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Men, how do you feel about the forum?

Men: How do you feel about the atmosphere of the forum?

  • I enjoy it, feel comfortable here, am happy to post anywhere

    Votes: 9 47.4%
  • Slightly offputting, but I'm still happy to engage

    Votes: 3 15.8%
  • Not comfortable, don't come here much for that reason

    Votes: 1 5.3%
  • Very uncomfortable, feel the atmosphere is toxic

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Comfortable but don't post much because I am busy

    Votes: 6 31.6%

  • Total voters
    19
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I had some things on my heart, but after reading all of this my heart is just heavy.
As I pointed out on another thread, the traffic on this site has changed greatly. More people than ever before exposing themselves to what is said.
But the focus is becoming the opinions of the offended.
Have we reached a stage of growth where we need to be all things to all people?
Does the status quo need to be what makes the largest number comfortable?
Maybe.
Polygyny has been the Wild West of Christendom, civilization may tame it.
Or Civilization may neuter it.

I don’t think all y’all see the possible consequences of changing from one style of ministry to another, because that is defacto what is happening.
It may be for the best, it may not be. But the laws of unintended consequences are a bitch.
What I don’t see being asked is What does Yah want?

I don’t think that I have anything more to say about this, those that presume to fix things are more eloquent than I and I would just be shouted down.
 
Steve, we're having a wide-ranging discussion here that is covering a whole load of areas. I am not going with any of the extreme suggestions here, and on the contrary, have made an extremely minor reshuffle of the order of forum sections in the hope of avoiding making any major changes at all. The adjustment I have made is so minor as to be inconsequential. No forum rules or guidelines have been changed, or moderator policy, or anything. Nothing has changed. I have simply shuffled around the order that forum sections are sorted on the main page, and could change it back tomorrow if people didn't like it.
Furthermore, such changes to forum sections have been made multiple times over the years - Andrew added extra forums, I have also, I've also reorganised things in the past, with no drama whatsoever.
There is absolutely no way I would change the style of ministry of this forum, as that is not my responsibility. I am a caretaker.
 
Where did I say that you are doing it?
 
I may have misread your comment. You said "because that is defacto what is happening", not "because that is what would happen if you did this". Therefore, I thought you meant that the reorganisation of forum sections I did a few hours ago was somehow a major change in ministry focus, because it was all I could think of that "is happening" that you could have been referring to.

Are you concerned that this "is" happening? Or are you concerned that it "would" happen if the most extreme suggestions made here were implemented?
 
There is a shift happening.
Your changes are merely in reaction to that shift.
 
What you see could also just be certain people who don't have much to say but also think that our 2 child society is a bad idea and we should encourage people to have more kids in order to offset the push back many Christians get from other Christians when they have more than 2.

Suffice it to say, that wasn't the gist of it.

By all means start a thread for the debate.

To start such a debate is not even on my radar. I don't think I'd even have anything to say, especially because I can tell you right here where I stand on it: how many children people have is a personal decision, but, in general, I say, the more the better! I'm all for being fruitful and multiplying.

I have a 50-year-old stepdaughter and a 41-year-old son from my first marriage. The marriage was a disaster, and I trace it all back to my extreme foolishness. Wreckage is too kind of a word for the result of that, and wreckage describes my relationships with those 'children.' My current wife and I have four children, which occurred after I'd done most of the soul-searching I needed to do after the wreckage of my first family. I would have been willing to have 12 children with Kristin, but she decided she was done after 4.

So I have 5 or 6 kids, depending on how one counts. That doesn't make me more or less valuable than men who have fewer children -- or more or less valuable than men who have more children. That has been my point from the beginning. When we laud men just for their reproductive virility, we sell them short and we elevate number over a great many other important male qualities. In addition, we give women the impression that their primary function is to produce offspring.

Being fruitful and multiplying is important and essential, but our Father did not just create us to be breeding machines.
 
Would it be sufficient to reorganise the forum main page so that it starts with a section for "Real Life", being all the sorts of discussions you outline, and then later there is a section for deeper discussion, but leave everyone with access to all? That way people can choose how deep they jump in and we're not offending anyone by saying "you're not ready for that", but they can stay in the first section forever if they like.

Wow. A lot can happen when one has to set aside participation for 24 hours!

I just made myself read through everyone's posts, so my following responses will reflect that. I'm most affected by what @steve has written, and I want to know more from him about what he fears is shifting, because I consider him to be our Man In The Cave At The Top Of The Mountaintop.

I'm increasingly concluding that we're overreacting to whether or not people are offended. I know I'm one who encouraged directing some attention to decreasing certain very specific behaviors for the purpose of not driving away single women who are sincerely looking to be under the headship of true patriarchs who are already married. However, my recommendations about Milk and Meat sections (a la I Corinthians 3:2) were not in reaction to this (as I believe that just drawing attention to those specific behaviors is sufficient to address them, as evidenced by the fact that those behaviors pretty much disappeared so quickly that by the time Rock noticed my comments he could find no instance of their occurrence) but in reaction to concerns about women (and some men) being so offended by 'rough' treatment that they would fail to stick around long enough to get help they may need.

Perhaps we should ask @nathan what he sees the online forum's role to be in the overall BF ministry, given that this entire thing is his and @julieb's baby. Absent further clarification from him, though, it appears to me that the evidence based on precedent is that the ministry is multifaceted -- and that the forum as it has existed is one of the more important secondary facets, the primary facets being meatspace retreats and ongoing personal fellowship, whether that be face-to-face or through phone calls, texting or even (shudder) snail mail.

So I lean heavily against doing anything that suppresses what the forums have been and continue to be: opportunities for full-bore communication, which includes everything from sharing key lime pie recipes to gritty theological debate about what role Samson played in Delilah's sojourn in the lake of fire. Furthermore, I believe that people feeling 'offended' should be far from our first consideration. The first law of behavior theory is that that which is rewarded will be repeated, and our supposedly-triggered snowflake culture already over-rewards people for feeling 'offended.' In general, the degree to which a person is offended tells one much more about the offendee than it does about the offender, and we will tie ourselves up in knots trying to figure out how to tiptoe around those who are prone to being offendees.

I therefore further suggest that we not really worry about whether offendees will be further 'offended' by being told they're "not ready for that." The average reasonable person won't be offended by being told that further benefits are available to full members. If someone is offended by being told that, then it's just further evidence that they're not ready for prime time.

This is why I recommended and continue to recommend that we restrict new people from having full access. I also recommend that newbies be required to go through a brief orientation with one of a small group of gatekeepers (I volunteer to be one) whose function is to make sure that those who want full access (a) have absorbed the bare bones of certain key concepts [a short, objective multiple-choice test would suffice]; (b) are not antagonistic toward patriarchy or biblical polygamy; and (c) are willing to take full responsibility for any upset they experience in response to posted comments they read in the meatier discussions.

The only problem is that the deeper discussions will continue to jump up in the "what's new" feed. I don't have a technical way to limit that unfortunately. But people who aren't interested in everything, if the forum is structured more clearly, may have no need to use that feed.

I don't see it as a significant problem that deeper discussions will continue to jump up in the What's New feed, assuming, that is, that when offendees and newbies click on those links they get whatever that message is that tells them that they don't have access. For persons sincerely interested in gaining access for reasonable purposes, receiving such error messages will only increase their thirst -- and thus provide increased motivation to complete whatever processes are necessary to get past Door Number Two, which for some will include having to address whatever rackets they're running inside themselves that cause them to be prone to indirect communication and/or feeling so offended by the words of others that they feel inclined to label themselves as victims.

Part of why we're here is indeed to help other people, but we do not owe to the people who need our help having to become Stepford Wives in order to do so. We're real people, and if someone wants our real help, it's not too much to ask that they ask for it politely rather than expecting us to politely beg them to let us help them.
 
It's easy to limit access to places. The problem is deciding what that looks like . . . Should people have read-only access to "meat" discussions, or no access at all? If no access, then this will disappear from the public internet and be no longer available as a resource to people browsing the forum looking for information.

This may represent ignorance on my part, given that I may not be aware of advances in coding since I was writing html code to maintain a web site back in the early 1990's, but could you please explain, @FollowingHim, why full members couldn't browse the full forum looking for information if newbies have no access at all to certain sections?

Personally, I don't really care if what we post on these forum threads is available for indexing by the likes of Google. I'm not going to get bent out of shape if a random person out in the ether does a search and finds posts of mine on Biblical Families, but my preference would be that they not be able to do that, so I'm unfazed by any restriction we might institute that might also make us disappear from the public internet, if by that you mean outsiders.

