hi there -

it's 8AM here, but my kids woke me up early so i thought i'd chime in this AM. just as a reminder for those of you new to DS, i am one of the founders of this site (this is my personal account).

i've been seeing lots of rumors and accusations flying around the site since i jumped in last night, so i thought i'd try to just give y'all a slightly clearer picture on how we operate. I'm speaking generally here...not about a specific member.

1) DS is run by a small collection of people located in two offices in California (and a designer in Italy - it's a long story). most of our folks are computer developers and product design people...and we now have ~3 full-time folks who help out with member care. we spend most of our days focusing on how to bring DS to more people and how to best provide services the folks that have already found us. in the words of Kevin Costner in 'Field Of Dreams', we believe that "If you build it, they will come". Or perhaps "If you build it really well and continue to nurture it, they will come and stay for a while and tell their friends" (but that doesn't sound quite as dramatic, does it?)

2) Member care is not just banning folks - in fact, it's far from it. First and foremost, it's responding to member feedback - broken features, technical support questions, new community suggestions, etc. Member care is the entry point for all of your thoughts, which we summarize and bring back to our product and engineering teams to help us decide what to work on next. Member care also helps us with editorial duties, updating our Help information, and much more. We do it collaboratively and everyone is thoroughly trained.

3) I've said this many times, but it's always worth repeating - banning members is the last choice in any situation, and something that we do as infrequently as possible. When we built DS, we didn't even have that functionality, as we (naively) thought we wouldn't need it...unfortunately, that hasn't been the case, but we still prefer to talk to our members, and see if they can work out the situation before we remove any content or members. We're also well aware that banning members will always upset that member's DS friends, who've come to rely on this person for support.

4) When we remove content, our intentions are to remove hateful content, usually directed from one member to another. Sometimes you (as a member) can't see the whole story of how members are interacting, but when it gets out of control (as in direct insults or threats) and we're notified of it, we take action. One golden rule of DS, unlike other places on the web, is that we are a support community, and there's just no place for directly insulting or threatening another person on our site. I think (hope?) you'd all agree that there's not alot of "therapeutic" value in attacking someone else, especially someone who's already going through a tough time.

5) With all the above said, we always give members the benefit of the doubt. It's easy to say things in the heat of passion we regret later, especially when hiding behind a computer screen. So we try to send out gentle reminders/warnings, and it works about 85% of the time. It's rare (if ever) that someone gets banned for a single action on DS.

6) As for why we delete specific content, if we ban a member and see a history of repeatedly inappropriate content, we may remove all of a member's content. It's just not feasible to read through 2,000 messages and decide if each and every one is appropriate to be kept or removed - that would take hours, if not days. we may also remove a thread that has just "gone the wrong way", where the focus of discussion has moved from support to individuals attacking or insulting each other.

I feel bad that new members coming to DS are going to see this long post about the "underside" of DS...when so much that's so positive is happening all the time. All of these issues are small in the context of the greater good that we hope DS is providing to 100's of thousands of people every month.

this is the last post i'll be making on this subject for a while, as we have lots of other important things to do, and i feel like we've exhausted this topic. however, please don't mistake my silence as an attempt to avoid any issue or hide from the truth.

the kids are hungry for breakfast...happy new year, all...

doug