What I hear you saying is...

(Image links to original movie)

I can't (a) imagine how long it took to put this together and (b) how long it's been since I had that much free time...

I was invited to speak on a panel at the ONA conference in Toronto last week -- The topic of conversation: "Managing Online Communities".

The two other guys on the panel were real characters and had a lot of interesting things to say about their experiences in moderating forums. And while we each held many different opinions about moderation, we absolutely agreed on one point:

Forums are not for all sites.

A member of the audience -- a producer from NPR's excellent "This I believe" series -- described his studio's horrific experience in adding commenting on both his show and also on "This American Life". Each had been inundated with trolls and nastiness, and they decided to take discussion boards off the site. He queried whether removing them had been the right decision or not.

Yes, we told him - the decision to host public conversation depends entirely on the goals you've set for your site. If you're trying to improve engagement, traffic, branding and stickiness, there's great value in forums. But for "This I believe", one has to ask how forums are relevant. First of all, they're dwarfed by NPR's over-arching brand -- it's not even an extension. And they produce only one 3-minute segment per week. How much relevant conversation and additional traffic can be driven off a program that iterates weekly? Could they really expect to build a regular online audience? Not likely, wethinks...

Ultimately it's like adding just one extra string of tinsel to the xmas tree. Hardly a glimmer.

But some sites definitely need forums...

No sooner had we finished discussing the NPR case, than a woman from a small local news site in Raleigh raised the following concern: Every time a contentious local issue was covered on the site, the station received nasty-grams and phone calls from half the town to remove the comments they were hosting.

Was there a way to abstract this out-pouring of public opinion and keep it from tarnishing their brand?

And it occurred to me -- even though we'd just spent the last five minutes discussing how forums aren't for everyone -- that the management team at this small site in Raleigh had no understanding of the potential that they were throwing away -- and that this type of contentious outpouring from the local readership was exactly the type of content that they needed in order to remain relevant in "the world we live in."

I offered up a meager suggestion that she could co-brand with an external forums provider to obfuscate any direct connection to their editorial crew (say, Topix, for example), but she responded that they'd tried this idea already. It was beyond her power, she said, to keep both her conservative editorial bosses happy and the local controversy raging. What could she do?

Between a rock and a hard place, we moved to our closing statements. I could sense a gathering hum of despondency in the room -- the woman from Raleigh was not the only one feeling the pinch.

The River of Conversation

When I look at the hockey-stick curve that is the Forums growth on Topix, it's clear that this untamed River of Conversation just simply didn't have a channel to flow through before. People have a lot to say, and draconian moderation policies are not going to stop them.

But just as the wave of free classifieds from the likes of Craigslist has changed the rules and categorically decimated what was once the turf of the local papers, is this growing online River of Conversation about to flow past these sites, too? Are they going to miss their opportunity to brand this as their own?

Thoreau wrote, "We are constantly invited to be who we are." And as a measure of truth and invitation, there's nothing like anonymous forum posts to tap the collective Id of the online world. The primal urge to comment and communicate is, well... primal. People in these forums are unbridled in their passion, enthusiasm, vitriol, hatred, love, bile and freedom of expression.

And whether the editors like it or not, this is not going away.

If you only watch 2 minutes and 23 seconds of college football in your entire lifetime, then let it be these: