Cyber Chat
by Doug Truax,
Director of Web Publishing
What an incredible medium this is. The Internet is in the process of revolutionizing how we communicate with each other, how we do business, how we educate ourselves, and a host of other aspects of our daily lives.
Some of the changes are wonderfully beneficial. Others we could do without. And as with any revolution, few of us fully comprehend the magnitude of the changes and where they will lead next. We grapple with them as best we can.
Here at All Outdoors we are privileged to play a part by developing a community around our personal passions--hunting, fishing, and the great outdoors. We've been delighted to find ourselves as one of the most highly rated hunting and fishing sites on the Web, and we're even more thrilled by the commitment and involvement of those who come here.
All Outdoors is a lot of things. A source for information, for one. A chance to be involved in a community of like-minded individuals, for another. Key to this community is the freedom of expression and communication the Internet provides. No longer do we have to sit passively reading and absorbing what others choose to publish. We can participate--through bulletin boards, through surveys, through opinion forums, games, and a host of other mechanisms.
One of the most popular and exciting aspects of All Outdoors is the area we call the Coffee Shop--a discussion forum for those who want to exchange information about hunting, fishing, and the outdoors. It is perhaps the fastest growing part of our website, and the one that takes fullest advantage of this new medium.
But like any new, unexplored territory there is constant danger lurking in the weeds. We've faced our share and undoubtedly will continue to do so. Current among our challenges is a healthy (and sometimes unsavory) debate about what should be allowed in these discussion groups.
Our policy has always been simply no profanity, no personal attacks, and no straying too far off the topic. That seemed reasonable enough to us and most of our visitors, but as with everything there were a few who wanted to press the limits, a few others who were simply causing trouble (chief among them at one time were the animal rights folks, bless their souls), and others who you wouldn't want to be seated next to at a mud wrestling tournament.
But our commitment to establishing this community has been steadfast, and expensive. Talk, at least on the Internet, is not cheap. We maintain a separate server just to handle the Coffee Shop, and over the last months we've upgraded it in several ways to deal with the increased traffic. These are problems we're happy to have. We've increased the topics, first from three to eleven, and recently have added two more. We also instituted a "Chat" area for those simply wanting to kibitz about what was on their minds at the time; this was done largely as a result of those in the more "serious" booths objecting to distracting discussions.
Unfortunately, Chat become a focus for those who didn't have much regard for the simple rules we established: no profanity and no personal attacks. So we decided that we'd pull the plug on the Chat area and make room for the numerous requests we'd had for new topic areas. We put on new discussion areas for Waterfowl Hunting and Gun Dogs.
Well...in the process we created howls of protest from the regular users of Chat. Some protests slammed us for not giving any forewarning: a fair criticism, I think, and for those we've inconvenienced, I apologize. Others were bent on spamming us in other forums--no apologies to you folks.
Simply put, we want All Outdoors to be a community where everyone who shares a love of the outdoor sports can feel at home. Does that mean limitations on what we can express? Yeah, you bet. Does it mean a serious restriction of our freedom of expression? I don't think so. There are literally thousands of places on the Internet to talk with others about just about anything until oblivion.
I like to think of our rules for participating in the Coffee Shop simply this way. If you had a 12-year-old daughter who was interested in hunting and fishing, would you feel comfortable feeding her enthusiasm by sending her to All Outdoors to read an article or ask a question in the Coffee Shop? I hope so, because we who are committed to these sports desperately need all the new recruits we can get. We want your daughter to feel as comfortable here as a grizzled old guide. In fact, in the ideal scenario, the guide would be giving advice to your daughter.
So silly, profane, irrelevant chit-chat simply isn't our thing here. And, again, we hear time and time again from our visitors that they like it that way. Good camaraderie among sportsmen and sportswomen is our thing, and we stand committed to providing the time and resources to make this a place where that can happen. It doesn't all have to be serious and high-minded. This is a great conversational medium that allows for all types of communication.
All we ask is the basic civility and good sense that have always been a badge of honor among good sportsmen everywhere.
Copyright (c) 1996 Doug Truax. All rights reserved.
