Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum set to reopen in stages after pruning

Skift Take

Some of the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum's bark was inappropriate, and now branches will reopen in stages. The adverse publicity won't derail BBC's potential sale of Lonely Planet, but it won't help it either.

-Dennis Schaal

Nearly two weeks after the BBC shuttered the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree travel forum because of inappropriate comments, the company says it will begin to re-open portions of the forum “over the next few days.”

In a notice posted on the forum homepage January 4, Lonely Planet says “we’ll be will be reopening Thorn Tree branches over the coming month, beginning with a number of our destination-related branches over the next few days.”

The BBC closed the forum around Christmas amidst reports that it took the action because of sexually related threads and other inappropriate language.

In its fourth update about the outage, Lonely Planet says it is “sorry” for the delay in re-opening the popular travel forum, but “felt it was important that any inappropriate content was removed and that we could put in place some additional moderation to prevent certain types of language and themes appearing again on Thorn Tree.”

Cleaning up the rogue threads and incorporating a new moderation system is apparently taking some time.

A BBC spokesperson has said that in the past the forum was moderated “reactively,” and this obviously wasn’t sufficient.

If the BBC is indeed looking to sell Lonely Planet or is seeking an investor, the Thorn Tree tempest certainly won’t throw that process off track, but it also doesn’t help.


Follow @denschaal

  • gabriele gray

    http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/news/1165734/Lonely-Planet-grabs/
    By the time LP is sold Thorn Tree will be almost worthless. The archive isn’t available, no searches possible, in Western Europe forum members with post histories in excess of 5,000 now show a couple hundred…who knows what happened to the older posts.
    While it is seen in part as fall out from the Savile debacle at BBC the fact remains that the people who oversaw each branch did not take responsibility (or were not told to) for the errant posting that happened on the untravel branches such as Your Choice, etc.
    The WE forum was pretty much self-policing and the amount time being spent vetting the past posts is a joke. If the search function worked, it would be easy to do a keyword search…of course it could be they have limited people to do the work and who knows what skills they have and what sort of background on travel so they could understand not just the discussions, but the context to some posts.
    I have seen a marked decrease in the number of people who were regulars….I don’t know if they’ve abandonned it as a good thing gone bad or if they’re waiting and hoping it will return to some of its past stature among travel forums.

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