FYI, as many of you no doubt know from first-hand experience, Bakersfield.com and its associated sites were inaccessible from some time in the early morning until the issue was resolved at about 8:35 a.m.  We apologize for the inconvenience, and invite you to alert us to any other site issues you may encounter today either in the comments or directly.

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It seems that folks only question whether I'm paying attention over here when I don't act on their complaints.  That, or they get upset at me for paying attention if that attention centers on their online behavior in a way they don't agree with.  At any rate, I make lots of you unhappy by either, in your perspective, ignoring you or picking on you.  Of course, I don't think I'm doing either, but then, that's the crux of the matter here, isn't it.  It's a matter of opinion, and of context.

If you have no idea why I'm writing about this, or what the title of this post refers to, then you're either a newbie, an occasional reader of these blogs, or else have had the good fortune to either miss or ignore the maelstrom.  Rest assured folks, I have not had that good fortune--I have neither missed nor ignored it.

But some folks seem to think that if I don't agree with their assessment of whether something is a violation of our Terms of Use worthy of removal or other disciplinary action (or, conversely, when I act on something they don't think needed to be acted on), that constitutes either a lack of oversight, a damning bias on my part, or a desire to silence different opinions.

I want to thank witbee for posting that excerpt of our Terms of Use on the thread in question, and for others who chimed in about the responsibility of community members to familiarize themselves with the rules and to police themselves first and foremost.

I am not a lawyer.  Yes, our Terms of Use contain legal terms, but I am not holding up flagged images to a legal obscenity test.  The clause that witbee pasted refers to "false, defamatory, abusive, obscene, threatening, racially offensive, sexually explicit or illegal material," and elsewhere the word "pornographic" is used.  We don't allow profanity or slurs--some folks think that if I remove a slur from a comment, that means that I'm censoring their opinions.  Nope--I'm removing a slur.  Notice that, in the thread in question, I did not remove the many proclamations of personal disgust, some of which were more colorful than others and could have very well been flagged as violations or personal attacks of someone had wanted to.  (Not that that means I would've acted on them, I'm just illustrating my point.)  I only removed the slurs.  We've had this conversation before--it's not about the content or the opinion, it's about not using language that we've prohibited to describe the content or opinion.  If you can't express yourself without breaking out the f-bombs or slurs, then, well, there are plenty of unregulated spots on these interwebs.

Now, to the issue of obscenity and profile photos.  Again, I'm not a lawyer, but to paraphrase a supreme court justice who wrote on the matter, I know it when I see it.  The problem here is, so do you, each of you, but we don't all agree.  And though it may be unfair, I have the job here to sort through things and make decisions about these sorts of things.  The profile photo in question, to me, was not sexually explicit.  Was it more than a peck on the cheek?  Sure.  Could you see tongues playing tonsil hockey and naked torsos?  No.  Am I a legal expert here?  No.  But I am the one charged with evaluating your complaints.  You may not agree with what I decided, and you are more than welcome to take it over my head.  When touchy issues like this come up, believe you me, I ask for coworkers' opinions, and they weren't all the same on this issue either.  But then I have to make a decision, good or bad.  One community member has repeated complained about another profile photo and called it obscene (which, according to what I've read, usually deals specifically with sexually explicit material when discussed in legal terms), and I have not acted on these complaints because, while tasteless to me, it doesn't quite violate our terms of use.  Did I make a bad decision?  You want my bosses to overrule me?  Go ahead and take it over my head.  That's fine.  (I do want to point out though, that whatever the user's intention was in putting up that profile photo, that particular blog inviting people to weigh in on the image was prompted by several comments on another blog which went off-topic in order to comment on the photo which had appeared by the user's earlier comment on the thread; the post about the photo wasn't apropos of nothing, and, perhaps, might not have happened at all if the offended users had used "send-a-message" or some other way to make their opinion known.)

