- Joined
- Jan 1, 2001
- Messages
- 60,183
The first step with managing a community is understanding that content is king. You might disagree with it. But all the bells and whistles to a site - the advertising you put into it - the marketing and funding, etc .. It all doesn't matter if there's nothing to read. And reading something that's not worth reading .. won't create return traffic or popular content. Content has always been, and will always be king. That and a few other things. How to manage this is tricky, and starting new, or running a 10 year old community it doesn't matter, sometimes you just need to share your knowledge and compare it against what you had on your mind or how you are running it. Who knows, maybe you can optimize your set up.
Ask yourself a few questions:
Do I need a staff section on my site? Why?
Do I need a report forum or an archive for my non-public content? Why?
Maybe I can allow content deletion, but do we archive it or leave it in place?
Can we outsource moderation to regular members, and trust them to not mass delete content?
Do we grant administrators with hard-delete permissions? Other team members?
How can I reward bad users for learning from their mistakes to get them back into the community again?
How can I reward good users for learning how to understand and respect our rules, or for simply asking additional questions - so we can improve our communication?
Do I need an announcement, information or news forum? And how do I handle the content?
- Will I have a newsletter sub forum, or post it inside the news forum itself?
- Will I have a site news thread with all the updates, or make a thread for every update?
- Should we even bother informing the users on our site with these updates?
What happens with popular content? What if a thread goes over a 1,000 replies? Do we close it? Create a 'round 2' - or allow threads to go over tens of thousands of responses?
How do I deal with critical mass, dealing with the digg effect, getting slashdotted or otherwise peaks in traffic? Do we scare away from it, or promote this and bring the content to our frontpage?
Which freedom or leeway do we give our regular, or more valued, or premium, or paying members? Where is the line and how will their actions affect the overall mood, now and in the long run?
Dealing with spam is obvious, or is it? Are you consistent with your moderating team on how to deal with this? Is the community involved, do we create drama about every deleted post that potentially wasn't a real spam user or keep it quiet?
Banned users, public or private processing, do we explain the actions to the users or otherwise deal with it?
Content is written by their authors, the visitors of your site (or your team members). They agree to have content become your property (unless otherwise mentioned). So you are free to duplicate their contributions within your property (your sites) and you're free to edit it within reason (for moderation purposes for example) or to move/delete it for whatever reason (move to archive, or soft/hard delete it). You have to know what you are expecting, how tight your moderating is, how public your expression about staff decisions are, and how to deal with traffic, peaks in traffic and the consequences in short term and long term for the site.
Ask yourself the questions about deleting content, pruning content, archiving content and moderating content. These actions and decisions on how to deal with it shape the mood on your site, creates a stable community when done right, and shape the global community guidelines / forum rules.
Know what you expect from your site, let your users know what they can expect, and grow with the natural direction your community takes you. Allow for mistakes, be honest towards the community, and know up front what you want, how to deal with it and the consistency and openness with supporting guidelines and trained staff, and properly managed content, will help the community to grow towards a direction you can support and in a positive manner.
Ask yourself a few questions:
Do I need a staff section on my site? Why?
Do I need a report forum or an archive for my non-public content? Why?
Maybe I can allow content deletion, but do we archive it or leave it in place?
Can we outsource moderation to regular members, and trust them to not mass delete content?
Do we grant administrators with hard-delete permissions? Other team members?
How can I reward bad users for learning from their mistakes to get them back into the community again?
How can I reward good users for learning how to understand and respect our rules, or for simply asking additional questions - so we can improve our communication?
Do I need an announcement, information or news forum? And how do I handle the content?
- Will I have a newsletter sub forum, or post it inside the news forum itself?
- Will I have a site news thread with all the updates, or make a thread for every update?
- Should we even bother informing the users on our site with these updates?
What happens with popular content? What if a thread goes over a 1,000 replies? Do we close it? Create a 'round 2' - or allow threads to go over tens of thousands of responses?
How do I deal with critical mass, dealing with the digg effect, getting slashdotted or otherwise peaks in traffic? Do we scare away from it, or promote this and bring the content to our frontpage?
Which freedom or leeway do we give our regular, or more valued, or premium, or paying members? Where is the line and how will their actions affect the overall mood, now and in the long run?
Dealing with spam is obvious, or is it? Are you consistent with your moderating team on how to deal with this? Is the community involved, do we create drama about every deleted post that potentially wasn't a real spam user or keep it quiet?
Banned users, public or private processing, do we explain the actions to the users or otherwise deal with it?
Content is written by their authors, the visitors of your site (or your team members). They agree to have content become your property (unless otherwise mentioned). So you are free to duplicate their contributions within your property (your sites) and you're free to edit it within reason (for moderation purposes for example) or to move/delete it for whatever reason (move to archive, or soft/hard delete it). You have to know what you are expecting, how tight your moderating is, how public your expression about staff decisions are, and how to deal with traffic, peaks in traffic and the consequences in short term and long term for the site.
Ask yourself the questions about deleting content, pruning content, archiving content and moderating content. These actions and decisions on how to deal with it shape the mood on your site, creates a stable community when done right, and shape the global community guidelines / forum rules.
Know what you expect from your site, let your users know what they can expect, and grow with the natural direction your community takes you. Allow for mistakes, be honest towards the community, and know up front what you want, how to deal with it and the consistency and openness with supporting guidelines and trained staff, and properly managed content, will help the community to grow towards a direction you can support and in a positive manner.
