>> BUT. This begs the question – who approved the photos to be in our stream, and why?
Ha, it’s like an Agatha Christie novel, you’re now down to 9 suspects.
This kind of thing is everywhere among Lego Flickr groups. A lot of them deal with it by either heavily moderating or limiting the number of photos somebody can post per day, or both. It depends on the scope of the group though and who’s running it; for example for the BrickFair group, they stopped paying attention years ago (Todd isn’t connected to the group) and so you typically have to scroll through pages and pages of crap before you get to photos that are actually from BrickFair. As a result, I hardly ever go there, instead using other sources to see photos of the events. We definitely don’t want that to happen to us.
In advance of BFNE last year, I created a group specific to that event and got Todd to promote it. My stated reasoning was that on the BrickFair group, the VA photos tend to dominate and it’s hard to find photos of the smaller events (which is true), but really it was so I could indulge my control-freak nature and moderate it myself to keep out the garage. But the other thing I did, which is the reason I mention is here, is that I also wrote a ‘terms of service’ blurb that you had to read in order to become a member. I can’t remember if we have one or not, but I’m guessing not; most groups leave that section blank, although I have read them for other groups. They are, of course, like all online terms of service, in that just because somebody checked that they read them, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they did. And I can’t say how well it worked because I only ran the group for a short time before passing it on to others (at which point I deleted out the rules except for one sentence), and it currently only has 17 members.
My original rules weren’t short (this probably surprises no one) but I thought they were clear and comprehensive, and despite the fact that I gave as wide a range as I could on what constitutes an acceptable photo, I had a surprisingly easy time writing them. What makes an acceptable Steel City LUG group photo is a lot more complicated. But maybe it would be worth it to put in something (I just checked, the Group Rules section is currently blank), it might make some people realize they don’t belong there.
