Are Message Boards The 21st Century Firehouse Kitchen Table?

FossilMedic ruminates: 

Last week I mentioned a buff trip made to New York City when I was an ignorant “know-it-all” college student. We got to visit the cousin of a fellow Sackroom member when he was working. It was a special feeling to be able to stand in a FDNY firehouse kitchen, the social center of the fire company.

Before the world wide web, I was the systems operator for a private message board run by the International Association of Fire Chiefs, known as ICHIEFS. I used to describe the ICHIEFS message board as an electronic version of a firehouse kitchen table.

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Message board operators say that 10% of the online members make the most posts. I wondered how Firehouse.com, the largest fire service message board, compared.

You need to register in order to post on the firehouse.com forums. As of last week there were 163,375 registered users. The top ten percent of the posters represent 8575 to 664 cumulative posts. This chart shows the exponential drop-off of the top 163 posters:

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Vertical axis is the number of cumulative posts 0 to 9000
Horizontal axis is the rank order of FH.com posters, from #1 to #133

I was surprised to learn that 85% of the registered members of Firehouse.com forums have never posted a message.

No posts 138,604 members 84.8% of membership

One post 8,825 members 5.4% of membership

Two posts 3,378 members 2.3% of membership

Three posts 2,115 members 1.3% of membership

Four posts 1,382 members 0.8% of membership

Five posts 999 members 0.6% of membership

This progression continues, with smaller number of forum members making more posts. With 442 posts, I am part of the top 30%.  The top 10% of the posters are responsible for 295,305 posts. That represents 39% of all of the posts made on the forum.

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There are two implications to this data. The first is that the discussion forum is not a critical component of the Cygnus digital communication business model. Here is my example.

Douglas Gantenbein posted an article on Slate.com on October 31, 2003. “Smoke and Mirrors” was critical of firefighters and filled with inaccuracies. The next evening Gantenbein went on the FH.com forum. It was a brutal eight hour exchange where he provided 50 some responses to fh.com members. Dave Iannone had a team monitoring the forum 24/7 for two days, quickly removing the death threats, personal information (home addresses, phone numbers, family details) and encouragements of personal and professional violence to Gantenbein.

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There was noticeable erosion with the internal support of firehouse.com in 2006. Dozens of forum members had posted complaints about technical issues and poorly behaving members and guests. Some received a bland “we are working on it – new server migration” response with no resolution. The webteam made no responses from May 31 to July 20.

On January 31, 2007, a vandal exploited a well known registration glitch. The result was 36 racist postings and pictures on Firehouse.com. Because we were advertising on FH.com, I quickly worked up to the Cygnus vice president of interactive media. Promises were made to immediately address the issue.

Four days later another attack was made, this time hijacking dozens of existing discussion threads as well as posting 34 racist pictures or messages. In each attack the posts remained on line 12 hours after I alerted them to the issue. It took about two weeks to correct the technical problems, during that time they repelled four additional forum attacks.

It is clear that there is one person that services multiple Cygnus online forums. This is a sad decline from the early days when a real team handled the firehouse.com forum.

The second implication is that the forum is not an electronic version of a firehouse kitchen table. When you are at the table, you see the person talking. You have facial, vocal and body language cues that provide a complete message. You can access the credibility of the speaker.

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At a real firehouse kitchen discussion you know who are eagles or turkeys. On the internet, with the cloak of anonymity, all of the posters could be turkeys. The value of the forum is to increase visits to the website, increasing the number of unique “eyeballs” that see the site. The eyeballs drive the advertising rates.

The advertising revenue pays the staff and generates the profit. I know that because it took a threat to stop all university purchases from the Cygnus family of publications and trade shows to get significant resolution to the firehouse.com forum problem last February.