Have I never acted on inappropriate images, then?  Some of you will be quick to volunteer personal experiences that vouch for the fact that I have removed images that violate terms of use.  The ones that come to mind right now, which many of you would probably treat as harmless jokes, involve the physical representation of cursewords that wouldn't be allowed on the site if they'd been written out, and thus, their removal.

This is not a perfect system, by any means.  This is about people, and opinions, and context, and experience, and whenever those things come together, we're talking about subjectivity and interpretation and misinterpretation and disagreement.  But you know what?  If you cut through all the hyperbole and some of the more volatile and extreme reactions on that comment thread, what you have is, indeed, members of this community talking to each other about standards of behavior and what to do when we disagree.  And that kind of conversation isn't bad to have.

We've talked before about implementing other kinds of technological tools that would help the "policing" of this site; maybe it's time to revisit that conversation.

Keep having opinions, keep revisiting the Terms of Use, keep flagging things you think are violations, keep disagreeing with me, keep policing yourselves and your virtual neighbors--keep having the conversation.

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Today, you will notice a change when you log into your account and glance over at your "My Stuff" box in the top right corner of People section pages.  No longer will you see a huge profile picture and a bunch of big buttons leading to your profile manager.

Now, you will see a small profile pic next to your latest "friend update" (more on that in a sec), above the latest updates from your friends on the site and four "My Tools" buttons that drop down to reveal links to where you can add or edit content and manage other parts of your profile.

If you click the "Open My Inbox" button below your new friend updates, you'll go to the front page of your new Personal Inbox.  From here, you can manage everything your email notifications and friend invitations, as well as your friend updates.

If you use social networks like Facebook, you're familiar with the idea behind friend updates.  From your My Stuff box or from your Inbox, you can jot a short "update" about what you're doing that will be seen by others in their update feeds and on your profile page.  There are plenty of privacy options here too--you can choose to let anyone see your updates, to not use the udpate feature at all and turn it off, to let only those you've friended see your updates, or to choose specific people on your friends list to see your updates.

Apart from the update feature, you can also make other choices as to how you receive information from Bakersfield.com and from whom you receive information.  You can choose to receive emails from registration@bakersfield--comment notifications, friend invitations, "send a message"s--in your email only, in your onsite inbox only, or both.  And you can also choose who can and cannot contact you via "send a message," guestbook messages, and blog comments, through the "blocked users" manager.

Check out our FAQ for these new features, explore around, try stuff out, and let us know when you have questions, concerns, or ideas.

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Today, bloggers will notice some changes when they go to write a blogpost.  Under the "title" field, you will see a "topics" field.  Here, you are asked to "change the category of only this post" via a pull-down menu with 18 top-level category choices.  Below that, replacing the old topic tag field that used to appear below the composition box, is a prompt to enter "keywords," a.k.a. topic tags.

What's this "change the category" thing, you ask?  This is the first public step of our interest group and blog categorization project, and we need your help testing it out.  We're calling this a public beta test--while the blogpost categorization tool is live and visible to anyone who posts a blogpost, the links I'm giving you right now, to our Interest Group Directory and the Interest Groups FAQ, are not pubicly linked elsewhere on the site yet (though you can get to them via the interest group links on categorized blogposts, like the link to the "Technology" interest group on this post).

You've heard me promise, over the last year-and-a-half, that a blog categorization scheme was coming that would allow you to browse blogs and blogposts by category.  Well, it's finally here, but we need your feedback to make it really work.  Right now, when you go to compose a blogpost, you will be prompted to choose one category for your blogpost from a list of 18 top-level categories.  This is optional.  When you view a post that has been categorized, you will see "Posted in the _____ interest group" below the text and above the "posted by _____ on _____" stamp.  That interest group tag links to that particular interest group's page.  For example, a colleague of mine posted this morning and categorized his post as belonging to the Travel interest group.

