I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

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This is a somewhat of a stream of consciousness post. That said, it’s taken me longer to write than my normal articles and more than once today I’ve considered deleting it. However, as I mention in the piece getting this kind of thing out can be quite cathartic and so by releasing it into the wild, so to speak, it serves some kind of purpose. I do feel an obligation to state that if you think anything written in here is about you, it almost certainly is not.

Before I got into blogging, I used to spend a lot of time posting on forums. This all started in the early 1990s. Later I began to run my own boards, some of which became quite popular.

A couple of weeks ago, I handed over total management of the forum at TheSchalter.com to my moderation team. I have, as of then and now, effectively retired from forum management.

I will never run a forum again. While I will still dip into various bulletin boards to post from time to time (my own included), on a pretty casual basis, my days of being any kind of admin or moderator are now behind me.

Let me explain why.

My first experience of ‘the internet’ was via a long-defunct British portal called Online UK. With Online you logged on to their servers directly - in my case, using a 4KB Pocket Quadcomm connected to a monochrome laptop with literally a four-inch screen - and chatted away. The format was quite open - basically, you moved around within specially permissioned UNIX directories and just wrote whatever you like, and people responded. There were certain themes and stuff like that. Looking back now, it was all a bit surreal.

Around the same time I also started fooling around on USENET. My firm at the time had a UNIX setup for pretty much everything - using DOS only when they had to, as our techie was one of the original Microsoft-haters and a total Nazi about all that - and eventually I stumbled onto USENET. This was before stuff like Free Agent and Outlook and as our UNIX systems were all command-prompt only accessing the newsgroups was a bit of a mess. Eventually I figured out how to filter it so I could look at just the groups I had an interest in.

It’s funny as even though this all took place around 15 years ago, I can still clearly remember the very first topic I saw:

Millennium Falcon vs Enterprise D?

Back then, I hadn’t watched any Star Trek: The Next Generation so didn’t have any idea about the different Enterprise starships. I still don’t, really, although I do enjoy the show. But the concept behind this question appealed to me, as all of my life I’d been happy to debate about pretty much anything and everything - Commodore 64 vs ZX Spectrum, Sega vs Nintendo, PC vs Apple, the Lord of the Rings trilogy versus the original Star Wars films, Burger King vs McDonalds and Bruce Lee versus Mike Tyson.

It’s only of late I’ve realised how utterly pointless all of that is.

This is probably not news to you. But for me - and I’m guessing hundreds of thousands of hardcore forum users around the world - it was something of a revelation.

USENET was - and is - jam-packed full of this kind of thing. In fact, USENET pretty much comes down to two things - things you can download and things you can argue about. It’s the ultimate place for bold and even aggressive self-expression, albeit from a nice safe place behind the reassuring comfort of your keyboard. At least, it was - most of the newsgroups today have real problems with spam and I haven’t engaged with USENET in any serious degree for probably ten years - but if you want to argue with people, that’s a great place to start.

After USENET, I moved on to the bulletin boards. As I said above, this all began at Fox, but when they started to have real problems with their servers I figured it would be a nice idea to create my own forum, and so I did. I called it Broken World, it ran using the original WebBBS software and mostly because the Fox boards were so often down (or running really, really slowly), it got popular pretty quickly. In no time at all it was getting a million hits a month. This was in the days when ISPs didn’t worry about things like bandwidth and nobody had a clue how to monetise a non-professional website (or even a professional one, for that matter).

I loved it. Whereas most of the discourse revolved around The X-Files and Millennium, pretty soon I expanded the content to include a ‘lounge’, ‘off topic’ and specialist sub-forums for movies, books, other TV shows, current affairs and that kind of thing (it even had a ‘sex’ sub-forum, which for some reason was wildly popular).

Naturally, all sorts of discussions - i.e., arguments - sprung up. In the early days it was mostly good-natured stuff. Forums can be a great place for meetings of minds and the exchange of information. I’ve met some great people on forums who, despite never actually meeting in real life (yet), I consider friends. Certainly, I know they’d go out of their way to help me if I had a problem (and I them).

The problem is, while as an admin you want your forum to grow and expand, the more successful it becomes, the more ‘random’ and often downright abusive people you will inevitably have to deal with. It’s like the difference between a private party with friends and one where you welcome anybody in off the street.

Whenever any message board becomes reasonably popular, soon enough you attract all manner of trolls, naysayers, spammers and other negative, bad-natured sorts.

Shortly thereafter they will start to poison the well. My forum started to attract its fair share of trolls, naysayers, spammers and downright weirdos.

As Broken World faded and I moved on to other, forum-led projects, this pattern would become a constant.

Trolls and spammers you can deal with easily enough if you run your own forum - ban them - but the real problem is people who just like to endlessly argue for the sake of it. Or those people who never have a good word to say about anything, who never actively contribute anything positive but who will go out of their way to criticise those that do and shoot down the hopes and dreams of anyone who dares to be even remotely upbeat.

