I just read the ACOR list. When I posted two years ago the moderator criticized me for posting a joke like item/// heck I was just trying to be cheery. (ACOR member)

Many types of messages may be forwarded to the list. Some of the more popular types are jokes, virus warnings, chain letters and requests for political action. As the quote above shows, these messages are sometimes accepted by a group, but sometimes are sent in ways that some find inappropriate or upsetting.

We also have recurring problems with members who don't trim away prior text from their posts. We remind the list as a whole about it regularly, and sometimes write a private post in egregious cases. We've also reduced the maximum size limit of posts to encourage trimming, but no solution has yet been perfect, that's for sure. (ACOR listowner)

As the listowner's comment above shows, forwarded messages can also upset list members. Their content may be viewed as inappropriate, as in cases of get-rich-quick email schemes or chain letters. Even if the content is not offensive, some members may feel that unsolicited email not related to the list’s topic is intrusive. Some of this email may be actively harmful, as in the case of forwarded emails that ask readers to go to websites or sign petitions that may be email harvesting and identity theft schemes. Many messages have been forwarded dozens of times, making them very long and difficult to read. In addition, many forwarders do not think to delete the header information and email addresses of those previously emailed. By sending this email to potentially hundreds of people (as well as placing it on the web, in the case of an archived group), senders inadvertently expose all of those previous senders to spam.

Recommendations

Create clear rules about what types of messages are acceptable in the community. Ask group members for feedback on these rules, to be sure that they represent the general feelings of the entire group. Make these rules available in whatever ways are possible – on related websites, FAQs, list archives, etc. Many listowners include rules on acceptable message content in welcome messages sent to new subscribers. It may be worthwhile to send the rules as a message at specific intervals to be sure everyone is reminded (for example, once a month). Links to the rules may also be attached as a footer to all list messages.

Jokes, whether written by the sender or forwarded from somewhere else, can also be very divisive. Some members may feel that humor is necessary, even in the most serious list--or maybe especially necessary in that context. Others may feel that humor is distracting or even upsetting, taking up time they set aside for serious information-gathering or support-seeking. The amount of humor that is acceptable to members will probably differ from list to list, and there is no “right” amount. It is important to be aware of personal preferences and to weigh the possible benefits to the group against any harm that could result. On POS, for example, jokes are strongly discouraged—members are asked to share them privately. Humorous anecdotes from the lives of members of their sons and daughters, however, are encouraged.

Recommendations

Often, list members police themselves in this area. The listowner may wish to propose general rules of thumb for senders to consider prior to emailing joke messages to the entire list. Encouraging very clear and specific email subject lines may also help in this respect – if it is clear that the message is a joke, then those who are interested can read the message and those who are uninterested can skip it.

Inexperienced or distracted, list members may send messages to the entire list that contain technical requests rather than using the automatic functions made by possible by ListServ. Common examples of these types of messages include “unsubscribe me please” or “put me on nomail while I’m on vacation.” These emails may seem innocent to the individual writing them, but many lists have thousands of members. Even if only a small percentage of them make such requests, they still generate lots of unwanted email in other members’ email inboxes. The same principle applies to test emails, in which senders test their Internet service or email client by sending an email marked “test” to the group.

Listowners vary in their views regarding test messages and technical requests sent to their lists. Some have reported that they consider them annoying. Others report that they rarely get complaints about such messages and consider them natural and normal and an opportunity to get technical assistance.

If the mail is not flowing right, how else can someone find if the problem is with their ISP or with the “group” service if they cannot test?. (POS listowner)

Typically, members write to the list describing their situations and how they handle challenges. Their stories allow other members to decide for themselves how applicable a particular piece of information or coping strategy might be to their own situations. However, some listowners and some members may have strong feelings about what should be done. Their messages can take on an authoritarian tone when they try to convince a member what he or she should do.

Recommendations

Listowners should be careful to reflect on their behavior occasionally and ask for feedback from other members of the LO team. Some ACOR LOs have suggested that if an LO’s leadership position on the list becomes too important to them, they may take constructive criticism or well-intentioned challenges to their authority too personally. Having some kind of system in place for LO self-monitoring may be a good idea in lists in which this becomes a problem.

