Announcement: Separate private forum

That is increasingly the view of many of the forum staff, and whilst we acknowledge and are grateful that there are voices of support for our work, the tone of the debate concerning the management of this forum is too often negative, with minimal constructive suggestions.  We have proposed DD Central as a way of creating a DD repository, and have sought individuals to lead this initiative. Yes, it is after having discovered there was a potential need for such a facility having learnt of the other forum. The suggestion could have been made by forum members earlier, but it wasn't.

This is your forum, but it can only remain open with a team of admins/mods who are willing to continue giving a significant chunk of their spare time to manage the forum.


Personally, I am very discouraged by the recent discussion, and believe I am indeed wasting my time.  There is a very real risk that I, along with the rest of the forum staff, will resign en-masse.



 

2. The prohibition on identifying borrowers.

I know a "borrower" with a string of bankruptcies. Each time just uses a different family member's name. This leads me to think its done on purpose. Yet I can't for legal reasons say anything.

This borrower(s) has loans over at least three platforms that I know of and to make matters worse the P2P platforms does not  mention it in their glossy write ups. In fact they go out of their way to avoid any negative information at all.  The problem is not lying or misinformation but of omission. We are entitled to know the background of the borrower the same as everyone else to weight up risk.

I am afraid to say here on the forum have a distinct disadvantage in the information front and platforms are using this for their own advantage. One has to remember the huge commission that is earned by platformers in filling a loan and very little or no risk to themselves when it defaults.

From what I have learned SOME P2P platformers are no better than politicians, lawyers and estate agents. They want YOU to risk your money for them.

I have now finished my rant but if this is what I know what about the other borrowers & loans that I don't know about, I dread to think.

registerme I have always appreciated your inputs & hard work here. This just to address some of your points. I suggest maybe taking a pause for reflection. It seems there are things that are surfacing that need to be handled (& perhaps first understood better).

Because the P2PIF is a public, anonymous and free internet forum where the volunteers who staff it accrue nothing. Is that the real problem, & if so what measures have the staff taken to resolve this? How can us members help?

What is there to control? What benefit comes of controlling anything? Well, the staff would be privy to more information than ordinary forum members (as would those they invite to that secret place, raising perhaps further opportunities for co-ordination/intrigue), so could themselves be subject to the same sort of suspicion that might have been raised in the OP. Without for a minute suspecting that’s the motive for staff to set DD Central up, one could wonder whether there is an issue of “being seen to be above any possible suspicion” or “conflicts of interest” that the Mods have not properly addressed, & rightfully should have if they are to have much credibility when taking on other (perhaps questionable) ventures on, without even consulting the P2PIF membership.

There are ofcourse other gains that could be made by staff looking to have a say in/control more things initiated on this forum. Some of these may be detrimental to the likelihood of this forum surviving ironically.

My fear is that if we are not successful the P2PIF will close as a result. This fear is real by the way. Fine, & if that’s the case let’s deal with it.

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). Given (it seems) some of those members have been identified, & you yourself RM might know their identities (?) could you & other staff that have had the opportunity to see these members’ identities (how did you get them btw?) comment on whether you believe their inputs here on this forum have been more or less valuable than the wider P2PIF membership’s? If the answer is “more” or even close to the average I’d suggest there really might not be much of a problem.. & the onus should be on getting other existing members to do more duedil, or attracting a better class of member  

And the SPF bans its members from becoming staff on the P2PIF (not to mention banning P2PIF staff from becoming members of the SPF). If that is the case are you really sure there might be perfectly reasonable (& perhaps logical if not ethical) reasons for this? Have you actually thought this through properly!?!?

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. Please see my prior post, which might address some of these points more accurately. Reposted here for convenience:

Mmm let’s see if I’ve got this right.

An anonymous admin on a forum where everyone is anonymous announces the existence of another anonymous place, but won’t identify its anonymous members in order to protect their anonymity, & hasn’t (so far) said how it got their (sic, coz it’s getting silly) anonymousness (or what it will do with it).

Now someone else (who might or might not be the first anonymous admin) says he is surprised to find that (despite the clear & repeated invitations to do so by other anonymous parties) any anonymous members might have gone somewhere he now calls “secret” but in fact might just be another anonymous place, with anonymous members.

In the meantime it seems another anonymous (secret) place has been set up with other anonymous (secret) members in a to date unknown (secret) part of this forum without the wider membership (who might be anonymous but surely have a voice) being told about it, knowing who will run it, or what it is for.

It is hoped that at some point someone will explain this better because my head is really hurting.


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. Maybe we should be thinking about not making this forum fully accessible to the public? Limiting numbers? (Modest) subscription-only? Lower-cost/free membership for those that provide useful dd? Changing some rules to encourage more dd? Use the income generated to hire the legal advice needed to relax some of the rules? These are just some ideas, which I don’t recall seeing the staff here address or propose. Instead (sorry to say) the impression seems that you have erred to taking a somewhat controversial view of things, & doing things that arguably should have first been shared with the wider membership. Ultimately this may have alienated you from some members here, the SPF, maybe (sorry to say) even some of your fellow mods.

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.

Wrt to enforcing the 3 rules above I personally have no/few problems with the way the Mods have handled things to date. You have a difficult job &, all told, I think you do it well & should be commended for it. I do however think there might be other issues (conflicts of interest, badly thought-out ideas, a feeling you are perhaps free to do what you like without even consulting the wider membership, no-one in place to oversee you, a lack of governance for the site & rules of conduct for the Mods etc) that perhaps ought to be addressed. These probably form part of a more thorough review of what the P2PIF should be about & where it should go in future.

ISTM that another possibility is that some people accept the reasons this forum has the rules it does because they're necessary for a public forum.  In that case, there'd be no point at all is starting an alternative forum to this one because that new forum would need to keep to the same rules.

So if those people wanted to discuss matters in ways that aren't allowed here, their only option would be to do it somewhere out of public view.  And admittance to such a place would have to be tightly controlled in order to contain leaks that could expose that group to the same risks that this forum is trying to protect its participants from.

To me, that sounds an awful lot like what is being proposed as 'DD Central'.  ISTM that if the DD Central concept had been suggested earlier -- instead of suggesting that people start an alternative forum -- then it would have been adopted without hesitation and this thread never would have been needed.

But I also see how -- if the DD Central idea goes ahead -- this forum could be accused of having a subset of members with privileged access to info that they could use to their advantage.  It's a difficult situation, and there's probably no easy answer.

I doubt any of the remaining platforms that contribute to the forum will see the suggestion of a break away group being of any benefit to them; its only a matter of time that they all cease to engage with the forum at all

The P2PIF and the other forum have engaged in discussions since 8th September via an appointed spokesperson on each side, attempting to reach an amicable conclusion. In the end we simply had to agree to disagree. The key stumbling block in the eyes of P2PIF staff was that of "secrecy".

Mrc.. Does this secrecy apply to ddcentral , because i have not been invited, so i will assume the conversations and due diligence discoveries over at ddcentral will be confidential to a privileged few, or will all information be revealed to the indie forumites?