for Long Island posts, solely for the idea that if they were all concentrated in one spot, I could ignore them easier.

This went on for a while, but then the threads began to get worse. There was the one thread asking about why he gets sores in his crotch when he hikes in the heat. There was a thread where he posted pictures that he took of a girl without her knowing it. There were threads - always around Valentines - bemoaning his inability to find a girlfriend. There was the thread where he posted this link that went to a scat porn star’s website for some reason or another. Still, people generally tolerated him, despite the fact that many people thought he was strange and creepy.

Then there were the “illegals.” This user has a real agenda against illegal immigration, and if you didn’t take the same racist stance as him you were part of the problem instead of the solution. He has quite a few videos on YouTube where he wanders through Long Island, pointing out anybody of Hispanic descent, and calling them illegals. He frequently calls them “fuckers” and other derogatory terms. Now, I don’t really care what this guys political views are, but every now and then he would want to bring them up on the site. Now, I tolerate a good amount of off-topic discussion, but hotbutton issues like these just divide users and destroy any sense of community. They pit member against member, and result in long threads which just go back and forth with the same nauseating argument all the time. It’s not just illegal aliens, we’ve seen it with issues like ORV use in the Pine Barrens. It’s not that I really care to censor what gets discussed, but I do want to keep the site a good resource for people who are doing research on the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Having political threads up just increase the signal to noise ratio and foster bad feelings amongst all of the users. So, I asked this user to not post any more threads dealing with illegal aliens. To his credit, he complied with this, although you could just tell he was bursting at the seams to bring it up.

Finally, he posted a thread wondering why he couldn’t lose any weight. It turned out that he was eating at Wendys quite often, and he seemed surprised that this might have anything to do with it. This thread was the straw that broke the camels back, and many people who just had enough with the guy turned out and mocked him. One of the users made an off-hand remark about his rants on YouTube and the user went ballistic, thinking that there was some double standard with what he could post and what other people could. This could not be further from the truth. Coming from someone who posted incessantly about the Long Island Pine Barrens, it’s doubly ironic. He’s the only person in the history of the site who was ever given their own subforum.

I ended up finally banning this user. It was like a wave of fresh air had blown through the forums. The user, on the other hand, decided to go to “war” with me, and a YouTube video ranting about me. When he found out that everybody — including my co-workers who saw the video — were laughing at it, he made a second video.

There’s several morals to this story:

First, People run websites for one of two reasons. Either to make money, or for fun. NJPineBarrens.com falls into the “fun” category. I don’t make any money from the site. People really don’t know how close they were to having me close up the forums a few months ago. I was incredibly burned out, and even took a week off from the site to clear my head. If you’re not making money with your site, or if you’re not having fun with it, you should close it. Ultimately it’s the admins happiness and attitude that reflects the most on the site.

Second, you can’t run a website — even a community site — like a democracy. Like a politician, every one of the administrators decisions will be subject to both praise and criticism from the user base. The larger your community grows, the harder it will be to make everyone happy. So stop. Run the site like you want it to be run. Stop worrying about hits, traffic, or who you’re going to offend, because invariably you will offend someone.

Sometimes great ideas come from disaster. One of the things I noticed while watching the thread where this user went insane is that people really seemed to want to have a place where they could unwind without having to worry about being topical or even sensical. Out of this came the “NJPB Hangout Thread” where people can post whatever they want - from serious posts to LOLcat macros - and not have to worry about anything.

Lastly, if you have someone on your site that you don’t like, or is causing problems, it’s usually better to deal with the issue quickly rather than ignore it in the hopes that it will go away. Had I discouraged this user from posting about the Long Island Pine Barrens, he probably would not have stuck around so long and the mess that happened would probably have not happened.

In the end, my userbase is happier that this poster is gone. My co-workers now make fun of me by mispronouncing my last name. And I’m amused to death that my humble website could have incensed someone so bad that they felt compelled to make two completely off-the-wall insane rants about me.

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Ben Ruset April 28th, 2008

Today I put the finishing touches on NJPB Live Maps version 2. What started as a Topozone.com replacement for my users has mushroomed into a pretty neat app that will let you view some historic aerial photography, topos, and upload GPX files that will display in the map.

Big thanks to Devin Heitmueller for giving me a hand with some of the Javascript. Also thanks to Google for making their excellent maps API available.

• Online Communities , Pine Barrens , Tech , Web Design
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Ben Ruset September 5th, 2007

One of the most important parts of being a community leader is diplomacy. This is true if you’re the President of the United States, or if you run a community website.  You’ll need to know how to intervene in fights, how to deal with “competitor” websites, how to defend yourself, how to moderate discussion, set boundaries, make rules, and most important, keep the place “loose” enough to make people not hate you and want to come back. You’ll notice that this article is really about running a discussion forum, which is the heart of most community sites.

I mentioned in part one that I am a member of the forums on SomethingAwful.com. As of the moment I am writing this article, that forum has:

• 104,370 users, with 2,688 logged in right this second.
• 2,240,902 threads, with 58,878,342 individual posts.
• Banned 10 users today, and 6,960 users banned total.

SA has some pretty strict rules. As a whole, the community respects these rules. Those who don’t get probated (banned for an arbitrary amount of time), or banned (they can’t log in until they re-register their account.) In the worst case scenario, a user can be perma-banned, which means that they are unwelcome to come back, and if they make a new user, that user will be perma-banned as well. Given that it costs $10 to make an account on the forums, it costs money to be an asshole there. (And yes, that means that they have made over one million dollars in registrations over the course of several years.)

If I had rules like that on my forum, the place would turn into a ghost town. Why? Because what makes SA so popular is the wide variety of content, the (relative) quality of the posts, and the overall sense of community that they have. Most forums can’t afford to run like that, so you need to be able to let things slide more.

I will admit that I am a bit of a control freak. I would prefer all of my users to post their posts in the appropriate forums. I would love it if people didn’t post non-Pine Barrens related photos in the photo gallery. I would really love it if discussions were always relevant and on-topic. I’d be thrilled if people didn’t post huge images in their posts that break the tables and make it so you have to scroll from side to side to see an image. It just doesn’t happen that way.  You need to either deal with these in stride (and not by banning or yelling at your users) or you need to not try to run a website.

On the other hand, if you have a user who is trolling your forums, being abusive to other members, and not really contributing anything to the site besides chaos, you need to take action. Give a warning or two, and then ban them. Be prepared to take abuse from that person through email, or field complaints by that persons friends (if he has any on your site). But the most important thing is to be firm and don’t back off your decision, unless you’re totally convinced that you did the wrong thing.

It’s this idea of moderation (both in attitude and in keeping an eye on discussions) that is so crucial to running a successful community.

Another important thing to discuss is having help. If your site is big enough, or if you have a busy life, you may find it helpful to have someone help you out. Typically these people are either admins or moderators. Admins have more control over the entire site, while moderators can typically just close/delete/move threads, edit posts, etc. I have read that it’s a good idea to only have one admin - yourself. Everyone else should be moderators, and if the site is really large, break moderators up so they only have specific forums to be responsible for. I generally agree with this principal. Certainly it makes it less risky for you, the site owner. If your other admin’s account gets hacked, you could be locked out of your forums. If you have a falling out with the other person, they could cause you a lot of problems. I’m very fortunate to have someone I trust very deeply as a co-admin, but my experience should be the exception, rather than the rule.

Finally, don’t be afraid to take a stand when you have to. I recently did a redesign of the website. In general, most people liked it, but a lot of people had problems, or complained about generally minor things. You could go crazy trying to make everyone happy, which is impossible to do. At the end of the day, this is still your website, and how it’s presented and run is a reflection of you. Don’t be afraid to not listen to everyone’s ideas, especially when it comes to very subjective things such as design. On the other hand, if your community is in agreement that something you did was a detriment to the community (a bad decision, or maybe you redesigned a menu and now it’s really confusing) swallow your ego and listen to their argument. Maybe what they’re saying makes sense. It’s always a give and a take.

It all boils down to this: Don’t act like a jerk. Be cool, treat your users well - but don’t let them walk all over you - and they’ll come back.

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