Just a thought, but what's the possibility of subdividing all this into two separate sites, one that's public and one that's private?

[Tangent: is everyone aware that there's nothing fully private about Facebook? I do a lot of extensive internet searching related to my business and some other matters, and I'm regularly amazed by how those searches will turn up Facebook sub-pages that one supposedly can only access by being an identified trusted Friend. Enter in the correct words, and one can find out what Regina Dotzkevekleviaoski's been doing with her latest paramour.]
 
Getting access to the next part can be done automatically (e.g. a certain time after signing up, or after they've made a certain number of posts, or received a certain number of likes, or whatever) - but that's frustrating to everybody as it doesn't really work for anybody, everyone's different.

I recommend against automatic access in any form. You've identified a handful of a myriad of reasons.

Or with an opt-in system, with people changing something in their own personal information to get access (but that's confusing and people will get very frustrated figuring it out).

Amen. Ditto. We can, though, provide a simple, up-front message that informs newbies that getting full access requires making a request to be granted full membership.

Or manually (only on approval of a moderator - but I really don't want to add that workload, and it's not effective as people will end up being forgotten and missing out for years while everyone assumes they already have access).

I agree that moderators are already being asked to do enough. Again, I volunteer to be one of a small team of people, or to lead such a team of people, who will provide some simple gatekeeping to requestees before they're given full access. [It's not that I'm dying to perform such a function; it's just that I think I should volunteer for the added workload, given that I'm the one doing the suggesting.]

Putting something like this in place would also provide us with an additional level of 'probation' that doesn't currently exist that could be applied to people who have already obtained full access (including all those who are grandfathered in at the beginning of its implementation). Occasionally we read of people being either rolled back to very limited access or booted out altogether. Instead, we'd also have the option of telling people, hey, you're a valuable member, but you're acting like you're being victimized by the reactions you're receiving to posts in threads no one forced you to participate in, so we're going to protect you from yourself by shielding you from some things for a while.
 
Furthermore, people lurk here for months, even years, and then sign up when they want to post something. Or their spouse is here for years, and they're familiar with the forum through them, then sign up themself to post something. If we limit everyone to only the "milk" section (for want of a better word), it just frustrates people who have been lurking, now want to post, sign up - and find they still cannot comment on the one thread that they wanted to comment on

I get that we don't want to unnecessarily frustrate people, but at the same time I'm a firm believer that it's highly inefficient to try to anticipate all the possible concerns of all the possible people into account.

Specifically, I'm not burdened by the frustration of long-term lurkers who suddenly feel inspired to post their wisdom or question about one particular line of inquiry but up until then haven't been interested in us getting to know them. I liken that to someone who spies on retreats for years or sends his wife or husband for years (getting full reports on every little detail of what happens there), then shows up for the first time, without notice, and expects to be treated as if s/he's been a full participant all along.
 
But the focus is becoming the opinions of the offended.

@steve, my prayer is that this is just temporary. I believe some good things will come out of these related discussions if we continue to listen to wisdom such as yours. We can stand some occasional self-reflection, but I think I'm in agreement with you when I say that I believe it will be a big mistake if what we end up doing is catering to the offended.
 
Have we reached a stage of growth where we need to be all things to all people?
Does the status quo need to be what makes the largest number comfortable?

Heaven forbid.

As Paul would say, may it not come to that.
 
the laws of unintended consequences are a bitch.

Amen, brother, but I think it is also important to remember that we are all likely to be paying such close attention that we'll begin to recognize those bitchy unintended consequences -- and we'll have the power to speak up about the need to do some course-correcting.

And you will not just be shouted down.

What I don’t see being asked is What does Yah want?

[OK, I can't resist: "Yah want" sounds suspiciously like that name we're not allowed to say! Are you trying to bait me into saying it? ;)]

Much more seriously, though: I think there are three main responses to your question:
  1. To the extent that asking what God wants is not being done by us, it certainly should be.
  2. It may be that, because, appropriately, most prayer is done privately between us and our Maker, you just don't see that the question is being asked even though it is and is reflected in the responses.
  3. My baseline assumption is always that God always gets exactly what He wants, so the short answer is that Yah wants exactly what is already happening. Yah has wanted the forum threads to proceed as they've been occurring. Yah also wants us to do some temporary self-reflection. And Yah will want whatever it is that we come up with and, in some cases perhaps, mistakenly think we came up with on our own.
 
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