Modern Vespa

As I've thought about it more, I think I've finally realized what the biggest difference is between Facebook and Modern Vespa:

On Facebook, you connect with others based on who you know.

On Modern Vespa, you connect with others based on a common passion.

I appreciate that perspective, but someone has to keep the trolls from running rampant. That is, for better or for worse, my job. I should change my title to Chief Trollspotter.

I'd forgotten one thing that was recently useful on Facebook.

I'm on the high school class of '68 reunion committee and we had lots of classmates with no addresses or other info.

I was able to plug their names into Facebook and find some of them.

And I was able to get a Facebook site for the class up and running in a very short time.

I'm mostly on Facebook because there are certain people I wish to stay in contact with who unfortunately don't know how to do a damn thing on the internet except Facebook, and are notoriously bad at answering their phones. Actual discussions, with such a diverse group of people that I wouldn't have come into contact with otherwise. It's a whole lot easier to find people here on MV that may have an opinion or answer to a scooter related question or problem than it would be on Facebook. Hmm... it's pretty damn compelling as it is, I would say.

Arguably, one of the best things MV has going for it is that it is strictly a forum. It's not a club, it doesn't hold events, doesn't have group rides, it doesn't even rely on people actually knowing one another in person. I think that makes it easier in some ways to have a more easily run forum (not in any way suggesting that the folks behind the scenes here don't work hard at running the forum).

In my experience, it's been those non-forum factors that have led to various clubs, forums, etc., having declining levels of use. Clubs that rely on active physical membership have problems when other priorities take over people's time, when a particularly active leader moves on to other things, or when personal issues or different prioprities among members lead to different factions. I think the purely forum aspect of MV--together with its moderation policy-- allows it to avoid much of that.

Brendan

You might consider trying the post-by-email feature here on MV. I think one of the things that might contribute to that perception is that we have a Ride Reports section, and a lot of people don't regularly peruse that section. This is, in fact, one of the dangers of over-segregating a forum, whether it be about scooters or cars or guitars or cigars. Grouping like things together seems to make sense at first, but that can also fracture the audience.

But MV'ers certainly do like riding. You just don't hear about it in General Discussion that much. Thanks for the comments.

I haven't posted here in a looooooong time. Probably over a year since my last post. Interestingly, I found out about this thread on Facebook. So here goes . . .

MV beats FB: technical information, crowdsourcing problem solving, searching, long term project or technical updates (for example, the intake box modification thread that gets appended to occasionally).

FB beats MV: General non-scooter related communication.

In my experience, unless you eat/sleep/breathe scooters, you kind of get to the end (or really close to the end) of talking about scooters as a primary topic. There's only so much you can say about windscreens and failing fuel pumps, then you move on to other topics with the group of like-minded riders that share similar interests.

For me, there's a core group of MVers on FB that I communicate with on a daily and sometimes even hourly basis. We set up secret groups centered around food, politics, booze and other topics. We invited our non-scooter friends to join us. We have open discussions that are not moderated--we don't need people to delete our posts or issue warnings or ban people because, even when we cross the line with each other, it's okay. We have in-depth political discussions and disagreements without being threatened.

I used to love this forum, but as time went on, it seemed more and more like a self-serving entity to make the moderators and their click feel superior to the average poster--and nobody wants to be treated like a second class citizen. I'm not saying that I was necessarily treated that way, but I've seen it happen many times.

Just my .02--hope this helps.

This is where the latest version of Craigslist is a pretty good model. CL has kept their site basically the same forever, but the recent improvements have made that site much better and easier to navigate.

For me, Modern vespa IS my facebook.

This is emerging as a very consistent theme. I'm actually starting to wonder if what FB is actually doing is giving people a way to pretend to still be in touch to alleviate the nagging feeling that one should be in touch with their family / old friends / people they know somewhat more casually. Mind you, I'm not slagging FB here, I'm just thinking about my own sense of occasional guilt that I don't call my mother more often, or that I have no idea where most of my childhood friends are or what they're up to. Maybe it is this weird human need -- a mix of familial obligation and guilt and nostalgia -- that drives a lot of FB membership. So what you're saying is, club pages added to MV wouldn't necessarily make them any better. This is also emerging as a trend. Thanks for mentioning it.

