Having all but vanished from my favourite queer messageboard for a month to work on The School Of Everything, I was dismayed to pop on yesterday evening and find a 14-page thread on censorship.

The management has recently changed. And the new team is making their presence felt in ways that have severely upset the community. Of course some of the heat is generated by irrelevant vendettas; but the deep problem is more serious than that. The two crimes that best exemplify this are as follows:

 1) The Gingerbeer management is refusing to let messageboard members self-organise a Christmas bash, because they want to put on an event themselves, at a venue of their choosing, at a cost of £10 per head.

2)¬†In an attempt to drive up advertising spend on the ‘main’ (ie static, non-messageboard) site, promoters and other money-making ventures serving the London dyke community are now banned from bumping their messageboard entries. As many of the promoters and service providers are also lively messageboard members, this is spreading bad feeling both on- and offline.

What these two things have in common is a determination to make Gingerbeer more lucrative. Well, actually it just wants to cover its hosting costs - it’s run entirely on unpaid work. But it’s going about this¬†by directing where and what members post and threatening to delete users that don’t toe the line. Now, of course you can’t keep something going forever¬†- however well-meaning and needed - on love and tea and voluntary labour. Server space costs. But both the above ‘crimes’, while clearly intended to help sustain the community economically, are doing serious damage to the relationships that underpin it. And without those relationships, there isn’t a community¬†to sustain.¬†¬†

And in taking these actions, Gingerbeer seems to be forgetting¬†its¬†near-monopoly on community discussion¬†amongst the London lesbian community. Surely there are ways of invoking that mass of good feeling, potential for collaboration, lively discussion and so on to make sure it doesn’t go under financially? What Gingerbeer needs to do, then, is to find ways of making it in everyone’s interests to¬†help it make money, and get them to help do it.

How? Let’s start with the party.¬†On¬†the one hand, you’ve¬†a community that wants to self-organise its Christmas bash as it’s always done. On the other hand, you’ve¬†a rookie¬†management team that sees an event promotion opportunity that might fund the continued existence of that community. Both are seeing the good of the whole, but at the moment their methods of pursuing that good are at loggerheads.

The management team would do well to remember, though, that ‘taking’ the Christmas party from ‘the community’ is very, very bad PR. The message is that¬†the invisible ‘parents’ of GB have ‘taken’ something members used to have a say in and ‘made’ them pay to join in. Very bad move. Given that GB is largely self-policing, energetically self-organising, dynamic and¬†opinionated, it’s¬†downright suicidal.¬†

So what if the team suggested that whoever wants to organise the Christmas party can go right ahead? And then simply get the community to spread the message that GB is skint and could everyone please make a donation on the door? Of ten quid? Same result, much less admin, dosh in the coffers, participating community. Everyone wins.

Secondly, let’s take a look at the events promoters, hairdressers and so on who are currently¬†being heavily restricted on¬†how they post. The rationale for this is that restrictions on how promoters use the messageboards will drive up paid advertising on ‘the main site’. But there are two problems with this.

Firstly, these restrictions are being applied to borderline cases, including community discussion of who’s going to what night, on the grounds that it’s ‘viral marketing’. Even if it wasn’t started by a promoter. This stifles discussion and creates paranoia, as the same people (by virtue that they’re always on about this or that club night) find their threads being continually sat on.¬†

Secondly - and this is crucial - the messageboards ARE ‘the main site’. The so-called ‘main site’ is basically a small-ads paper with some hypertext: the content is infrequently updated, commercially-weighted and often poorly-written in a way that’s not out of place on a messageboard but doesn’t inspire repeat visits to a static site. Compared¬†to¬†the drama, squabbling, cliques, friendships, passion, flirtation, infighting, and so on that seethes constantly on the messageboards and it’s no contest. Of course promoters want to put their events where everyone can see them! If you try and make them keep it to the static site, where no-one ever goes, you’ll just drive them to spend their advertising budgets somewhere else. And on top of that, your messageboard members (who, let’s not forget, are often also promoters) will be really, really pissed off.

But what if some¬†paid promotion functions were incorporated into the messageboards? Perhaps a promoter could pay a weekly fee for a sticky topic in the messageboard events section. Perhaps that could have a feature that lets messageboard members review and rate the event. That way, you’d have the community collaborating with you to engage with paid advertising, rather than either imposing it,¬†driving it somewhere less interesting,¬†or else banning it altogether. Again, everybody wins.

Fundamentally, this discussion is about one thing: centralised management versus dynamic community. Though it’s just one messageboard, I find myself thinking and writing about it extensively because this quarrel is such an archetypal example of competing approaches to service delivery and community. Gingerbeer needs money to sustain its community economically, but the way it’s going about this currently depends on restrictions, centralisation of power¬†and micromanagement of members in a way that is damaging to the community it wishes to sustain.

A¬†thriving online community¬†needs both central control and¬†user freedom in order to function. The key is to make sure it’s in the users’ interest to collaborate with the enabling mechanisms (the technology, the management). This done,¬†there are plenty of ways that money-making can be incorporated such that community members actually contribute to and help to police the commercial activities that are currently causing so much contention.

But if Gingerbeer is unable to recognise that there is very little separation within its community between producers and consumers, and continues to treat its users like passive recipients of a service, then I give it six months maximum before it’s killed the goose that could still lay the golden egg.