If you go to the Travel interest group, you will see a few new things.  First, at the top, you'll see "Travel Talk."  The Talk section on every Interest Group page is like a message board.  While we are working on implemented threaded discussions, right now, this first version is like our profile guestbook, with no threading, with the latest comments at the top.  If you want to talk about something travel related, maybe ask a question but not write a whole blogpost, you can do that here.  When you go to post something in Talk for the first time, you'll be prompted to become a "member" of this interest group first.  This is a required step (and violations of our usual Terms of Use can result in your removal from an interest group) to participate in Talk.  You can choose to have your group membership displayed on your profile, or not.  You can also choose to be a member of a group without posting to Talk, in the Members section at the bottom of the page.

Content in the appropriate interest group category will surface between these two sections, so that, if you go to the Travel page, you'll see the latest blogposts submitted in that group, as well as the comments on those posts.  Eventually, you'll be able to switch a toggle to see content in that category from across our network of sites.

Now, we need your feedback.  What works, and what doesn't, for you?  What's self-explanatory and what's too confusing, and how can we fix it?  Right now, it is optional to categorize individual blogposts.  We have not made live the feature that allows you to categorize your entire blog.  Do you want that?  If we go that route, we could allow you to choose more than one category.  As well, the reason the categorization language reads "change the category of only this post" is because you can recategorize individual posts if necessary.  Say you write mostly about politics, and so you categorize your blog as a Politics blog.  All your posts will appear on that interest group page.  Now, what if you write a post about travel on that blog?  You can mark it as travel so it will appear on the correct interest group page and not the wrong one.  Now, should everyone have to categorize their blogs (that's entire blogs, not individual posts)?  What would you call a catch-all, miscellaneous, "I write about life and/or all kinds of stuff" category?

You can go into your archives and categorize old posts to see how this looks and works, and of course you can start categorizing your new posts.  But the idea, of course, is that this is supposed to make it easier for you to find content by your peers about the things you're looking for, by going to the appropriate interest group page.  Our 18 top-level categories are just a start.  We made them broad on purpose.  What are we missing?  What's there that shouldn't be?  Do you want nested subcategories?  (Right now, that exists only for the neighborhoods interest group.)

Please, check out this new feature at the links I embedded above, read over the FAQ, and write your comments, questions, criticisms and suggestions in the comment thread here--or join the Technology group and start chatting about it in Technology Talk.  And of course, you can email me directly.  Thanks in advance for your help in making this a better community.

Sometimes, especially after antagonistic flareups on these blogs, it certainly feels that way.  That's not to say that non-virtual, offline, "real" communities are by any means necessarily better, or less conflict-filled, or anywhere near perfect, because we all know that that's not true.  But because much of my job here is to try to figure out not only how to make things "work better" in this online community, but to figure out what that even means, these flareups and disagreements weigh on my mind.

Often, the root issue is a fundamental disagreement over how we should treat each other.  When I first started working here and exhorting community members to engage in civil dialogue even when they disagree, I was told by many veterans that that just wasn't a reasonable expectation.  That's not how things were in the blogworld, I was told; get used to it, grow a thicker skin--If you think it's bad now, you should've been around when....  And then, of course, there was the ever-popular retort that it would just be too boring without personal insults and namecalling.

But in between flareups, I've been buoyed by occasional shout-outs, in comments or via email, from even those who warned me to cut out the wishy-washy goody-goody stuff in the beginning, that things were better than before, by whatever standard.  And I've been gratified to watch community members take the lead, unasked, in engaging their neighbors, building community, even asking the tough questions and getting us all to participate in some self-reflection about what we're all doing here.  And I thank you for that.

But even still, it seems that some of us are unable, for whatever reasons, to leave insults and namecalling, however veiled or inocuous we think they may be, behind.  Some, when called on such behavior, are amenable to change.  Others slip back into bad habits.  And still others refuse to agree to try to follow the rules, and resort to changing identities, using IP proxy servers and newly created email addresses to prevent us from identifying them beyond a shadow of a doubt as previously suspended users, even when it may be obvious on the surface to other users.