Statistically speaking, no. I don't see that trend. MV's traffic is very seasonal, as you'd expect from a scooter forum. We're up in the summer and down in the winter. We had our best season ever (by a wide margin) in 2008, when gas prices went crazy, the economy was still good, and scooter sales were through the roof. We've been off that peak ever since, and traffic has been (ignoring the seasonality of it) fairly flat.

There's also a trend for members to register, participate for a while, and then disappear. This is a regular feature of all forums, and not something I'm directly worried about, but one does have to wonder if the people are losing interest in scooters, or just talking about scooters, or are drifting off to other venues like FaceBook.

Thanks for the frank assessment. If it helps at all, you're always welcome here.

Sounds like Belk is better at it than most.

That's looking like a better and better idea by the minute. I've been pondering that lately as well. The usual solution trap that most forum admins fall into is to organize by forum section, dividing content into smaller and smaller pieces so that it is grouped together. But as mentioned earlier, this also fractures the audience, as nobody really wants to hunt through all the sections of a forum just to find some content to read.

In thinking further, there are actually two reasons to create a dedicated forum section: (1) to make things easier to find, and (2) to keep those things from cluttering up some other section. I don't think most forums have really fully considered whether they were trying to accomplish #1 or #2 when they did the forum layout.

For instance, we wouldn't want For Sale postings to show up here in general discussion -- they would clutter up the space, and make things generally unpleasant to read. So the For Sale section falls into category 2.

Project reports, on the other hand, could very well appear in General Discussion, and would probably be fairly interesting to lots of people in GD. But in an effort to make them easier to find, we've put them in a separate forum, which actually reduces their visibility for people who might actually enjoy them.

Tagging would be a nice way to achieve both goals, making content easy to find and still relatively visible to the general population, assuming that said content does not end up drowning out the rest of the section it appears in.

I do think scooters, and certainly active involvement in a scootering "scene" or a forum-based scooter community, are something that a lot of people get into for a couple of years, then move on to other things. One of the important benefits of MV is that it is the first place many people go when they first get a scooter or decide that they want to communicate with other scooter riders (where I live, there are hundreds of scooter riders who have nothing to do with a scooter community at all). It's to be expected that many of them will go through the life cycle of involvement, then gradually fading away, but this forum is in the good position of continuing to attract new members and having something to offer them.

Brendan

My other main passion is music, in particular playing the bass. I joined the [url]www.talkbass.com[/url] forum but find I rarely visit it even though, or maybe because, it is vastly larger then MV. MV is just that much more intimate. Or perhaps scooters break more frequently than guitars do.

Facebook is not compulsory. Neither is posting private or intimate information. Used sensibly it is, as others have expressed above, a useful tool for achieving certain objectives. Through it, I keep in touch with scooter people in Memphis, Richmond and New Orleans who either rarely post on MV or who are hard to identify here. Yes, I confess, some of my friends own, dare I say it? (Dare, dare) non-Piaggio scooters!

Oh, definitely. FaceBook is consolidating a lot of the world's internet users. Agreed.

Thanks Jess. I am just getting other things together in my life and scooting is taking second or third place. I love what you've done with the forum. I think a Like button on individual posts would encourage better behavior than just the karma system. Kinda instant reward if you say something useful. Even though I'd like an unlike button on FB I don't see that working here on MV.
All the best - Drew aka Santiago

I'll admit that I left MV for awhile because many of the same questions came up, over and over again, and I got bored with it. Then I snapped out of it and remembered when I was the newbie and asked the questions. Now I pop back in to check the rides forum and take a look to see if something interesting was posted in the general forum. I went long periods not posting just because I didn't have much to add and what I would normally say had already been said.