A researcher may contact the listowner separately or send an email to the list to request participants for an online survey. Many listowners require that researchers ask permission prior to posting anything to the list. If a researcher posts a request for participants without permission, some listowners may tell subscribers not to participate or ban the researcher from the group.

Some researchers may wish to read, conduct analyses and report on the messages sent to the list. When this is done with the cooperation of the listowner and general approval of the list, this may be the least intrusive type of research. It is possible to remove all identifying information from the messages so that there is little chance of a breach of confidentiality. Also, this type of research does not require any effort on the part of the subscriber.

Researchers sometimes take information from mailing lists without the knowledge or permission of the listowner. If a list has open membership and/or archives, someone could easily join for the purpose of collecting data. It is difficult to guard against this use of list messages. A listowner must weigh the privacy of list members against the openness and ease of use of an open-membership system. Some groups, such as ACOR, have opted for a compromise system of open membership but closed archives (in other words, someone must be a member to access the archives, and the archives cannot be searched using web-based search engines, such as Google).

Recommendations

It is in the best interest of the community for the listowner to understand and approve any research being performed on the list. If the list is willing, they can seek out creditable researchers and invite them to collaborate in data collection. The Health eCommunities project is one example in which online communities have been willing to collaborate with researchers on their studies. Both ACOR and POS have actively sought these collaborations. Some listsowners allow researchers to post messages directly to their lists or forward their messages for them. If researchers are not allowed to join the list, Alternatively the listowner may also post a brief announcement about the research, with contact information, so that list members who are interested can contact the researchers privately. One ACOR list helped to raise money for and contributed to a tissue bank to expedite research on a rare form of cancer. In all cases, the listowner should work closely with researchers to be sure that the research is not coercive and that it is appropriate for list members.

When HeCs collaborate with researchers, listowners and members should ask to review and comment on researchers’ draft reports. This step has two benefits. It gives feedback to the community and helps to insure that study findings on groups are valid.

Flame is the word used to describe many types of email communication that recipients consider rude or hostile. Flaming also includes insulting and/or harassing others. A combination of factors can lead to recipients of flame messages experiencing their emotional impact more intensely than they would to angry venting in face to face groups (Seabrook, 1994). In online groups, members often have no nonverbal (body language) cues to alert them about what they will read in a flame message. Often subject lines do not accurately warn of a message’s hostile tone or intent. Also, many members may not have been following the thread of the discussion leading up to a flame.

Flame wars occur when multiple listmembers flame each other. Though it is particularly easy for a debate to become a flame war on a list dedicated to a controversial topic, any topic can potentially ignite a flame war. Such conflicts can disrupt supportive discussion threads and fill the list with antagonistic messages.

Flaming often occurs in lists formed for discussions of political and social issues (Lee, 2005). Although HeC listowners report that they have to deal with flaming, there is no research available to know how common flaming is in HeCs where members are more reliant on each other for help. It seems likely that when HeC members are under stress, some may post flames because they are feeling irritable or depressed and others react strongly for the same reasons.

Trolling is the act of posting a message to an online community for the purpose of creating a strong reaction in the community. The word "troll" can refer to the person doing the writing or the post itself. Trolling differs from flaming in that flames can be motivated by genuine differences of opinion that spiral into insults, while troll posts are made intentionally objectionable and/or offensive for the sake of creating a huge amount of commotion and disrupting the community.

Shills are posters who misrepresent their identities by pretending not to be involved with a business or special-interest group to which they belong. They pose as neutral individuals and write messages that support a product, service, or idea that will benefit them in real life. The writer may pose as an expert, such as a doctor or pharmacist, or as a customer who has had a good experience with a product. Marketing companies may employ this strategy to build “buzz” around a certain product, since people may trust the “unbiased” accounts of their online friends more than they might trust advertising. (See also the Wikipedia entry on shills

Recommendations

Experienced listowners recognize that flames, trolls, and shills are probably an inevitable part of using the Internet, and they do not expect to prevent or eliminate them entirely. However, they also know that they have to move quickly to calm the uproar. If they don’t, there will be a flurry of members—often the most fragile—who decide to unsubscribe because they are unwilling or unable to tolerate the conflict. While they may rejoin later, at least for the short term, they will lose their access to the support that they were getting from the list.

