If you use Facebook, we invite you to join our new group to discuss, learn and share information, thoughts and ideas about community media.
Given recent controversies about Facebook’s management of user data you might wonder why we chose Facebook, and why we don’t host the community on our own website. Please let me explain.
Our commenting and forum systems became a liability
We want there to be a community for our readers and listeners, and to some extent that used to happen here on our website, through our commenting system. We also used to host discussion forums. Unfortunately both of these systems became too difficult and time consuming to maintain. And in the end, they compromised the stability of our site.
While we did receive some participation in both systems, the number of useful comments was far outweighed by a deluge of comment spam from bots and break-in attempts. Despite our efforts to employ industry-standard anti-bot and anti-spam measures, the game of cat-and-mouse was sometimes overwhelming.
Towards the end of 2017 to the beginning of 2018 we experienced so many attempts to spam and break in to our site that it compromised our ability to be online and available. That’s what finally led to the choice to disable user registration and comments.
It sucks that a few bad actors forced us to make this change. However, we’re far from alone, as these sorts of attacks are pervasive on the internet. Radio Survivor is one of thousands of independent websites that have needed to take these steps.
Luckily, we have Facebook. And, already, many of our readers and listeners use it, liking and commenting on our articles. It makes sense, then, to meet people where they are.
What about other commenting or community options on the site?
We have investigated and experimented with several third-party commenting systems (like Disqus) but have been unable to get them to work satisfactorily. Others require payment or subscriptions, and it is unclear if using them would be worth the cost, since our site generates only enough revenue to cover basic costs like domain registration and hosting.
What about other social networks or online communities?
We are open to having communities elsewhere online, although the questions of how easy they are to set up, how accessible they are, and how much time and labor they will take to maintain need to be addressed.
If you have suggestions please feel free to drop us a line.
We look forward to talking with you in our Facebook group.
