i wondered when this topic would come up.

since the moderator created the tribe and the participants joined the tribe knowing full well the moderators powers, i do support their right to delete an active tribe. any of the members of the deleted tribe can recreate it and attract the active members to the new tribe if this were to happen.

i do NOT support the idea that the originator and what we were lead to believe was the owner and responsible party is only a figurehead. especially if the tribe becomes "popular" and contributes content to tribe, i can see why tribe would support the idea that the moderator doesn't have the right to delete his own tribe, but i disagree strongly.

i imagine that it wouldn't really matter much in the long run in any case. a new tribe would spring up. the active members would migrate over to it. and, the old material (which no one reads anyway because the same damned threads happen again and again and again) has been trimmed down.

but i also know that what i strongly object to has no bearing on what will be implemented.

I don't see a problem with deleting an inactive tribe, but simply and abruptly shutting down an active tribe with a lot of members doesn't sound right to me.
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i am considering deleting all of my trites, including the active ones in protest of the new hypocrasy (i.e. flagging system.). and dthough i'd hate to do that to my friends i feel dthat trite.net needs a good kick in ass.

Gosh, could Warren's query have anything to do with this?

moderators.tribe.net/thread/...741f661e

Until now, selective tribe deletion has *never* been a consideration at Tribe.

Does Tribe get to decide ad hoc which requests will be honored, and which ones will be ignored?

Historically speaking, tribe deletion requests were honored in a timely fashion. Previous posters have made a clear case for permitting people to remove the groups they moderate, regardless of whether the group has 1 or 1000 members.

The protocol has always been that moderators owned the tribes they create and develop. I know the phrase "eminent domain" doesn't appear in the TOU explicitly, but perhaps it should.

If your new policy is to selectively disregard the wishes of moderators who wish to remove their tribes (*and* expropriate their content) please state this clearly in a public thread and update the Terms of Use to reflect this change.

It might also merit another cogent and adroit message from the marketing veep to let all moderators know of the updated TOU.

Q: “I think there's another consideration that ought to be included in this process--whether or not the tribe is "dead", or active.”

A: Actually I did consider this, and consciously skipped it. “Dead” and “active” are both opinions. If you base these values on “time without posts” there is still no regard to its historical and reference value. Once you make the decision to the rights of the community vs. the rights of the creator everything else follows.

Abortion is a pretty good analogy. But once you make the decision to go with it, then go with it *. If you want to put up a couple of road blocks to cause people to confirm they have considered their reasoning, then do it. In family planning I suspect they ask a bunch of questions, have you talk to some counselor, and then you pick up some form that lets you do what you wanted to do in the first place.

For example, there is this new (for me) feature of assigning another moderator. But it seems more efficient to have multiple moderators. A healthy system would have this. Separately, when closing down a tribe, all moderators need to agree. Or, thought separately, the last moderator out the door needs to turn everything off, being offered that one last chance to pass the torch to someone else on the way out. I won’t detail out how a moderatorless system works, although in the spirit of community software, I think all soc-net systems should have this feature as well.

* While Shatter expresses himself in a less than friendly/diplomatic manner, I would have to say it is driven by his strong passion. Once you get past the attacks and the Tasmanian devil delivery, his content is to the point, so I don’t think he can be called a Troll.