Edit 4/26/08: All this info and more can be found on the
BTF Blog, giving news and updates:
www.bhangrateamsforum.com/blogWelcome! We hope you'll enjoy the features BTF has to offer. Please introduce yourself, where you're from, and if you're with a team. Enjoy!
We'd like for this to be a place that people honestly interested in Bhangra can come and have respectful discussion. The main things I saw lacking in POL were respect and some basic moderation/user interface features.
Respect: As this site hopefully grows, I'd like to invite some main members to become community moderators. They
won't be there to make sure you don't hurt anyone's feelings or don't put down any team's performance. Even if you do it with a nickname. (We would appreciate people identifying what teams they are on, etc.) What will not be appreciated is offensive and disrespectful slander aka 'trolling'. This gets to the features.
Features: To help keep that respect, modern discussion boards use IP logging to identify where their members are posting from. Trolls will receive warnings then will be blocked. Again, this is not if you say "____ team had a terrrible performance at ____ and they were sloppy and tired and messy". It's for when trolls take it a step further in their language and then try to hide behind a cloak of anonymity. Trolls like that will be
banned and their IPs banned so they can't sign up again.
User interface: I wanted to give a normal discussion board look where you dont have EACH and EVERY post on a different page. 50 replies to a topic should not take you 50 page-loads like at POL. Period. Better integration of dances/videos, attachments, etc. Hosted on a capable and stable server from a well-reputed hosting company (Xeon processors, too). A list of recent topics will help you keep astride of what's new on the forum.
I also want to open this site up. As I said, I will most definitely not be sole moderator around here, I would like a community environment. Secondly, for those who are interested, as the site picks up I will post the monthly statistics so you can see what is the top discussion on the forum and what is the focus according to users. Lastly, we will
always be open to suggestions for features and assistance in implementing these features. You can reach me at malkana [at] gmail.com with any feedback.
PS - as a first example of trolling, we had a user sign up named "____BhangraSucks" and his team name was "your mom's". He posted some valid points but wasn't very civil about it at all. Once we tracked his IP to a specific university's residence halls, he quickly disappeared and deleted his account. I am always willing to increase/decrease the threshold of what is 'trolling' as the users want.