As usual, politics and religion remain contentious flashpoints in this community.  And though some of you still refuse to believe me, I don't care what side of what argument you're on--all I care about is that you make your case without resorting to cussing, namecalling, and personally insulting your opponents.  I know that many of you think that I am unfair and unbalanced in the "discipline" I dole out--but remember that yes, this is subjective work, done by one person with one pair of eyes and limited time, in need of your help in identifying potential problems and understanding why you may think it's a problem, and that I try to keep much of this behind the scenes, without publicizing what happens to which user and why or when, in favor of users' privacy.

It's fascinating to me how often both "sides" of an escalating argument employ the same strategies against each other, and both accuse the other of being unfair in its use of said strategies, and both accuse me of being unfair in my handling of the other side when it uses those same strategies (but of course doesn't see anything wrong with what it's doing and doesn't want to be chastised for its similar actions).    But let me lay this out as clearly as I can:  if, instead of arguing your case, you resort to tarring your opponent by, in so many words, dismissing them as inherently stupid because of mental defect, mental illness, drug use, or other disease, saying that this is why they believe what they believe (and of course they're wrong and you're right because of it), that's an insult.  That's an attack.  That's not making your case.  That's not building an argument.  That's dismissing what another human being has to say, what another human being believes.  So you don't believe what they believe, you don't agree--explain why.  Don't just say, well, you think that because you're stupid/mentally ill/deluded/high.  And please, don't think I'm addressing this just to "one side" or another, because all sides have done and continue to do this, and it needs to stop.  And, of course, if this doesn't apply to you, it doesn't apply to you.

I've been reading and rereading this post about online social norms since it was posted in December by danah boyd, a leading scholar of online communities and social networks, especially as used by teenagers.  She digests and puts together all of this much better than I could, and so I'll leave you with her words.  Thank you all for continuing to be here, continuing to work to make this a "better" community, whatever we all decide that means.

"musing about online social norms"

by danah boyd, social media scholar

Since the earliest days of Usenet and email, people have complained about how much easier it is to be mean online than offline. If you spend enough time on public forums, it's hard not to run into mean-spirited rhetoric: defamation, hate speech, flaming, etc. The latest story of helicopter parenting turning deadly highlights how easy it is to deceive to be cruel. Discussions of using mediating technologies for the purpose of bullying often rely on arguments about how technology aids and embeds malicious acts by reducing the consequences of breaking social norms. Governments often seek to ban technologies because of mean-spirited interactions that take place.

Of course, what's at stake is fundamentally a philosophical question, the precise one that got me kicked out of my 9th grade English classroom: is "man" basically good or evil? (I argued that man was basically evil, but apparently this was the incorrect answer and I wouldn't back down.)

There are all sorts of forces that limit social behavior in everyday life: fear of legal consequences, fear of social consequences, fear of damage to our bodies, lack of functional capability, whether potential gains outweigh costs, etc. Our legal system takes these forces into consideration and this is where punishments like jail (or the death penalty) operate at disincentives. Likewise, we often try to regulate structures so that it is functionally impossible to commit an act that is perceived to be collectively "wrong" (legal or social). Yet, in truth, we rely primarily on the things that are essential to humanness: desire not to face physical harm and desire to fit in socially.

Mediated environment throw these forces for a loop. I can say anything I want here and you can't punch me. At least not while you're sitting on your computer reading this. And I have a reasonable expectation that your potential anger will dissipate before you see me again. Furthermore, this fear of bodily harm is very ephemeral - we are much worse about evaluating whether or not an act will result in _future_ bodily harm than determining if it will result in immediate harm. The lack of immediate harm is key here.

