掲示板 Forums - [Discussion] Considering major changes to this forum

Hello everyone!

I am generally pretty open about issues (both positive and negative) on renshuu, and with that in mind, I wanted to discuss some concerns that have been growing in my head about the Anything Goes forum.

renshuu is home to 10s of thousands of learners, and the forums were made almost 20 years ago as a way to allow them to have simple discussions, largely based around renshuu and Japanese. The "General Discussion" category (of which Anything Goes is part of), was and still is meant as a "side-bar" to the main forums, for when the occasional topic doesn't fit into those main areas.

Additionally, as a single developer, I have neither the time nor resources to effectively monitor the current traffic level of these forums, especially fast-moving conversations. We created discord largely for the this purpose, as it makes it much easier for me to take advantage of discord's moderation and safety tools to keep the server safe for all members.

The "anything goes" forum had just over 8,000 posts in the last 30 days. Of those posts, over 80% of them were written by 8 people. The forums have turned into what you could call a group conversation of just a few people, spread across several dozen topics/threads.

This has made it generally hard for others to participate in any conversation due to the speed and closeness of the discussions by the core group, made me greatly concerned about my ability to keep everything safe, and makes it hard for the built-in tools we have for content reporting to work, as most users (naturally) do not seem to be interested in trying to keep up with a conversation between just a few people.


It's not my wish to close these forums, but it's my responsibility to keep all of renshuu safe, and I intend to take measures to ensure that.

I am considering a slow-mode feature added to all topics under "General discussion". I am not sure if this will improve the situation, but I feel that it's worth a try. Ultimately, though, I am not interested (nor able to) in handling safety issues and content moderation for so few people that could easily be replicated in any number of platforms out there that are more geared to group conversations.

That being said, I am open to thoughts and ideas on the issue. Please keep in mind, though, of what my goal is in growing and maintaining renshuu as a place to learn and enjoy Japanese - everything else will be second to that.

I certainly understand where this is coming from, but I’m concerned about unintended side effects of this particular proposal. It seems to me that users have been pretty good at self-policing once Michael has made his concerns clear, but there are always new users, and new situations.

My concern with slow rolling the general discussion forums is that the self-policing will evaporate as users try to get around it, especially by posting in other forums.

Is it possible to make a few trusted users like 'moderators' to Help you? (Maybe not.)

What if we 'report' ? Could it keep things under control or would it just make even more work for you?

Why not add more rules for the forums? For regulation, I think a few simple ones may make a huge difference! like: "Stay on topic" ; "Don't spam" ; "Use the 好き button for agreement!" ; "Instead of numerous of people repeating the same ' LOL' just Don't. It's not a helpful for learners! ; "Don't take over others' threads to greet friends!" ; "Please, consider newcomers who CAN'T keep up and read the whole thread!" ; "Consider the heart of renshuu and keep it a Japanese learning place! Don't make it a chat room" ; "Delete unnesesary messages!" etc. ALL of the listed are kinda reffering to same thing!!! Was imagining it's a good idea, if someone smarter than myself gives it a structure in 3 or 4 short rules???

We can "drop you a line"... can we have mail in renshuu? (No?) How about Announcement everyone gets! ❝To "drop a line" for connection purpose and delete it after you've found your buddy, cuz it's not really helpful for anyone!❞ Like the Japanese lessons in resources/New year cards! (If THAT isn't understandable, Idk)

Not sure if this is ideas or suggestion! Depends, is it helpful? マイコ―先生、本当にありがとうございました。

5.

6.

7.

❔️❔️❔️Seems like the most simple solution.

Thank you for the comments so far. Let me address what I can.

1. I am not interested in adding moderators. That is a significant time investment (and trust investment) to setting up a moderating system. Currently, rule-breaking posts are very rare, and are almost always reported by multiple users when they appear. However, as someone else put it, the majority of these conversations are staying within the official rules, but are not content that really belong on a learning system aimed at all ages. (This is also why DMs were removed on renshuu - my inability to handle potential issues in private conversations).

2. I do not think adding more rules will really fix it - rules need to be fairly clear, otherwise it becomes relatively easy to skirt by them. For example, "no spam" would be hard to enforce in the current megathreads.

At its core, though, it is a mismatch between how some users are using the "anything goes" forum and how I feel would be ideal for the majority of users. To put it simply, this is not a place for "conversations" - we have numerous channels on our discord server for that exact purpose. This is for discussions - those are longer messages between (often) larger numbers of people, with less of an immediate back and forth. I hope this is clear enough of a distinction.

If you could replace the content of a forum thread with a phone call or a voice chat, then it would be much more appropriate to use discord, or take it off of renshuu.

To be clear, my goal is not to say "don't converse" - it's to say "we have a better infrastructure for it, so please continue to do it, just use the right tools for the job."

renshuu is a 2-person company, but while my wife does amazing work with the artwork, voices, sentences, etc., I do the development, maintenance, user-support, and day-to-day. We have no desire to make the company bigger - that would be a lot of stress for us, we'd need to monetize more of renshuu (which we don't want to do), and I feel that renshuu would cease to be what so many people like about it. So we need to be smart about the decisions we make so that something like a subsection of the forums requires so much time/energy from me that the core of renshuu (the learning!) suffers.

Rather than changing the forums, rules, or anything like that, I would suggest dealing with the problem directly i.e. lock the problem threads, and ask the 8 people that generate the 80% of the messages to relocate their conversation(s) off the Renshuu forums.

I have never used the anything goes part of the forum during the 2 plus years I am on renshuu. I took a look at it just now and realized why. I am here solely to improve my Japanese, not to interact with minors or users who give the appearance of being minors.

I wouldn't miss it if it's closed down tomorrow.

1. Both rules are quite vague. I assume on purpose to give room for flexibility when moderating. Not really an issue as far as I'm concerned.

2. When showing the rules to first-time posters, you might want to make sure they aren't just scrolling past them like most of us do with EULAs. Maybe add a small delay before they can hit "Accept," or a checkbox for each rule? Maybe you already have something in mind and this isn't an issue.

Overall, I don't see anything wrong with your approach. Enforcement might be an issue, but it should alleviate the problem to a point where the moderation workload is manageable.

By the way, how will these rules be enforced? They seem rather subjective.

Got it. I was just wondering how you'd catch rule breakers, given that the forums (as far as I'm aware) don't have the same comprehensive moderation tools as Discord.

Honestly, as long as users are required to read the rules before being able to post, there really shouldn't be any issues. I think most people don't have a problem with following rules. It's just a matter of whether or not they're aware of them in the first place.

One more thing: this was in a private discussion with a user, but I wanted to post it here.

I know that the decision I made is not going to go over well with everyone, but it is my hope that I was clear enough that I not only think this will be better for renshuu users as a whole, but for me, too. It's easy (I do it too) to look at a site or app and not see the person/people behind it (and there are plenty of places where it's impossible to actually talk to someone), but I work full-time on renshuu, and it is both FUN and VERY STRESSFUL. If money was not an issue, I could (of course, I wouldn't) drop renshuu tomorrow and I can almost guarantee that my migraines would disappear.

So in the end, I'm also looking to find a balance so that I can remain mentally and emotionally healthy so that I can continue to work to help everyone learn and enjoy Japanese. More so than renshuu as a business, this is where I find my joy as a teacher, and I want to do it for as long as I can.