In a surprising fit of community management, the owners of Faceparty shut their site down for the day whilst they went to the zoo. In place of the site they posted the page reproduced here (click on the image for the full size version). Whilst probably not the most conventional method of dealing with criticism from an online community, you have to admire their honesty. A few points came to mind whilst mulling over the contents of this page.

• The site is not run as a business, the owners have no legal obligation to satisfy the demands of the people using the site
• From my own experience of managing an online community, this sort of criticism can be extremely frustrating and requires the thickest of skins to avoid a reaction like the one demonstrated here
• This probably seems a lot worse to those of us who have never seen Faceparty, the language and attitude of this page are fairly in-keeping with the normal style of the site.
• This response was not entirely a knee-jerk reaction, somebody took some time to put together the page, so there must have been some thought put into whether it was a good idea or not.

Overall I think it’s a brave or possibly brash thing to do although I don’t think it will earn them much Whuffie. As pointed out, the site is run as a hobby, the owners can do whatever they like with it. I couldn’t imagine Facebook shutting down for the day because of complaints, or the Twitter fail whale getting a speech bubble containing a stream of expletives. Mind you, it could happen, only time will tell.