You know the sort - they refuse to take part in polls but will then openly attack the final placings. Or they’ll endlessly criticise other people’s favourite films, television shows, music, books, etc, but will keep their own cards very close to their chest. Or they’ll announce that something is ‘rubbish’, even though they’re never seen more than five minutes of it.

Nobody really knows why these people exist, or why they seem so prevalent on bulletin boards around the world. Common theories are just that some people go around with an endless chip on their shoulder about God only knows what and rather than dealing with it themselves prefer to take it out on others.

I know this because Tyler knows this.

I know this because I have been this person.

At least, in part. I balanced it out. I’ve been a naysayer and a provocateur (as one online buddy once called me), and I’ve been negative, and I’ve said some stupid hurtful things and made some dumb mistakes, but I wasn’t always like that. I like to believe that I was also helpful and upbeat, humourous and kind. I hope so, at least.

And when I was the opposite of these things, I was still aware of my behaviour, and later tried to rectify it, even if I couldn’t do much about it at the time.

The problem is that if you’re in any way like that, and then surround yourself with people who are always like that, you’re trapped. You’re never going to change.

You can’t escape.

Sure, you can take absences of leave. I used to routinely take 1-2 weeks away from my own bulletin boards just to get a breather. Otherwise, you’d go mad. There’s only so much negative energy you can handle before it starts to have a really serious impact on your life. But it’s not a cure. It’s just a temporary fix.

That sounds like overstatement, but it’s not. If you’re any kind of ‘power-level’ forum user (i.e., an administrator, moderator or very heavy poster) you’ll be aware of these kinds of feelings:

• Feeling like you must have the final word in every argument
• Letting hurtful things said by others to you (or to your friends) affect you more than they should
• Finding yourself in the ‘forum daze’, where you’re zoned-out thinking about threads and arguments even when you’re doing something else offline
• Letting debates and discussions online distract you from the ‘real world’
• Feeling like you need to be constantly checking for updates to a point where it’s a habit
• Becoming increasingly negative or cynical about most things
• Spending most or all of your online time talking about doing things, as opposed to actually doing them

Part of the problem is that, as an admin or moderator, your relationship with the ‘naysayers’ of the online world - those that are never quite trolls but kind of flirt with it most of the time - is a bit like that between a woman and her current ‘bad boy’. Deep down, you know they’re never going to change, but every so often they’ll give you a cheeky wink and a smile and you start to believe that if you work hard enough they just might.

They won’t. They never, ever change.

And the dumbest part is when you look back at the time you’ve spent on forums - the hours and days and weeks and months and years - it’s pretty much all been a colossal waste.

What have you accomplished? What have you done? What have you learned?

What could you have accomplished, if you’d used that online time in a more productive manner? What could you have done? What could you have learned?

When I used to work in the City - and the only person responsible for this is me, so I take total blame - the amount of times I got distracted by talking about something on a forum (one of mine, or another) to the point where it was clearly interfering with my work are too numerous to count. And I knew I was doing it, too. That’s why most people use forums, because you don’t want to be working. It’s the same thing with social networking - Facebook is the ‘new forum’, at least inasmuch as it’s a great way for people to avoid doing the thing they are supposed to be doing (which is one of the main reasons why I closed my Facebook account a few weeks ago.)

Sure - as I said above, forums can be a great way to pick up information. But in the scheme of things they’re no better than just loading up the front page of the BBC, Google News, Reddit or Digg for about ten minutes once a day. Indeed, more often than they’re miles behind the information curve of these other resources.

And at the end of the day - does any of it really matter? I mean, specifically when it comes down to debates, discussions and good old-fashioned arguments?

I like X. You like Y. You don’t like X. I don’t like Y.

That’s it. That’s as far as it can and ever needs to go. How many times has an argument about something online changed your position on that thing? I mean, what, once or twice out of every hundred occasions? Not even that many?

Yes, once in a while somebody wise will come along and present something to you in a way you had never considered and make you look at it differently. But this is a very rare treat, and you could have easily and far more effectively discovered this by yourself simply by picking up a well-received book on the subject (or even Googling it).

The rest of the time, you’re just arguing about taste and opinion. And once that happens, there is absolutely no chance of any ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ making an appearance. There is no possible right or wrong. It’s opinion.

When you stop and think about that for a second, it’s really quite ridiculous.

Think about your favourite

• Movies
• Television shows
• Books
• Albums
• People

Just because somebody else says they don’t like these things, why should it matter to you? And if you say it doesn’t matter, why bother arguing about it? You really think you’re going to say something that will actually change their mind?

I mean, I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve spent 3-4 hours and probably 20-40 posts engaged in some energetic, polarising or even downright hostile debate on a forum, only to realise later that same day you wasted all that effort arguing about whether Mariah Carey had a better voice than PJ Harvey.

I mean, really - who cares?

And these are really, really trivial things. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter at all if you like one artist over another, or your really love one film and I do not. I mean, we’re not talking about important things here, like religious or political views, your stance on abortion or how you feel you should raise you kids. And even if we were, there’s even less chance that anything I or anyone else would say would make you change your perception by even the tiniest of margins.
Generally, we’re debating dumb stuff. The Internet loves to discuss the bejesus out of the minutiae. We’re arguing about whose opinion is best.

