Safe Speed Forums

Even though the rules of the anonymous forum are regularly broken by individuals posting mischievous and (usually) ridiculous comments, it seems that many of us can't resist the temptation to respond.
Why bother? These individuals are clearly just spoiling for an argument and perhaps having a laugh at our expense as well, why else would they refuse to register?
But they keep posting and we keep rising to the bait - why not just ignore it or delete each and every post they make?
Just a thought, I'm sure many will disagree.

I agree. As long as members keep rising to the bait, the anon users will keep 'baiting'. If the said posts were ignored and left to 'die' as it were, these peeps will soon get bored. Likewise if some of the more ridiculous posts were deleted.

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Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

This has been extensively discussed between Paul and the moderators of the anonymous submissions forum.

The forum is certainly being abused to engage in debate and point-scoring rather than merely posting information which is what it was intended for.

Unfortunately it's not possible to change the forum settings so that postings to this forum require approval before they appear on the website.

Anything that is obviously libellous, offensive or totally irrelevant is deleted on sight. However the postings of "Mr Plod" and others could be regarded as legitimate debating points, even if flippant and poorly expressed, and to start removing them could be construed as censorship.

The general feeling is that it's better to keep the anonymous submissions forum and live with the crap rather than removing the facility altogether.

I agree if people didn't bother responding to "Mr Plod" he might give up and go away (and I've been as guilty as anyone else on this point ). If he wanted to debate seriously he could easily register as people such as Basingwerk and Itschampionman have done.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Hmm, but perhaps each posting could be moved to the relevant subscriber forum. We could answer in that (proper) forum leaving the nonny stuck alone ine the Anonymous.

Is this possible?

It's possible, but it's a bit of an admin hassle to do it every day. If there was anything in there of exceptional interest, I'd certainly consider moving it elsewhere and especially so since I turned on "purging" in the anonymous forum. These days threads that haven't been posted to auto delete after 30 days. This ONLY applies to the anon forum.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Could it be that some people anonymously post 'sensible' material that is off-message with respect to the 'official' site agenda to avoid getting hounded by the usual speed kid trolls?

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I stole this .sig

Do you feel that you've been "hounded"?

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Anyone can still respond to their messages and 'hound' their argument in the nonny topic. Whats the difference?

Yes, and I haven't noticed much 'sensible' material being posted there anyway.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

Sometimes I do. Many of your posters can make a coherent response, but many just shoot straight from the hip. Sometimes, I do that too, so I can't complain much, I suppose. In fact, I think it is essential to stir things up to get to the bottom of this speed issue. We don't need to know 'what' people think but 'whether' they can think about it!

BTW - I still see severe shortcomings in the fuzzy proposals to 'un-enforce' lawful limits, and I havn't seen a simple, coherent position paper that presents the trade-offs. Could you give me the run down on the SafeSpeed Manifesto, as it were? Or point me to the synopsis? I.e. what would be the ideal way this could run out for you? You know my position - the underlying curve is much worse than we think, and removal of cameras now would mean a surge in road accidents, and further rot of the driving culture. What do you want to happen, and what would be all the effects?

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I stole this .sig

The anonymous forum was, as far as I can make out, introduced to replace the anonymous submissions option on the main SafeSpeed site.

Wasn't this option offered to allow 'whistle blowers' to pass on information to SafeSpeed safely?

I think there is a case for the anonymous forum to become moderated. While this may seem like censorship, at the end of the day the information was being offered to SafeSpeed ie. Paul, not necessarily the general public, so Paul should have the final say, with the co-operation of of the submitter, whether the information should be put in the public domain.

If the post is off topic (ie. not new information) then there should be no question as to whether it passes into the anonymous forum as it can be justifiably binned or redirected to other forums.

There are countless other opportunities for people to post freely in other forums, and the 'fear of registration' is a bogus argument.

Totally agreed, unfortunately the way the software works it is not possible to "moderate" the forum in the sense of approving all posts before they appear on the website. If this could be done then the problem would not exist.

I and several others have been appointed as "moderators" and can edit or delete posts, but this privilege is only exercised in relation to posts that are libellous, offensive or irrelevant.