Many ACOR lists have rules about posting on complementary and alternative medicine because of bad experiences related to shills. Overly enthusiastic recommendations of products that aren’t approved by the FDA or that are being sold only in an online store are definite warning signs of potential misrepresentation. Some lists have rules against soliciting or selling products through the list, but this may not prevent falsely positive reviews.

Tips from ACOR Listowners

Quietly admonish the participants, put one or all on review or nopost, send out a general "here's how to fall off the wagon and what to do to get back on" message. Key to my approach is to praise in public and criticize in private.

It's pretty easy to see a flame war coming...I usually try to lend support publicly to the opinions of all and communicate with the involved parties privately. I remind the members that the archives are forever. Very rarely, I have put a member on review or removed them.

Munchausen by Internet (MBI). Munchausen Syndrome is a mental disorder in which a person fakes or deliberately gives him or herself a physical illness. The affected person pretends to be ill in order to receive nurturance and attention, rather than material gain (if a person gains something, like drugs or time off of work, from their faked illness, it is called malingering). Munchausen by Internet (MBI) is the term used when someone fakes an illness online.^[2]

List subscribers who fake illness can be very disruptive to their lists. They may distract other subscribers from their own problems by attracting a disproportionate amount of attention. They may also divide the group into factions, such as those who believe the MBI sufferer’s story is real and those who do not. List members who invest time and emotion in the pretender may suffer serious emotional effects when the lies are uncovered. More than a list annoyer, MBI is a potential destroyer. Many of the online groups mentioned in published accounts of MBI did not survive the revelation of deceit. As with all potential list destroyers, this issue must be approached with caution by the listowner team. False accusations of MBI may be as damaging to the list as a real case.

Dr. Marc Feldman, an expert on Munchausen Syndrome, offers these clues for help spotting possible Munchausen by Internet sufferers in your group:^[3]

• the posts consistently duplicate material in other posts, in books, or on health-related websites;
• the characteristics of the supposed illness emerge as caricatures;
• near-fatal bouts of illness alternate with miraculous recoveries;
• claims are fantastic, contradicted by subsequent posts, or flatly disproved;
• there are continual dramatic events in the person's life, especially when other group members have become the focus of attention;
• there is feigned blitheness about crises (e.g., going into septic shock) that will predictably attract immediate attention;
• others apparently posting on behalf of the individual (e.g., family members, friends) have identical patterns of writing.

Some individuals may sign up to the group as several distinct identities, posing as different members. These identities can be related, such as a parent and child, or may be completely different. List members who claim to have multiple personalities are rare, but several instances have been reported. Multiple personalities or online identities may take several different forms in your group, each causing its own set of problems.

The challenges of dealing with members who have authentic disorders are quite different from the challenges of dealing with a faked Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) case. When members discover that there is a member with DID in the group, they may feel angry, foolish, betrayed or frightened because the situation is so far beyond the range of normal experience. Some listowners report that fake cases may be more harmful for a group because of the added sense of betrayal.

In this case, a listmember subscribes multiple times to the same group, using different email addresses, and s/he pretends to be different people. This behavior appears to occur with some regularity in news or politically-oriented online communities, where members may create a new account to show support for a post they wrote with their original account. The multiple characters have been named “sock puppets” by these groups. The behavior is often discovered when the person forgets which name they are using and accidentally writes as a different person from the wrong email address or screen name. When someone does this to seem more popular or to prove that their opinions are shared by many, multiple identities may only be a list annoyer. When someone does this to gain sympathy, to bad-mouth other members without fear of consequences to their main online identity, or to otherwise stir up trouble, such behavior has the potential to be a list destroyer. ^[4]

Some listmembers may claim to have Dissociative Identity Disorder, causing them to sometimes present one personality and at other times present very different ones. The likelihood that the member has this disorder is low, as it is quite rare, but it is possible. Messages from such a member may be drastically different from previous messages, which can cause other members to become upset or confused. Membership may become divided on opinions of whether the person is faking or not, or regarding the level of tolerance for disruption the list should show to the affected individual.

Faking death in an online community is a behavior very similar to Munchausen By Internet. In this case, someone claiming to be close to a listmember (a parent, sibling, child or friend) writes to the list to say that the member has died. Even if the loved one’s behavior seems suspicious, many are reluctant to question any other listmember on such a serious topic, for fear of being wrong and hurting them. Many listmembers really do have relatives who join or monitor the same list, and they report on their loved one’s illness or death. On many lists this behavior may not be unusual at all, making it difficult to determine when an individual is lying.