Millennium Falcon vs Enterprise D?

In the music section on his MySpace page, a friend of mine once wrote, “I like what I like and that’s it. I don’t feel the need to discuss it.” At the time I thought it quite a ridiculous statement, but as the years have passed I’ve come to the conclusion that it was really profound. He’s very much the happy-go-lucky sort of chap. One wonders if there’s a direct correlation.

Choosing not to argue about something doesn’t mean you lack a backbone or don’t have an argument. It means that the online part that appeals to a lot of online folk - the arguing - is irrelevant to you. You know how you feel, and where you stand. You don’t have to voice it.

I mean, most of the time we’re not even really sure why we like some things. And as it’s pretty much a truism that nobody can tell anyone else what is erotic, funny or weird - it either is to them or it is not - why do you think you are different?

And this perspective is not, of course, limited to forums or, indeed, the online world. I’ve been going out of my way of late to not get involved in pointless debates, bickering or arguments, about trivialities, be that on other people’s blogs - just earlier today I wrote about 500 words that I then decided were unnecessarily negative and counterproductive on a blog that I actually like, and so deleted the lot - or in potentially tricky situations like family gatherings and meet-ups with friends.

It’s not part of my 28-day cycle, but it really should be. In fact, I might make it official after I’ve polished off this four weeks of running.

It’s so easy to drift into these kinds of silly arguments with friends, siblings and even parents. Many times they can get quite heated. At the end of the day, who wins?

This is one of the great things I like about blogging. The option is there for discussion but it’s also a really good way to get things out of your system.

I write an average of one article a day, that takes me somewhere between 30-90 minutes. I spend about half an hour or so administrating my blog, moderating the comments, filtering out the spam, that kind of thing.

So a couple of hours, max.

That’s it. Any other time I spend in the ‘blogosphere’ - reading and commenting on other blogs, etc - has nothing to do with my own blog per se. But it’s all part of a global community that I find to be generally pretty upbeat. Okay, there are a few problem individuals amongst this (pretty vast) group, but most bloggers appear to be fairly constructive people.

That doesn’t make them sheep or ‘yes men’ - far from it - and naturally a few have an agenda (i.e., to get links back to and/or promote their own blogs), but even in these cases the individuals don’t just come in and just start pushing buttons to get a bit of attention. Points are made and items are discussed, but for the most part not in a negative, dismissive or unnecessarily critical way. Dreams and goals are encouraged, not shot down. Comments remain relevant and very rarely go off-topic. This is almost certainly because the people making the comments nearly always have blogs themselves. If only moderators and admin posted on forums, I’d imagine you’d get a similar level of courtesy.

And if you do find yourself at the mercy of a commentator who is blatantly a troll or naysayer, you don’t publish their comments and you ban them. That’s the end of it. And if it all became too much of a problem, you can do what some of the A-list bloggers have done, and switch comments off altogether.

Sometimes, you just want to get things off of you chest. You just want to say stuff. That’s what this article has been about for me - it’s a very cathartic process, getting these things out from inside of you and on to paper, virtual or otherwise. I’m very efficient at making my mind up about something, moving on and not looking back.

For example, I don’t miss Facebook at all. I feel that there’s a chance that at some stage in the future I may need to go back there for business purposes - i.e., for proper networking - but as of right now I don’t even think about it, whereas a month or so back I was checking it many times a day.

Compare this with running your own forum. You pretty much always have to be there. Sure, you can take breaks and leave things in the hands of your moderators (who do an excellent job), but as you are the man, all major decisions have to come down to you. So you can’t ever be completely away from it.

Because you have to be aware of everything that is going on so you can make these big decisions effectively, you also can’t ignore stuff, or switch off. You have to be constantly thinking about it all. You can’t ignore threads and you can’t ignore people. Otherwise, when the crap hits the fan - and it always does, 3-4 times a year, minimum - you wouldn’t have a clue what was going on. I’ve seen several examples where forum admin only have a casual presence and when something really problematic occurs they always seem to make a really lousy decision, simply because they’re not really in touch with the community.

Other forums have a near zero-tolerance to bad behaviour and just ban or block anybody who even might be a problem. There’s a middle ground to running bulletin boards and I’m not sure the latter is ever the best way, but from an administrator’s perspective it’s definitely the lesser of two evils.

These forums aren’t a business. They make no money. They actually cost money, because they use up a fair bit of bandwidth. That part is fine, though, as it comes with the territory.

It’s different if you’re a member of a forum. You can come and go as you please. You don’t really have to do anything - your level of contribution is entirely up to you. It’s very easy to take the rough with the smooth in that position - if you don’t like something or somebody, you can choose to ignore it, or them (many forums have in-built software that actually makes this automatic, but again it’s not a luxury that admin or moderators can afford).

I’m a strong advocate of ‘everything in moderation’ but for some things in life that methodology just does not work. And in my opinion, properly administrating your own forum is one of those things. You either do it full-time or you say your goodbyes and hand the reigns over to somebody else.

And that’s what I have done.

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