Cleaning Up the Board

Founded by enthusiasts of the annual Burning Man counter-culture festival in Nevada, Tribe initially relied on users to place a "mature" label on any adults-only photos or content on their personal profiles. The site requires users to be at least 18 years old to join, but the policy is difficult to enforce and visitors can still view all of the content.

The community-policing rules changed in December, after a broad, pornography-related decision by the Justice Department left the company worried that it could be held liable for sexually explicit material posted by users and after advertisers expressed concern. "Our advertisers and our investors aren't particularly happy with the adult content there," said Darian Patchin, spokesman for Tribe Networks Inc., which runs the Web site. "We needed to do something that enables us to be a successful business and that our investors are okay with."

Tribe, a San Francisco firm that received initial funding from The Washington Post Co. and Knight Ridder Digital, announced that as of Dec. 20, 2005, it would remove all "mature" content from the site. Such discussion groups could continue to exist, but to only members who signed up for them. They would become invisible to everyone else.

That move, coupled with the "TOU Guy," sparked outrage. Some members tried to test the limits. Matthew Puffer, who uses the screen name "Mateo," started posting adult photos, just to see if Tribe would kick him off. (Tribe eventually blocked his server from accessing the site.) He posted lewd photos of "soft" pornography but also some of artwork that involved nudity. Puffer said the TOU Guy ignored some photos, but removed images of ancient Peruvian pottery featuring naked figures. "The way they implemented their TOU was so completely arbitrary, it was ridiculous," Puffer said.

"They had this whole period of being overbroad in what they were censoring," said Deborah Pierce, a former member of Tribe who left to start Free-Association. "A lot of Burning Man photos of naked people were being taken down. They weren't sexual. They were just of naked people at Burning Man."

The move told many members that Tribe had become something far different from its origins.

"It doesn't surprise me that we have really strong feelings" by members about the changes, Patchin said. As one of the company's earliest employees, he agreed that the company had changed a lot over time and that it had refocused its efforts to become a cross between MySpace.com and Craigslist.org, a Web site for free classified advertisements. But Patchin said Tribe is a business and ultimately has to be responsible to its funders.

As for the loss of some of its members, Patchin said the secession hasn't made a huge dent. Tribe recently had to lay off about half of its 25 employees as it put costs more in line with revenue from online advertising. It has more than 500,000 members, he said, and is still growing.