I'm a daily FB user and love it. I know and socialize with most all of my friends. They're either family, work, or scooter friends. I use it to plan events, stay in touch, and just honestly waste time on. It is very user friendly and I like that.

My first big ride to Seattle AV came from a post on MV. That was the start of a wonderful friendship with so many of you. There are some issues with MV that make it a bit less user friendly (picture posting, quoting text, search for specifics) but I don't normally use those features and I haven't really taken the time to figure them out. What I love about MV and it hasn't changed in the many years I've been around is that it's the first place I go when I have mechanical problems and I always find my answer here. If I don't find it posted, then I have met many of you in person and I'm able to send you a PM and get my answer.

I like the MV forum categories. I feel there are just enough and correctly separates info that you may not need or care about. I don't like the idea of having a 'club' category. Too exclusive to many. I like how Jess moderates with a tight fist. We don't need the BBS mentality again. I know this is a tremendous amount of work for you and although it may seem we take it for granted we truly appreciate the sweat you put into this and the scooter community NEEDS MV. We don't need a Facebook page to replace what we have here.

That's fair. Heh. How quickly we forget. I would like to point out for the record that banning for life -- and being consistent about it -- would mean you yourself would no longer have an account here.

From a technical standpoint, it's not actually possible to ban for life. If someone reinvents themselves and registers a new account, we can only do something about it if we actually spot them and connect the dots. We have some technical means to do so, but generally only for short periods of time (i.e. a few months).

We have recently made some technical improvements that have drastically reduced the incidence of freshly-banned members re-registering immediately to say "Fuck you, jess!" or whatever. In fact, we've done so in such a way that wastes a lot of their time, along with spammers (who are caught by the same technical countermeasures). Watching the logs of people trying to re-register using a variety of insulting names is actually fairly humorous, in a twisted kind of way.

Still, if someone reinvents their identity months later and we don't spot it, there's nothing we can do about it. And really, that's probably fine -- by going through the process of being banned and coming back under a new identity, those members discover what is and is not acceptable behavior. If they don't change in between (*cough*wayne*cough*) then we just keep banning them until they get the idea.

To answer some comments above. There is a "Scooter Gallery" forum here for pictures, and a "Rallies..." forum for events, etc.. We could make better use of these MV features.

Yes. I think you've captured that nicely.

This is why I've never been tempted to join FB. I've never felt like I've "lost touch" with anyone that I really cared about or who really cared about me. My relationship with each of my friends and family members is personal and individual and I don't really want to lump them all into one big FB group. I may want to spend time with my sister, but that doesn't mean that I always want to bring the rest of my family and friends along. And that's kind of how I see the whole FB thing ... everybody doing everything together all the time.

If I want to find out what's up with a friend, I pick up the phone and call them (I know ... who does that??). I had lunch with a a couple of friends a few weeks back and they spent a good deal of the time checking FB on their phones. Then one of them wanted to take a picture of us having lunch and post that on FB. I don't get it ... why would that be interesting to anyone else? I met both of these friends at school where we all shared common interests and goals, but only time will tell if our friendship will stand the test of time. I really don't want social media to be the glue that holds us together.

I enjoy MV because it's my own little thing that I don't share with anyone else in my "real" life. The only people I know who share my interest in scooters are the people that I "know" here.

thanks for putting into words what i've been trying to do in my head all day

Yeah 2006 was an especially bad year. I really didn't get it for several more years. That was central in my thoughts as I typed. The forum, you, myself, and most of us have evolved since then. Although some would argue, but then someone always does.

I'm thankful I have a place to pursue a hobby and have made real life friends I would never have otherwise met. GTS Owners on Facebook is quite disappointing, but entertaining. The best part are those posts that refer back to a forum technical post I had missed. Then again, Facebook isn't a forum and so far doesn't have any of the same appeal.

Thanks for the fresh view. That makes sense on membership monitoring.