The bigger issue has to do with social consequences. I have no way of determining if you're nodding along or scrunching your face in disgust and violent disagreement. I have to imagine your reaction as I write this (and I'm imagining the nods). I have no way of adjusting the next paragraph according to your implicit responses while reading this paragraph, both because I can't see you and because you're reading this in a time-shifted manner. Furthermore, unless you explicitly provide feedback (like comments), I have no real understanding that you're out there let alone what you thought of my post. The lack of social feedback sucks, but the lack of immediate social consequences can be far more dangerous.

Impression management is a core process of human participation in social situations. I try to present myself in the way that I want to be received and based on your feedback, I adjust my presentation. This is not easily learned and teenagers often struggle with this (thus, an "identity crisis" is when one's imagined self doesn't mesh well with how one is perceived) but adults are by no means perfect at this. We all learn through experience which is why social interaction is crucial.

Yet, in mediated environments, impression management is stilted. There's no implicit feedback and explicit feedback is minimal at best ("nice picture" isn't really informative). The immediate social consequences are also not there because there's no way of knowing if someone just walked away. As a result, social norms aren't really enforced online and without this re-inforcement, it's easy to break them without even knowing it.

This gets even trickier when you remember that networked publics bring together people from all sorts of environments with fundamentally different sets of social norms and expectations. Many imagine a melting pot where a new set of collective norms evolves, but because it's hard to provide social feedback, that doesn't happen. It's more like a rotting salad bowl.

Now, add in the fact that people regularly seek attention (even negative attention) in public situations and that public forums notoriously draw in those who are lonely, bored, desperate, angry, depressed, and otherwise not in best form. Mix this with the lack of social feedback and you've got a recipe for disaster. There are few consequences for negative behaviors, but they generate a whole lot of attention.

The question remains: is this the fault of the environment? In some sense, yes because the architectural underpinnings of these environments don't allow for social feedback or meaningful social (or bodily) consequences. This is where legal folks get into a tizzy because they think that legal consequences will solve everything. For this reason, they often argue against anonymity, viewing it as a barrier to regulating social behavior online. Unfortunately, this argument is flawed. While legal consequences certainly limit some people from some acts, they certainly do not limit everything. If they did, we wouldn't need jails and murder would be a thing of the past. More problematically, most of what needs regulated in social environments online is not a rupture of law but a rupture of social decorum. "He's being mean" is not something that the law really wants to involve itself with.

So then how do we fix it? Is it a matter of design? Do we need to bake in social feedback loops and consequences into the core of our technologies? If so, how?

Alternatively, is there a way to socialize people into an environment where they do "what's right" simply because it's right? Of course, this question extends beyond the internet. I fear that as a society, we are relying more on legal regulation and less on social regulation and I can't work out why. But, perhaps the problem is not the internet but a general lack of collectively understood everyday norms. Older people certainly spend enough time bitching about "kids these days," but there are all sorts of contributing factors for building and maintaining collective social norms is hard: age segregation, class segregation, homophily more broadly. We can blame overworked adults, cars, lack of public spaces, single family social units, and other such bits on contributing to homophily and the lack of collective social norms.

But here's where I think that there's an interesting sociological puzzle. What network structures result in strong collective norms? What forces are needed to create those kinds of social network? (This is a classic question of tolerance... we know fairly well that diverse networks have higher levels of tolerance, not surprisingly.) Given that universal unitedness isn't really going to happen, what are the structural changes that increase norm maintenance?

As for the internet, mass media hype aside, I bet that the internet is statistically nicer than it was when I was growing up. While many public forums and community sites like Slashdot are still bogged down with crud, most people are going online to interact with people that they know. There's only so much you can get away with when you're going to see the person the next day. Time delay might not be ideal for social feedback, but it certainly helps.

Last night, we made some back-end upgrades to our network of sites to make sure that they can keep pace with all the amazing growth we are seeing in our online communities.  Unfortunately, as many of you experienced, that upgrade came with some problems this morning, and we want to thank those of you who alerted us to them. 