We could delete any posts that were simply making a debating point, but if people saw their posts appear and then disappear they might raise accusations of censorship.

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"Show me someone who says that they have never exceeded a speed limit, and I'll show you a liar, or a menace." (Austin Williams - Director, Transport Research Group)

Any views expressed in this post are personal opinions and may not represent the views of Safe Speed

I think then that there is a case for closing the anonymous forum and inviting anonymous submissions to be tendered by some other means (perhaps a form on the main page), or even disallowing non-registered posters from changing the posting name - being restricted to 'Guest' or 'Anonymous'. This shouldn't be a problem for genuine users/uses of the forum, and it will discourage frivolous use as off-topic troublemakers will get lost in the morass having no clear identity.

Currently if a post from someone who identified themselves as, say, 'Mr Plod' was deleted, and then another post from someone naming themselves 'Mr Plod' cries foul and claims censorship, there is no way of knowing that it is the same person and it is a valid claim - so there is no strength to anyone not registering making a complaint as each post in the forum not by a registered user is, by it's nature, unclaimable.

I've just changed the rules and the behaviour of the anonymous forum to deny anonymous visitors the right to reply to existing topics. This is the rule:

"Anonymous users may start topics in this forum, but they are not permitted to reply to existing topics. This behaviour is enforced by forum software settings. Any reply posted by starting a new thread will be deleted on sight."

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I really do like to openness of the Anonymous forum, in as much as folk can post and can see that they have posted.

I really like the fact that this process is automatic, because I'm always pressed for time and the fewer admin tasks the better.

I used to have an anonymous submission script, but hackers got to it and used it to forward spam. I'm somewhat reluctant to go down that route again.

I hope that the new changes will help to make the anon forum nicer and better managed. If not then other solutions will have to be sought.

Let's see how it goes over the next few days or weeks.

Thanks for your suggestions.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I think the anon forum is good.

We get a lot of you stupid speedophiles why don't you slow down b4 you kill someone debates, only for the poster to release that there is a lot of qualified and well read expertise in here and that we are all after road safety.

Secondly it helps to remind us that the 'surely common sense says the slower we go the less likely we are to have an accident' view is really quit common among the camera huggers.

And on that subject I have to write a letter (yet again) to the idiots at surrey council who have just launched a campaign called 'whats the hurry in surrey'.

When will they do some research rather than churn out this garbage.

I do think we've got to tread very carefully WRT the anonymous forum, and while I agree with what diy is saying, the only reason for anyone other than a genuine whistle blower to use the anonymous forum is to take pot shots from the sidelines. Genuine dissenters would have no trouble with identifying themselves to us, registering and using the appropriate other forums (as proud of their cause as we are of ours!), so the 'fear of registration' or worry of 'association' is a load of nonsense - I'm sure a few genuine posts from the dissenters would establish which side of the fence they are on.

The idea of anonymity is to encourage those who feel they would be victimised to come forward, not to give those who would victimise a shield to hide behind.

It would be easier to just ignore these individuals until they 'go away', but I for one am just not that patient.

Would it be possible to take away the ability of non-registered posters to post under a user selected pseudonym? It is a meaningless feature anyway as any and every anonymous poster can use any combination they want - even one that another poster has used before!

This takes away any accusations of 'censorship' while at the same time discouraging malicious posters trying to make a name for themselves.

The software does not support that idea, and even if it did they could still incorporate some sort of signature within the body of any posts. I don't honestly think it'd make much difference anyway.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Paul, have you tried reporting persistant offenders to their ISP?

And I assume you have blocked the IP adresses of the main anonymiser sites?

I don't know too much about it myself but have some geeky friends who can help out.

No ... none of the above.

If folk want to use anonymiser sites that's fine by me, and anyway there are so many open proxies that there'd always be another.

I had to report one poor chap to his ISP, not anything to do with the forum though. He had a virus that was sending hundreds of copies of itself per hour to me - with him on broadband and me only on ISDN.

No need for you to worry about this stuff, thanks.

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety