Freethought Forum History
The lineage of the Freethought Forum traces back to the
Internet Infidels Discussion Board (IIDB), a forum community attached to
the Secular Web, a site "dedicated to defending and promoting a naturalistic worldview on the Internet" owned and operated by a 501(c) non-profit organization called the Internet Infidels.
Once upon a time, the IIDB administration maintained two hidden forums for discussions of board related business and socializing which were open to non-theists only. These fora were called the Freethinkers Private Forums, or FPF's. In order to gain access to these private fora, a new IIDB poster would have to meet certain posting and ideological criteria, be nominated by an existing member and survive a nomination/voting process that started simply but over time became much more complex.
In April, 2003, after months of intense strife among the 400+ diverse members of the FPF, the administration elected to abandon what they described as a failed experiment and announced their intention to close the FPF's at the end of the week. The decision was met with a strong mix of applause, resignation and overt criticism (some of which continues to this day), and many of the FPF members desired a venue to maintain the relationships they had begun to establish with their fellow members. In response to this announcement, viscousmemories -- a new FPF member nominated by livius drusus in January 2003, herself a member since February 2002 -- volunteered to create a new off-site forum to replace the old FPF's, asking livius to lend her extensive experience to co-administrating the new forum.
The new "Freethinkers Forum" was an instant hit with the estranged FPF'ers, attracting well over 100 members in the first few days it was online. Given the primarily social nature of the new forum and their dissatisfaction with certain aspects of how the old FPF's were managed, liv and vm chose a much more relaxed approach with the new forum. While it remained a private forum for non-theists only, the new FF had no nomination/voting process for inducting new members (any avowed non-theist could join, even if they had been denied admittance to the old FPF’s) and a hands-off moderation policy that let the members express themselves as they saw fit.
In an important sense, the new forum was a success: The management and venue had changed, but the community remained largely intact. Naturally there were failings, too. Some negative social dynamics carried over directly, others were reignited when previously banished or excluded FPF members joined the new FF, and of course fresh conflicts developed continuously. Also, in spite of having specifically designed the new forum as a community for non-theists to socialize, liv and vm were disappointed when the new FF continued to be utilized as IIDB's "back room", the place for primarily lighthearted interaction while IIDB remained the destination for more serious intellectual exploration.
As novice but enthusiastic forum administrators, liv and vm were consistently intrigued by new ideas and experiences, and all the while their personal philosophies evolved. In the late fall of 2003, less than six months after the creation of the Freethinkers Forum, they arrived at the difficult conclusion that they could no longer endorse the FPF's original equating of "freethinker" with non-theist. In light of this important shift in their thinking, they felt compelled to present their thoughts to the forum membership and to advocate for the removal of the non-theists only admissions policy.
Not unexpectedly, the proposal met virtually unanimous opposition from the FF membership. After much discussion, liv and vm decided that instead of closing the forum they would turn control over to two members who volunteered and start a new forum. The only caveat being that the new administrators would have to register a new domain name, since liv and vm intended to create a new “Freethinkers Forum” with modified rules and policies.
In the months that followed, the old forum changed management and name twice, ultimately becoming "Heathen Hangout". In late 2003 to early 2004, liv and vm were still active at what was now HH (with vm handling the technical administration of the site) but primarily engaged with helping seed the new
ebla forum (started by two former IIDB moderators/Freethinkers Forum members). As such, development of a new Freethinkers Forum seemed as if it might be indefinitely shelved.
During that same timeframe, liv and vm were engaged in many long, often passionate debates about forum administration and moderation at the
James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) forum, and a small private offshoot of JREF called
Renata's World at mu.nu. They had lost interest in the strict moderation strategy employed at the ebla forum, and they were hoping to find (or help cultivate) another 'freethought' forum community guided by principles more aligned with their own.
By April, they had concluded that the only way they were going to have a forum community like they envisioned was to create another one. Armed with their prior experience with the first FF and all the information they had gathered over months of research and debate across multiple forums, they set out to do just that. To this end, they set up a temporary forum, populated it with numerous threads outlining their ideas for developing a new forum community, and invited 12 former and current IIDB/FF/JREF members covering a range of experience and opinions to help them brainstorm the structure and policies of the new site.
For two weeks, the group discussed forum architecture and online community dynamics from a technical, sociological and philosophical perspective. One important outcome of these discussions was the decision to eschew the name "Freethinkers Forum" in favor of "Freethought Forum", the idea being that one needn't label oneself a 'freethinker' to engage in the exercise of "free thought". The decision to put the tagline "think what you like, and say what you think..." in the forum header was a whimsical afterthought during the forum design phase (and an unfortunate choice in the opinion of the forum founders - too often cited as a justification for thoughtless monologuing and propagandizing).
At this stage in the planning process, liv and vm had every intention of implementing moderation at the new forum. With livius' experience moderating at IIDB and all the research and discussions of moderation they'd conducted, they felt confident that moderation could be beneficial. Although never a fan of moderating, vm appreciated the arguments in favor of it and accepted that -- with appropriate checks and balances -- it could in fact be useful. So, much of the discussion that took place at the somewhat inaptly named "Focus Group" was around what type of moderation might work best.
It should also be noted that at this time they intended to build the new forum on a hacked version of phpBB, just like the original FF, and that they didn't plan to invest a great deal of time and money into commissioning custom software for the site. The idea for extensive "self-moderation" features such as those available at the new Freethought Forum (eg. the ability to ignore individual avatars, signatures, threads, etc.) had not yet been conceived. It was around this time that they started to become heavily involved in another public, mostly unmoderated forum built on phpBB called
SkepticalCommunity - an experience that profoundly influenced the physical and philosophical design of their new forum.
They had already decided to invest in vBulletin software near the end of the Focus Group, and now extended that to commissioning extensive software customizations to provide a host of self-moderation tools, the most complex of which being a
Post Voting System instead of top-down moderation.
Borrowing a little bit here and there from numerous solutions (including vBulletin's "reputation" system and Slashdot's moderation system), they imagined a system whereby the forum community could democratically moderate itself.
Simply put, the post voting system worked like this: Every new post started with a value of 20 points, and each member could give a give or take a point from the total. Then, members could elect to filter threads based on post value. With this system no posts would ever be edited or deleted, but people could elect not to see content from anyone whose posts were consistently voted down, thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio.
On July 14th, 2004, they opened the doors of the new Freethought Forum, welcoming members from the old Freethinkers Forum, JREF, SC, IIDB and elsewhere.
Stating clearly that their intent was to prevent free speech being used as an excuse to rationalize abuse, livius
announced their new system on the first day the new forum was open. Sadly, it took less than a week of trial to convince them that the Post Voting System was an inadequate solution, and on July 19th, 2004 they
announced their decision to disable it.
Disabling the Post Voting system was a huge blow to their plan for managing the new Freethought Forum community, but rather than assume a traditional authoritarian administration style, vm and liv decided instead to let the forum community develop organically and with reasonably limited intervention. Guided by their strong belief in the principles of free expression as well as a deep and abiding desire for a positive and intellectually stimulating social environment, they continue to seek out ways of acheiving their objectives with minimal autocratic interference.