The most noticeable problem was pages either taking a really long time to load or not coming up at all.  Our software development team worked to roll back and fix some of the changes to correct to the glitches.

However, we need to keep testing this upgrade for a few days in order to fine-tune the improvements.  So, from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. tomorrow, Friday, Feb. 15, and at the same time on Tuesday, Feb. 19 and Wednesday, Feb. 20, please be on the lookout for any problems or glitches and let us know if and when you experience them.

We thank you for your patience, and for your help in making our sites better, faster, and stronger.

Attention night owls:  due to a software upgrade, the Bakomatic-powered parts of Bakersfield.com--namely, the interactive parts you contribute to every night--will be inaccessible tonight from 11 p.m. to at least 1 a.m.

[So fair warning, Nancy--don't start writing something at 10:58 and then hit "post" at 11:01 and tell me I didn't warn you first when it disappears!  Heh.]

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Head Bakotopian Matt Munoz has let me know that local actor and acting teacher Jim Padgett, who posted here as "bballdadmc," passed away on Tuesday, January 29.  He was 45.

Bballdadmc was a member of this online community at least since the move to Bakomatic, and was a semiregular blogger and commenter last spring and summer.  Though he hadn't been an active participant recently, his profile page shows that he was visiting here as recently as two weeks ago.

Nick Belardes has a remembrance of Padgett up on Bakotopia.  Our thoughts go out to his family and friends. 

So, apparently, in the wake of a software upgrade earlier in the week (mostly back-end improvements), we've encountered a few bugs.  Several of you have reported that the RTE (that's "rich text editor," a.k.a. the box that lets you post comments or blog entries or reviews and format the text the way you want) is acting wonky or broken, appearing blank or unusable or giving weird error messages.

My more technically-endowed colleagues here recommend two things: First, clear your browser cache.  Second, go to a blog entry page where you're seeing this problem and hit "refresh" while holding down the "shift" key at the same time--*EDITED*--or, if that doesn't work in your particular browser, try "ctrl-refresh" instead.  If neither of these things work for you, please email me directly with as much detail about the problem as possible (what you did, what you saw, screencaps if possible, OS and browser info, etc.).

We apologize for the inconvenience.

The Bakersfield Californian's charitable giving program, TBC Gives, is at the tail-end of its second annual "My First Library" children's book drive.  Hopefully you've seen the print ads in the paper, but here's the skinny:

We're collecting new and gently used children's books, appropriate for those in kindergarten through grade 6, until the end of business this Friday, November 9.  We've partnered with the Bakersfield City School District and the Kern County Superintendent of Schools to make sure all books collected get in the hands of children who don't have books at home.

You can drop off donations at the front desk of The Bakersfield Californian at 1707 Eye Street downtown (or at the HFPC at 3700 Pegasus Drive) through Friday.

Last year, our Interactive Media department (responsible for the B.com interactive features you know and love) spearheaded a TBC Gives drive collecting personal hygiene materials for homeless persons, and several regular bloggers stepped up and helped us out.  I hope that you're similarly inspired now.

Also, to show how much you love the blog community you spend so much time keeping going here, you can mark your donations with a post-it or something with "Interactive Media" on it.  You see, we're in the middle of a little interdepartmental competition here, seeing who can bring in the most books, and I know you'd want to help us out.

BTW, I was reminded that today is my one-year anniversary at TBC as your Community Content Coordinator.  That's right, you've been putting up with me for an entire year now.  Love me or hate me, you should know that I've really enjoyed working with you over the past year, continuing to create a vibrant, dynamic online community here.  I know I can sometimes come off as a killjoy or worse (heh), but I do appreciate the feedback, support and help many of you have lent in our never-ending quest to make this virtual space, and the features it offers, better.  We've got a lot of cool stuff coming down the pike (including that long-promised topic-categorization system--seriously, I mean it!), so stay tuned, and as always, keep those suggestions coming.

And drop some books by while you're at it!