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Research: Online Service Provider Assessment Project: Methodology: Message Boards
Review list of message boards to see if there are chat rooms where discussion of topic
or constituent issues is possible and appropriate. If not, determine whether policy for
creation of message boards permits creation of message boards on that topic and/or
for that constituency. Also, determine if
access to message boards external to the online service provider environment are
accessible, such as those at
http://www.gay.com and
http://www.planetout.com for the
LGBT constituency.
In existing message boards, recruit and train a team of volunteers to monitor content
for messages that are affirmative or defamatory toward the LGBT community. The
volunteers should file incident reports by cutting and pasting the messages from the
board and emailing them to an email account created for that purpose at the online
service provider, for example to OnlinePolicy@familyclick.com (see the list of accounts
already made in the
Online Policy Email Accounts section).
Have the volunteers
send the email to the online service provider account so as to preserve any codes within
the text, as used by AOL, and make sure to cc onlinepolicy@glaad.org in case the account
with that online service provider gets terminated. Incident reports should include the
date/time, message board name, and as many of the related messages from the board as
possible. If any attempt is made to report the incident to the online service provider,
the volunteer should record all attempts and any responses as well. If the volunteer can
make a screen snapshot of each part of the incident, that will be very helpful in
substantiating the incident report, so a procedure explaining how to create screen
snapshots on various platforms should be provided to the volunteers.
Determine which words from category G, category H, category I, and category J word
lists, from
Appendix D: Word Lists are filtered in the message
boards or result in notices of a violation. If there is a search facility for the
existing message boards, search the message boards for the category G, category H,
category I, and category J word lists, then file incident reports as appropriate.
Revision 1.000 of July 28, 2000
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