The member whose death is being faked may or may not be a real person. Sometimes, an individual may make up an identity and then “kill” them. Sometimes, a person who really exists may fake their illness and/or death, either as an excuse to leave the list or to gain sympathy from other listmembers. Faked deaths are a possible outcome of Munchausen by Internet or multiple personalities, as a way to deflect criticism when suspected of faking illness or as a way to stop having to pretend to be someone else. In the cases of faked death reported online, it appears that the deception is most often uncovered when someone notices similarities in the writing of the new member and the “dead” member. One of the most infamous examples of a faked death (as well as Munchausen by Internet and the use of multiple online identities by one person) is detailed in the links below.

Recommendations

There are several famous instances of MBI. Below are a few links that LOs may find helpful. It is very difficult to deal with any of these situations, but reading about how others have dealt with it may provide ideas and/or strategies.

There are a few pieces of advice that victims of these hoaxes have for LOs and list members. First, some suggest disallowing raising funds on the list for any reason. Often members will try to raise Paypal donations for a sick/dying/dead listmember. By forcing members to do this on their own, LOs may discourage members from attempting to take advantage of their fellow members’ generosity in this way.

If you suspect a list member of lying about their intentions or identity in a way that may be harmful to the list, try checking them out using search engines. They may be posting something totally different on another message board, or there may be information that proves their identity. Keeping in touch with LOs of similar message boards is also a good preventative tactic. If someone is faking illness on your message board, it is entirely possible that they are doing the same on another (or have done so in the past).

Some listowners have an “unspoken rule” that in the case of a death, the person writing about it send a link to an obituary to the list. This allows concerned members to know where to send condolences, flowers, and donations if they like. It also prevents any discussion or worry about false pretenses. Since everyone follows the rule, no one feels singled out as needing to “prove” themselves. In addition, the obituary provides a real service to the group other than proving that a death truly occurred.

Some other examples of hoaxes:

• Rosacea sitehoax.
• Museum of Hoaxes: Kaycee death hoax.
• Kaycee Death Hoax.
• Doctor hoax.

In general, the list is a wonderful resource and support. However, the few nasty members make me more hesitant to offer certain opinions. I think the list should, above all, be a safe place to offer opinions in a respectful manner. I think the list managers should step in more promptly to curb hurtful attacks.

As the above quotes show, there is a happy medium between being too quick to shut down conversation and waiting so long that the list is undermined by a disturbance. Ultimately, it is up to the listowner team to decide the best course of action in each case of a potentialproblem. It is important that at least one listowner closely monitor the list at all times so that the team is prepared to deal with problems quickly after they arise.

A possible initial action listowners may wish to perform is to place a moratorium on posts on a particular troublesome topic. If it appears that a flame war is brewing, the listowner may be able to prevent it by invoking a cooling-off period in which no one discusses that topic. This tactic may be effective for smaller disruptions, but will probably not deter those who are passionate about a subject or who are unmoved by the knowledge that their actions may disturb the list.

Often, those who are causing trouble on the list may be unaware of the effects their words are having on others. By taking their concerns off-list in personal emails, listowners can prevent possible humiliation of the troublemaking listmember as well as a possible string of nasty emails if the discussion goes badly. Particularly if there is an argument between several members, personal emails may be a good tactic for resolving their problems without involving the entire list in an off-topic and potentially quite distracting discussion.

Particularly if the discussion with the troublemaker goes badly and he or she is removed from the list, it is best if this occurs off-list. Then, instead of a hundred angry emails back and forth being sent to the list, the listowner team can send one or a few emails to update members without derailing list discussion completely.

This action should not be viewed as punitive so much as a means of controlling what appears on the list. Once the troublemaker understands the system, it usually (but not always) is possible to take him or her off review status. The list member on review will almost certainly see this as punitive and unfair treatment. However, the good of the list—the needs of the many—must supercede the desire of one or a few people to discuss something which violates list guidelines and is causing harm to the list.

Many listowners do not use a moderated posting system, in which all messages must be approved by a listowner prior to going to the list, because it is too cumbersome. However, placing certain potential troublemakers on review, so that their posts must be approved but all others are posted normally, may be a helpful tactic for preventing flame wars and other problems.