cts | Volt a Day | Follow-up for The Real GM-Volt Deal November 01, 2010

After reporting on Lyle Dennis and his much-longer running GM Volt daily blog, Lyle wrote to me. He said, “If you would like to link back to your blog from GM-Volt, you need to delete the slanderous post there.”

I am pretty sure he meant libelous, since it is published rather than spoken. In the interest of reconciliation, and the hope that we could make a better community for Volt owners, Volt drivers, the CAB members, and people insterested in the Volt, I took down the post and wrote to Lyle. I said, primarily:

GM-Volt's daily blog is your site. I strongly believe in the voice of an author and that someone with your degree of passion should protect their expression as much as possible. I also believe the forums are a community, and as such should operated with a little care toward protecting *those* participants. To that end, I would suggest the following:

• Links are okay. You yourself linked to BNet.com, which has ads. I think you could have a moderator patrol the links a little and if someone is clearly spamming, you hide a post, send them a note, and the next time you ban them. That goes for links in signature blocks, Twitter names and so on. If Mark wants to have a link to the CAB site in his signature, that's okay. If Chelsea has a link to her blog and to greencars.com, those are things that your community members might want to check out.
• You cannot edit posts. Doing so undermines the expression of the community members. If you do it to someone twice they are unlikely to post again with any meaningful thoughts because of the chilling effect of perceived censorship. I would suggest if you have a problem with a post that you send the person a note and try to get them to edit it. Even better, since you are the host of the party, if someone writes something you need to respond to, respond in public. The answer to bad information should always be the swift publication of good information. Deleting the bad information just makes it seem that it is good information someone is suppressing. That only build credibility for the author. Calling them out in public is a much better plan.
• The same goes for deleting posts. I understand the sensitivity of keeping out trolls (see below), but wantonly deleting a post or thread has a terrible effect on the community. Essentially, only the people who have thick skin continue to post, and those are not always the best members of your community.

I would like to see these community guidelines posted somewhere with a note from you saying this is what you are following. But that's not necessary. If you just write me and say those are agreeable to you and you (and your moderator(s?)) will be following them from now on, that would be enough. I could then participate without fear that my contributions were a waste of time, and I could happily pass people the link to GM-Volt when asked about the car.

As an aside, trolls suck the life out of communities, even though they "foster" discussion. You should probably warn and ban trolls as well. MyNissanLeaf.com does an excellent job of knocking people off the site for trolling, which means that the discussions stay out of the flame-war territory. That's not a rule, just a suggestion that you might want to think about. I've noticed that particularly in your comments there are people that post, "The Volt is just another crap American car." That person should be booted, banned and the comment deleted. Any reply comment should be deleted so that people trying to have a discussion or read one aren't wasting their time.

That's incredibly difficult work. I know, because I do it for a smaller community of pilots and have done it in the past for a community of several thousand writers.

I would be willing to respond as long as you acknowledge you agree that everything I send to you via email is for only you to see, and that my emails to you; past present, and future may not be published in any way, shape, or form without my express written permission.

His stonewalling reply was simply that if I couldn’t talk about it off-the-record then he couldn’t talk about it. And that’s where it has been left. I refuse to have discussions about a community which are clandestine and by-agreement hidden from the community. If the above rules were agreed to, then I would consider having other discussions off-the-record, but the above are a minimum. Anyone that cared about the community (instead of just profit) would have no problem with them as a starting point.