Announcement: Separate private forum

This is about control?  You may be right there cooling_dude , but certainly not on the part of the staff of the P2PIF.  Why?  Because the P2PIF is a public, anonymous and free internet forum where the volunteers who staff it accrue nothing.  What is there to control?  What benefit comes of controlling anything?  

My hope is that this discussion turns into one about the evolution and maturation of these facilities such that they can continue to benefit lenders and platforms.  My fear is that if we are not successful the P2PIF will close as a result.  This fear is real by the way.  agent69 asked above why this might be the case.  Well, the P2PIF depends on volunteer staff.  The set of people we naturally look at are those that are a) prolific posters and b) add value.  Much the same set as is likely to be recruited by this "separate private forum" (SPF from here on out).  And the SPF bans its members from becoming staff on the P2PIF (not to mention banning P2PIF staff from becoming members of the SPF).

No staff no P2PIF.

If this "separate private forum" is just about being able to conduct due diligence under a different regime then there are ways that could be looked at to enable this as part of the P2PIF.  Similarly there are ways that the P2PIF and the SPF could co-exist, under different regimes. 

Is there any willingness to explore this?  Because the status quo (the SPF being born of the P2PIF which remains public, established in secret, secret membership, secret charter, prohibitions on membership, no published protocol for engaging with the parent community) is not tenable. 

Staff being "pocket Hitlers"* aside, there would seem to be three possible areas of contention when it comes to moderation:-

1.  The ban on swearing / bad language.
2.  The prohibition on identifying borrowers.
3.  Personal attacks.

With regard to 1. I don't care for it.  I swear like a trooper in real life, think we're all adults, and understand that some people may find it offensive and not engage as a result (decisions have consequences etc).  Equally there are other valid opinions out there, but one thing removing it would do would lessen the burden on moderators.

The prohibition on borrowers is more difficult.  I understand how frustrating it can be, accept that it imposes a cost on the forum and the moderators, but I don't think there's a way round it when it comes to a publicly accessible forum.  See my points above about how the P2PIF could evolve, or how the SPF could work with the P2PIF.

As to the last point, does anybody think personal attacks and insults should be tolerated?

* The pocket Hitler hyperbole made me laugh.  As staff most of the time I consider myself to be an office cleaner, more productively I spend time as a track worker, rarely and reluctantly I have to be a judge.  Oh yeah, I do it for free, don't have any armies and have no plans to invade any neighbours  .


RM

PS.  Ozboy was last online yesterday and hor1997 deleted his account after being told not to personally attack other forumites.  In doing so he called into question the independence of the P2PIF.  I find this richly ironic.  I always thought that were the forum to close it would be as a result of succumbing to pressure from a platform, and not because it was undermined by a small coterie of its own membership  .

Has it crossed your minds that any DD uncovered by the so called secret 60 may permeate to this forum and benefit all of us ?

Published protocol?
That sounds very much like you want to be in control of other people's hard work

part to part

On the "side" of the P2PIF it's got nothing to do with control.  I repeat, the P2PIF controls nothing and has nothing to gain from any such control.  It's about the elimination of any advantage that one sub-set of this community may have over the super-set of this community, or the perception that such an advantage may exist.

Eliminate the secrecy?  End of problem.

As for hard work, can I get my three or four hundred hours back please?  Because that's my estimate as to how much time me being a staff member here has consumed.

Get a life pal, you are wasting your time here

As part of the announcement we said we wanted to initiate a dialogue on moderation of the p2pif. So therefore don't want to digress too much on this thread, but it is possibly worth making a response to some of these points, without getting in to too much to and fro: we intend to create a separate opportunity to do that.

The primary reason here is concern over "google crawlers" as opposed to  "human eye". Personally not an expert, but google crawlers work off links. So there is a considerable difference in terms of risk mitigation while not really impacting the ability of users to understand the intent. That is the purpose of the distinction.

It is not. If stuff is fact based, it will be allowed to stand, though in language which is proportionate. We have frequently been criticised for moderating posts which do attack platforms in a way we think is not reasonable.