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Why do we have User Privlege Levels

The Dynamics of User Registration and Activity.

Before delving into to the history of our current privilege level system, it is important for you to understand some of the dynamics of user registration and activity. If you look at the registration numbers, you will see that we have over 6000 registrations and yet, I consider ourselves lucky if we have 500 “active” users. That is quite normal for websites like ours. Why the discrepancy? There are several kinds of situations and our privilege level system has grown out that, as we had to decide where we wanted to put our limited resources.


  1. Registers for a very short term gain and leaves never to return.
    • Thinks there is something more if they register and then learns there really is not.
    • Wants to gain access to our library to get files.
    • Wants to use classifieds to sell their stuff
    • Spam
    • Troll ( registers only to start fights in threads.)
  2. Registers because they need help with some woodworking issue, gets the help and then visits every once in a great while for more help.
  3. Registers and visits frequently. May or may not be very active in terms of posts or participation in activities
    • There are users that register and stay fairly active for a very long time.
    • There are others that are active for quite while and then leave for a long time and then come back. And that continues in cycles.
    • And there are users who are very active and then leave forever.

The Raiders.


This was our very first awareness of the issue. People registered with a temporary email address and then immediately downloaded every file in our library of plans and then disappeared. A lot of us felt almost violated. But the real issue from a practical viewpoint was resource utilization. We had limited bandwidth and the downloads ate a lot of it up.

Our initial answers were to attempt limit that kind of raiding by not allowing downloads until a user had 5 posts. Later we added a period of time before they could download. We weren’t trying to limit anything but the misuse of our resources by people who could care less.

The Commercial Sellers.


Some people were registering and then trying to use our free classifieds to sell their commercial products. Usually disguised as your trusted neighbor doing you a favor. So the natural response was to use the same type of tactics, post count and how long people were registered.

The Discount Program.

About This time we wanted to start a Discount Program. I went to many places and tried to get participation. They were more than happy to support clubs, but we weren’t one from their viewpoint. Fist people who registered, didn’t pay anything, and they knew that most people who registered at a site who disappear immediately. I negotiated with some of these and what we came up with is what we are using today.

They and us wanted some assurance that a registered person will actually be part of our group, at least for while. This turned out to be a minimal number of posts and some time as a member. But one of the most interesting things was there needed to be some way to know if they were actually visiting the site. Thus was born the Visit Frequency metric. Something I believe maybe unique to us.

There was also one other factor that had to be dealt with our requirements for DQ, User contact info. One of the motivations for a retailer to provide a discount is to receive a members list with contact info. They essentially want to add to their mailing list. We refused to provide such a list in general. We didn’t even have member contact info. So was born the “opt in” strategy for providing the list to retailers. You provided your name and address and you specifically Opted In for each retailer that you would allow us to provide the information.

Post Count Wars


Not really but……..

It is traditional in many on line communities to use post count to judge the worth of a member, on the theory that if you are posting, then you are contributing. In fact vBulletin, our software base, has a user privilege promotion scheme based on post counts and some other factors which we find repellent and don’t even enable.

But just so you know, the first and probably most strongly backed proposal was to make 50 posts the threshold for DQ and other things. Well that’s not what we did. We recognize that there are people who don’t post very often, but they are the first people help with Pony Express or moving your shop or cleaning up after a picnic. So these people are a very important part of our community.


Eventually, we began to realize that perhaps the most important post a user can make is the post where they introduce themselves. It is a very important part of our community.

Community.


Yes, that is what we have built, a community. Not just an on line community but a blurring of the line between an online community with a face to face community. In many ways that is what make us so unique.

Resource Management.

The first shop crawl was not an official NCWW event. At the time there was not a concept of an official event. Doug Robinson decided to organize a shop crawl. He probably asked me if he could use the web site to do the organizing. ( Rob, probably did the same thing when he went to organize WNCW. It was common practice to ask, if though I didn’t really care.) Anyway, one issue that came up was how to reduce the number of people who would try to come. The interest was high, and no one wanted to have 50 people coming into their shop. It just wouldn’t work. So there was this desire to try to keep people who had just registered to get a place in the shop crawl instead of a more established member of the community.

There was no privilege level system in place at that time. But there was DQ and many people saw in its requirements, some indication of a user’s longevity and visitation. So the temptation was to restrict resource strained activities to those with DQ. And if my memory serves me correctly, that was the criterion used on the first shop crawl and for many of the following ones. I think it is more tradition than policy.

Non Profit.

This became our next step in Privilege Levels. I suspect that most of you think that it is just another level. It is actually a legal issue. When I incorporated NCWWI in North Carolina as a non-profit, we had to deal with certain organizing issues.

A for profit corporation has stockholders and non-profit corporation has Members. I didn’t choose the phrase, that’s just the way it is. When writing the articles of incorporation, I had to choose a governance method from the small number of choices permitted. I wanted a method that allowed our community to choose a Board of Directors who in turn would select our Corporate Officers. So we had to figure out who was “Member” with voting privileges. The lawyers said do it based on contributions or dues, money. I was and am still vehemently opposed to that concept.

What I did, was instead, had the initial By-Laws have only one voting member, myself. That gave us time to figure out how to do these things in a better manner. I knew we wanted our voters to come from the ranks of our users. But for practical reasons, we could not have every registered user be a member. If we did, we would never be able to get the required number of users for any vote, like our upcoming BOD election, to be legally valid. We have over 6000 registered users, we couldn’t get in touch with the 3000 needed for a legal vote, much less get them to vote.

Also, there is a legal requirement that the corporation maintain and up to date list of ALL voting members and their addresses. And we must with be able to present such a list to the state and/or the other members of the corporation with in a reasonable period of time( I think a week or two). Most of our users would rather trust Klingspor with their address than the state of NC J

The end result was the Corporate Member Level. We decided that if we could not and should not have everyone vote, then we created a system that limited it to the people who have been here a while, visit often and have some small number of posts.

At the same time we created the Senior User which you will notice is actually the same as Corporate Member, except they have not opted in. I assume for privacy reasons. But their desire for privacy should not limit any of their privileges except for voting,

Summary.

I hope at this point you have seen that the privilege levels were born out of realistic needs:

  • Protection from raiders, spammers, & trolls .
  • Satisfying the needs of our discount partners
  • Stewarding our resources which can get strained. BTW, sometimes the most limited resources we must guard are the people who are the staff; that is the BOD, Moderators, Administrators, committee members, etc.
  • Maintain our corporate status in NC
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