A rule enforced without being explained

On July 30, Front Porch Forum declined to publish a submission of mine under section 2.6 of its Terms of Use, and asked me not to post about the Washington Central vote for a week. Its stated basis was six postings I had made that month.

Those six covered four subjects: whether school board members were carrying out duties required of them by statute; district debt and deferred building maintenance; state and federal outcomes data; and the ballot question itself. Section 2.6 reads, in full: "You agree not to repeatedly post the same or similar content, or dominate the discussion." I do not see how the first half applies.

I tagged three of the six "Election." One of those three took no position on the ballot question — it compared Washington Central's results against figures tracked by the state, the federal government, and a research group at Stanford. I tagged it anyway, because it bore on the vote, and because a neighbor who wants nothing to do with the election should be able to see that tag and scroll past. I labeled generously so people could opt out. Front Porch Forum then counted more postings than I had tagged, without saying which, and without saying what else it would count.

I asked four times what the standard is. Over what period, and across what range of subject matter, is "the same topic" measured? How many postings in how many days is too many? I asked first so I could stay inside the line, and later because I had begun to wonder whether the line moved. Each reply restated the section number. On August 5 the chief executive told me he had reviewed the file with colleagues, stood by the decision, again declined to state the standard, and noted that further violations could close my account. I told Front Porch Forum I would write about this in the absence of an answer. None came.

That leaves the second half of 2.6: dominating the discussion. The digests are in every subscriber's inbox and anyone can count. Other members posted on election topics, often in support of a specific agenda or candidate, more frequently and in a shorter time frame than I did. I was asked to stop. They were not. How does a member dominate a discussion in which others post more often than he does? I have asked four times. Front Porch Forum has not said.

When I described this publicly, Front Porch Forum declined that posting too, under section 2.21: "You agree not to misrepresent FPF's policies or actions." I was not told what I had gotten wrong. A rule against misdescribing the company, used to decline a description of the company, with no correction offered, is not a standard. It is a way of ending the conversation.

Separately, several residents have told me they marked postings to be shared with neighboring Forums and later found that sharing switched off. Front Porch Forum told me election postings are not shared across Forums by default. That does not explain what those residents described, because the postings in question were not tagged Election. And if it is a matter of defaults, a checkbox that does nothing is worse than no checkbox at all.

Front Porch Forum reaches more than half the households in this town. It calls itself essential civic infrastructure, it is a Vermont Public Benefit Corporation by its own election, and it told me in writing on August 4 that it is nonpartisan. Those are the grounds on which I had taken its judgment on trust.

Days before a vote, a rule that can be enforced without being explained is indistinguishable from one applied selectively. In a town where a single service reaches most households, that is not a small thing.