I agree, and I think that's a really important point. Most of the long-term members here are likely no longer interested in the daily fodder of oft-discussed topics. Keeping people engaged despite that is a challenge, but fairly necessary both to maintain critical mass and to pass on the institutional knowledge. This is, I think, a double-edged sword. Beheading trolls in public is often messy and ugly. But if we didn't behead the trolls, the trolls would take over. Where people get turned off is when there's a difference of opinion about what constitutes trollish behavior. Given that we're all human, we're probably not all going to see a particular behavior in the same light, or agree that action was necessary. Even among the mods, we don't always see things in the same light, and what triggers action for one mod may very well not for another. I don't always agree with the actions of the other mods, in fact.

As it turns out, some of the most effective moderators are so quiet you don't even know they're moderators. When someone needs to play the heavy, I often step in to fill that roll so that the other mods don't have to. And I willingly take the heat for it, because they're volunteers and I'm (in some weird way) not.

That's a really excellent way to put that, Alice. Thanks for that bit of insight. I suspect this has less to do with "who would be interested" and more to do with filling in their FB timeline. Kind of a visual diary, I guess.

It's really pretty simple.

The quality of the people and conversation seems much better at MV than FB. There will always be a place for forums of this excellence. I've logged on nearly every day since I found this place, and I don't even know you guys! Why? Just to see what you're doing. This is an interesting group of people.

I came to learn about scooters and was handed a much grander world. I'm not sure whether scooter people are just cool, or that the moderators have a magic touch. Maybe both.

I've been on tons of forums since back in the BBS days and none have been/are of this continuing level of interest.

Thanks again to all who participate...

I have also thought about deleting my Facebook account in the past but when I realized that you can never really delete your account but simply "deactivate" it I basically gave up. Now that I most of my family is on there (including my grandmother) I'm ok with having it open for them to share photos and events.

I don't find Facebook compelling. I have an account for other people as silly as that sounds.

Modern Vespa is a great place for me to stay informed as to what the scooter community is doing. Since I don't work in the industry anymore I need MV to stay informed.

I respect that keeping trolls off of a forum is important. But, I think that MV is quick to judge anyone who does't fall under certain categories or follow certain opinions. It can get kind of boring around here when strong opinions are shut down and removed so quickly (even if they are obviously wrong). It prevents people from sharing their opinions because they are afraid they will get shut down or banned. I sometimes get tired of reading post on here because of the giant circlejerks that pop up every now and then. But for me, there is an easy solution. If I don't like what I'm reading I simply move on. I also think the karma system is lost on a forum that doest have rated posts. I never really understood why it was started. If someone has a high post count they have obviously been around a while and are probably respected. I think MV is a great forum and if nothing changes I'd be fine with that.

On the TV show "Catfish" the investigators automatically go to a FB account to authenticate a person and they claim, "Anyone with under 100 FB friends cannot be trusted???"

How can anyone meet and maintain a relationship with hundreds of people unless you are business or selling something? If I don't know you, you don't get in.

Social Media for Marketing and Sales is a new frontier people are jumping into as well. Twitter, Tumblr, Flicker and Pinterest. Not to mention the constant Link-in requests. It gets exhausting.

FB and MV are about all I can handle right now.

same here..no FB on my iphone or anywhere else for that matter.

On the plus side I hated High School but now I've run into many classmates and they are decent and fun adults now. I no longer carry that hate with me. Facebook did that. Reconnecting with old friends is great.

Now MV is a place where I made many new friends. Some of them on FB so it's kinda circular in that way.

I think MV reached a critical mass sometime ago guaranteeing it's continued survival where some other groups never got far enough to be self sustaining.

Edit: I'm glad that HS girl I had a crush on never dated me. She now looks like a manatee.

Oh, something that just occurred to me:

Is it possible to add a way to set MV hide everything from certain users? Maybe they just bug me, maybe I don't think they ever contribute anything useful, whatever. (I'll bet there are people that think that about me, too)

It'd be nice to open the forum and just not even see any new threads they've posted.

Or, for maybe a little less extreme, a way to tell MV to ignore/hide a thread. Basically, the opposite of the Favorite button...

