The primary purpose of both AFOM and MOOTWeb is communication between the respective members. This communication can be to make plans or discuss serious topics, and it is often to discuss fun, amusing, or just silly ideas. Both communities provide a way for a group of friends to share ideas and feelings, and Pretty much any kind of idea that can be shared between friends has probably been shared at some time or another on MOOTWeb or AFOM.
A frequent and practical use of the communication on AFOM and MOOTWeb is that of making plans. The members of both communities often get together in real life, and the two media are excellent ways to discuss plans. When posting plans to AFOM, it has the advantage of always reaching every member of the community. On MOOTWeb, often only a few members of the community are present at one time for a discussion, so plans may need to be discussed several times to make sure that everyone knows what is happening. On the other hand, the real-time aspect of MOOTWeb makes discussions about plans much faster than on the mailing list. So long as all those concerned about the plans are logged in and present for the discussion on MOOTWeb, plans can often be finalized in minutes. On AFOM, it is reasonable to expect that it will take at least one day for everyone on the list to read a message and respond to it. Often it will take even longer. So, when making plans on AFOM, it is often necessary to start days or even weeks in advance to allow the adequate time for discussion.
Members often come into information either when surfing the Web or in the form of email forwards or even through outside, non-Internet sources, and they sometimes wish to share this information with other members of the community. Both AFOM and MOOTWeb are used for sharing this information, but in different ways. On AFOM, it is possible to send an entire email forward, or an entire article from the WWW. This is not really an option on MOOTWeb. The largest amount of text that it is reasonable to post on the MOO is about a paragraph, and even then, a single sentence at a time is the norm. Larger amounts of text disrupt the flow of conversation and interaction on the MOO. Instead, it is frequent practice for members of MOOTWeb to simply tell other members the URL for an article. This allows people to look at the article at their discretion, and does not flood their screen with text that they might not want to read.
Of course, another purpose of communication is simply to discuss different ideas. Discussions of various topics occur frequently on AFOM and MOOTWeb. Again, the real-time property of MOOTWeb is often an advantage in these circumstances. The disadvantage MOOTWeb has when compared to AFOM is that several conversations can be going on in the same room, and the burden is on the members to separate the conversations. On AFOM, different conversations will follow different threads, and will be separated into different emails.
More involved conversations on AFOM have the disadvantage of generating a large amount of email. What happens is that a single person will send out a message, then several people will reply to that message. Then several people will reply to each of those messages. The result is an exponential growth in the amount of email. In actuality, the amount of email when discussing a topic does not grow by powers of 20 (the approximate number of subscribers to AFOM at present), but the effect is still the same, to a smaller extent. A recent email to AFOM about the popular phenomenon Pokemon generated a discussion that spanned several threads about religion and religious tolerance. These threads encompassed well over 100 emails. As valid as everyone's point of view is, it can still get tiresome to read this many emails on variations of the same few topics. Such long running, in depth topics do not happen all the time, but they have occurred more than once in AFOM's history. Luckily, AFOM seems to tire of the topics after a while, and it moves onto new topics on its own accord.
MOOTWeb also has the purpose of providing an environment in which members of the community can experiment with building and programming in the MOO. Not every member of the community is granted a programmer bit right from the start, but there are fairly simple channels to acquire the added permissions for building and then programming. In addition to building and programming, members of the community have the opportunity to talk with the wizards about the policies and procedures on the MOO. The wizards do have the final say in all circumstances, but they are not facist in how they run the MOO.
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This page was created by Mathew Corthell for the course Computers and Society in the fall of 1999 at Northeastern University.