Flick that switch

[Ricky]

So the house is full, there are people in every room, everyone's talking getting on well enough. Now what? Pdp's last comment “we need to some cleaning up around this community :)” could not be any better said. We need to do some house keeping.

I don't have time to do a full sized rant here since I am in-between houses since I am moving to a new flat so I have stuff here there an no net. So I am not going to be around for a bit to do my effort, but when I am back I sure have some plans to put in place.

People are slowly turning this between a mix of myspace/facebook and the forums at zone-h.org. What do I mean by that, I seem people adding as many friends as they can have, or joining as many groups as they can. People adding the female members of HoH then messaging them with stuff you would expect on social networks like myspace, here is one example.
“have you microsoft messenger?
here in brazil is te most used instant messenger...
if you have, mi msn adress is [address]@hotmail.com
add me please”

I will state this is not all member of HoH who are being pointed at by this blog post.

We really need to start acting on some of the great ideas people have post about, this house is our house an I think some of you are waiting for pdp to lead you somewhere, well that's the thing he has he has led us all somewhere. Right here, where we go from here on out is regulated by HoH as a team.

Lets make it move somewhere good instead of HoH being known as “that place”, lets make HoH stand for a lot more an lets not throw this chance away because if we throw the title of HoH in the dirt it will be hard to clean it off an make HoH stand clear for something.

Where as right now we have a clean house to work with so to speak so lets get decorating it with as many interesting thing as we can come up with.

[conde]

I have to agree, I've recently talked to a friend about this. It's getting very discouraging to see people here behave like myspace or hi5 (it's sadly the most popular social network here in Portugal). But hey, in my opinion it's inevitable... an open social network for hackers attracts lot's of kids that want to be the best l33t h4x0r in their neighborhood. That's why most of the hacker circles are closed to outsiders. Still... I believe that HoH will get a little more "clean".

[misunderstood]

"People adding the female members of HoH then messaging them with stuff you would expect on social networks like myspace[...]"

^^ Well, I AM female, and I felt disturbed by these kinds of messages and adds right from the beginning...you´re absolutely right, something has to be done.

The house is full, as you said, but I still do not see a lot of talented and/or skilled persons around here... lots of groups, once very active, seem to be dead now, which is a shame.

We should all think about what we expect from this place and why we are here.
The ones who are here because being a hacker is cool or because they want to date female geeks (btw., there are some females around who seem to think that way, too) should think about going somewhere else.

Unfortunately, I do not yet have an idea how to solve these problems...:(...but I´m glad to see I am not the only one around here who sees them.

[webmylife]

If we update the HoH's rules and apply them by some operators, I think that it will be a great step to control the community. Like this, HoH won't be like a facebook or hi5 community.

[$ummer]

How about making people pay? I'm pretty sure those concerned by this post will leave. However, if this happens, I think there should be more content so that it worth it.

[XayOn]

Updating HoH rules is a very good idea indeed but we need to be carefull with that...

I don't think paying will be a good solution. I mean, you'll make leave lots of people, not only those undesirable ones. We're the ones that promote the liberty of the net. I think everything in the net may be free (as in free beer and freedom ;-) )

[47_MasoN_47]

I don't have any proof of this of course, but I'd take a wild guess that there are quite a bit of people who joined just because the name has the word "hack" in it. Those people seeking to become 1337 and gather up a bunch of hacker friends so they can threaten other people with "their army of h4xx0rz."

I've put a few friend requests out there, mostly to serve as links to the people's pages that I feel actually know what they are talking about and have information that I deem desireable.

IMO it wouldn't be a bad idea to ban people who spam every person they can with a friend request, especially the ones harassing the females. This isn't a dating site, and if people want to whore a bunch of friends they can go join MySpace or start working on their 6th profile.

[misunderstood]

47_MasoN_47 :
I totally agree...the problem will be how to decide who is to ban and who is not. There should be a possibility to propose people for banning, and if enough members did, to ban them finally.
Someone should make this proposal to pdp ...

[47_MasoN_47]

It definitely will be hard to decide at times I'm sure, but I think you have a good idea with the community effort towards keeping the site clean. We are a community after all, and it's important to keep that in mind. If certain members don't agree with the standards that we have here or don't behave in an appropriate manner, I think the community should be able to decide whether they can stay or not. I'm sure that a lot of people would change their ways if they noticed they made it to the voting board for being banned. The ones that didn't change or couldn't propose a valid reason for not being banned would get banned and HoH would be one bit cleaner.

[Ricky]

47_MasoN_47 : I am sure you can see I agree with there are some people who's reasons for joing HoH totaly have nothing to do with the core reasons this place was made.

misunderstood: I like this idea, as so far think its hard for one person to be in charge of banning people.

[misunderstood]

Ricky:
yes, it would be hard, and the idea of deciding such matters together is, in my opionion, a good/important one.