By far the largest content group within dpreview is our discussion forums, with around 24 million posts over a period of almost 10 years from around 320,000 posters (dpreview forum stats). One thing I've noticed in the past year is that everyone (admin & forumite alike) has a different take on the forum's nature and likewise everyone struggles to articulate their mental model of it. This will be an issue for the dev team when forum development resumes, because everyone has a feature request (or five) at the ready but no shared vocabulary or model exists to help concisely explain issues or solutions. My goal then is to produce (over a series of blog posts) such a 'forum model' to facilitate productive discussion, analysis and visualisation.

The knee bone's connected to the ... ?
So what exactly am I looking for? At the very least a comprehensive (interlinked) glossary of dpreview forum-related concepts. Even better would be a suite of diagrams really capturing the low-level actions (posting, replying etc.) and higher-level phenomena (cliques, debates etc.). Geek heaven would be a set of techniques to measure, describe & visualize user activity (individual and aggregate) and overall 'forum health' (based on metrics yet to be defined). So roll up the sleeves, it's time to talk social network theory.

The who and the what
Before we tackle the juicy stuff (factions, reputation, mood) we need to cover the basics. First, let's look at the various players and some of the simple (observable) behaviours actions they can perform within the system:

• anonymous
  
  • view list of forums
  • view list of threads within forum by date updated
  • read posts / threads
• members
  
  • all of the above
  • start thread
  • post reply to thread/post
  • quote user
  • edit own post (within allowed time frame)
  • reference images in their post(s)
  • link to any URL in their post(s)
  • view list of threads they've participated in recently
  • complain about any post (including their own)
• admins
  • all of the above
  • all user actions
  • delete post (and all follow-up posts)
  • delete thread
  • lock thread
  • move thread
  • issue forum-specific ban to user (temporary or permanent)
  • issue all-forums ban to user (temporary or permanent)
  • view complaint list
• bots/spiders
• advertisers
• developers

Constraints
So now we know who's playing this game, so what about the rules? Our forum rules come in two flavours: 'hard' rules, imposed by the unyielding machine, and 'soft' rules whose enforcement depends largely on whether the moderator (a dpreview writer procrastinating mid-review) lost their last foosball game.

• Hard rules
  
  • 3 posts in 15 minutes per user
  • Posts can be edited up to 15 minutes after initial posting
  • Maximum of 150 messages per thread
  • Message length limited to 8kb in length
  • Messages will be blocked if they contain censored words or coupons
  • Messages will be blocked if they contain blacklisted URLs
  • Html tags are be removed from submitted posts (plain text only)
• Soft Rules
  
  • No schilling or classifieds: It detracts from the conversation.
  • No coupons: It puts us & advertisers in a precarious legal position
  • Relevant images only: Technique-related only. Happy-snaps go in samples & galleries.
  • No cross-posting: No posting identical message to multiple forums, it leads to problems
  • No multi-posting: Repeatedly posting the same message frustrates others.
  • Nothing risqué: What is tasteful to some may be pornographic to others
  • No inappropriate child images: Illegal, wrong.
  • No voyeur images: We don't want our community to go in that direction
  • Be civil: (most infringed rule) Insults beget insults, nobody wins.
  • No Off-Topic: It distracts. We move it if can, otherwise it has to go.
  • No bashing: Broken-record, unsupported criticism of brands/individuals wears thin.
  • No bumping: Pushing your pet thread to the top distracts from bona fide popular threads
  • No off-board harassment either: Just because it happens off-board doesn't make it OK
  • No piracy: It's illegal. Enough said

Individual behaviour, group behaviour and user archetypes
Ok, so we've covered the main players and most of the rules they're (theoretically) playing by. Now to the meat of the issue: behaviour. Many existing features and most feature requests (including ports of other forum's features) represent attempts to shape, curb or encourage various individual and group behaviours. Here's a list of a few such behaviours (desirable and undesirable) off the top of my head:

• Conversation: the obvious one. But can conversations exist above and/or below the level of threads (probably)
• Cliques: People who interact with each other to the degree that they can be considered a group. What is the participation threshold which implies clique membership? Can cliques overlap or do they merge?
• Fan-boys: What degree of content analysis is required to detect this behaviour programmatically?
  
• Bumping: I'm pretty sure we could detect this programmatically
  
• 'hit-and-run' posting
  
• Cross-posting
• Flaming
• 'Me too' posting
• Bashing
• Ad nauseam debates

Here's where you come in
The lists above are incomplete, I'm sure of it. There's a huge community of dpreview forum members and readers with a deep understanding of our forums (and other forums) so I'm trying to tap into that here. If you can think of any other individual behaviour patterns, group  patterns, user archetypes, metrics or resources on the subject I'd love to hear from you (no 'I was banned', 'jimbo99 calls me names' type comments please).

Aside: What do I mean by 'visualization' anyway?
The expression 'visualizing the forums' may sound like a buzz-phrase, but it refers to a growing field of research around producing graphical representations of complex structures using statistical analysis and computer generated imagery. Feel free to suggest visualisations we could derive from the dpreview forums dataset. Below are a few social networking visualization examples (courtesy visualcomplexity.com).