You can delete it, at least now you can. It takes a bit of work -- you have to delete it, and then not log in for a certain amount of time (30 days?) before they'll make it permanent. The only thing I can offer is that you take our word for it. The karma system has made a huge difference in getting people to think more carefully about what they were posting, and to provide a feedback loop about how they were doing. The difference in terms of moderation has been night and day, and has largely supplanted the need for moderators to take action on minor points. There are certainly a vocal minority of people who don't like the karma system, but it's been my observation that said minority has a very large overlap with people who are currently on the receiving end of negative karma. Post count is not indicative of respect. It's indicative of time served.

But I think perhaps you're conflating result and goal. For each individual, accumulating roundels may very well be a goal. But that's not my goal. My goal is to encourage good behavior and discourage obnoxious behavior. The roundels are just the result of my overall goal. And the karma system has achieved that goal in ways that are profound.

It's been on my long-term features list for quite a while now. It's been discussed on and off amongst the moderators, and not always with full agreement about the impact and the wisdom of it.

Personally, I'd like to make it cost something. Not money, but karma, maybe. From a pseudo-economics perspective, we mint new karma points on a daily basis, but none of it ever gets spent -- just hoarded. And over time, we see an inflationary trend. I've already had to adjust the curves by which karma points are converted to roundels in order to avoid roundel inflation. And I'll likely have to do so again.

So giving people something to actually spend karma on seems like a good idea, and blocking individual users seems like a good candidate. This has also been on my list for a while.

Thanks much for the suggestions, though.

I'm not sure if this is a case of great minds thinking alike, or the inmates running the asylum...

The topic of dividing and subdividing the forum is a tricky challenge (for all the reasons Jess has mentioned). One thought here: could MV apply the same type of filtering that craigslist has? When you post something there, they ask you to categorize it upfront. That might help here, especially for Scooter Galleries, Projects, Rallies, and Ride Reports. Most MV'ers end up posting in the General Discussion threads instead.

Tangentially, I think that the Skoks have figured out how to use MV like FB. Those threads are more FBish than anything else here and it works marvelously (and it's interesting (at times) and entertaining). There's no reason that more of those types of threads couldn't be started by those who want FBish interactions without the FB baggage...okay, it would require some wit, intellect, irreverence, and twisted humor but most MV'ers seem to have those qualities in spades.

Ok, at risk of raising Jess's ire - he and I had a disagreement here several months ago. It was on topic, it never descended into trollish behavior on either of our parts, and he NEVER threatened to ban me in any shape, form, or fashion. We respectfully disagreed. It is sometimes difficult to separate "Jess the Petty Tyrant" who runs this site from "Jess the Passionate Scooterist" who uses this forum just like the rest of us, but I'm pretty confident that he does a good job keeping those roles separate in his own head.

I *think* the attitude that people are referring to comes from the fact that the core of this site is a dedicated, incredibly knowledgable core of people, many of whom know each other in real life. They have history and conversations that of course the larger community here is not and should not be privy to. It is a weakness inherent in any community that mixes online and real life friendships - naturally there is a little bit of "us and them" feeling caused by the fact that most of us only know part of the story. As I have made my own real-life friendships from the site I realize that what seems high-handed online text often is balanced by the personality that you don't always see. It isn't a weakness of the site nor is it something to be 'fixed' - it is an inherent part of the social realities of a forum that unites many scooter communities all over the world.

Everyone's pretty much summed up FB. Keeping in touch with family, friends, yada yada. MV offers exceptional technical info along with a generally warm, homey feel.

As for enhancements, I'd love to see a Garage feature, like this one: http://club-s12.org/retro4/index.php?action=garage;sa=view_vehicle;VID=452

Just the feature, not the appearance. That site is HORRID to visit

Thanks for the suggestion. I've considered it several times, it just hasn't made it to the feature-I'm-actively-working-on phase yet. There's a small question in my mind as to whether people would actively use it or not. I really don't know. I still like the idea.