Building an Online Community: Part Four – Take a Stand
Just about the only time that I see my co-admin is when we're out exploring, and even then it's pretty rare thesedays. But usually when we're out, we'll have a conversation to the side and I'll ask him his opinion on various things going on with the site. Generally there's some form of drama going on, and I'll seek his sage advice on it. Invariably, he'll give his opinion and say:
"But it's your site, you should run it the way you like."
It's taken me a long time to really "get" that simple message. You see, one of my biggest faults is getting upset, or caring too much, about whether or not people are upset with me. So running a forum is like walking a razor thin line - do I enforce a rule and risk annoying someone? Do I ban someone who is constantly annoying other users, or posting useless nonsense? What sort of fallout am I going to have to endure if I do ban them?
I recently banned a user who had about a two year posting history. He came on the forums and posted some interesting threads on the Long Island Pine Barrens. Hey, it's pretty cool to learn about new places, but after a while, it was just non-stop LI talk from this one user. He was uploading copious amounts of pictures onto the server, and every time someone visited the front page of the site where a random image from my image gallery displays on each page load, there was a risk that a user would see a Long Island picture. It bothered me, but I let it slide because I didn't want to offend anybody. Eventually I made a subforum just for Long Island posts, solely for the idea that if they were all concentrated in one spot, I could ignore them easier.
This went on for a while, but then the threads began to get worse. There was the one thread asking about why he gets sores in his crotch when he hikes in the heat. There was a thread where he posted pictures that he took of a girl without her knowing it. There were threads - always around Valentines - bemoaning his inability to find a girlfriend. There was the thread where he posted this link that went to a scat porn star's website for some reason or another. Still, people generally tolerated him, despite the fact that many people thought he was strange and creepy.
Then there were the "illegals." This user has a real agenda against illegal immigration, and if you didn't take the same racist stance as him you were part of the problem instead of the solution. He has quite a few videos on YouTube where he wanders through Long Island, pointing out anybody of Hispanic descent, and calling them illegals. He frequently calls them "fuckers" and other derogatory terms. Now, I don't really care what this guys political views are, but every now and then he would want to bring them up on the site. Now, I tolerate a good amount of off-topic discussion, but hotbutton issues like these just divide users and destroy any sense of community. They pit member against member, and result in long threads which just go back and forth with the same nauseating argument all the time. It's not just illegal aliens, we've seen it with issues like ORV use in the Pine Barrens. It's not that I really care to censor what gets discussed, but I do want to keep the site a good resource for people who are doing research on the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Having political threads up just increase the signal to noise ratio and foster bad feelings amongst all of the users. So, I asked this user to not post any more threads dealing with illegal aliens. To his credit, he complied with this, although you could just tell he was bursting at the seams to bring it up.
Finally, he posted a thread wondering why he couldn't lose any weight. It turned out that he was eating at Wendys quite often, and he seemed surprised that this might have anything to do with it. This thread was the straw that broke the camels back, and many people who just had enough with the guy turned out and mocked him. One of the users made an off-hand remark about his rants on YouTube and the user went ballistic, thinking that there was some double standard with what he could post and what other people could. This could not be further from the truth. Coming from someone who posted incessantly about the Long Island Pine Barrens, it's doubly ironic. He's the only person in the history of the site who was ever given their own subforum.
I ended up finally banning this user. It was like a wave of fresh air had blown through the forums. The user, on the other hand, decided to go to "war" with me, and a YouTube video ranting about me. When he found out that everybody -- including my co-workers who saw the video -- were laughing at it, he made a second video.
There's several morals to this story:
First, People run websites for one of two reasons. Either to make money, or for fun. NJPineBarrens.com falls into the "fun" category. I don't make any money from the site. People really don't know how close they were to having me close up the forums a few months ago. I was incredibly burned out, and even took a week off from the site to clear my head. If you're not making money with your site, or if you're not having fun with it, you should close it. Ultimately it's the admins happiness and attitude that reflects the most on the site.
Second, you can't run a website -- even a community site -- like a democracy. Like a politician, every one of the administrators decisions will be subject to both praise and criticism from the user base. The larger your community grows, the harder it will be to make everyone happy. So stop. Run the site like you want it to be run. Stop worrying about hits, traffic, or who you're going to offend, because invariably you will offend someone.
Sometimes great ideas come from disaster. One of the things I noticed while watching the thread where this user went insane is that people really seemed to want to have a place where they could unwind without having to worry about being topical or even sensical. Out of this came the "NJPB Hangout Thread" where people can post whatever they want - from serious posts to LOLcat macros - and not have to worry about anything.
Lastly, if you have someone on your site that you don't like, or is causing problems, it's usually better to deal with the issue quickly rather than ignore it in the hopes that it will go away. Had I discouraged this user from posting about the Long Island Pine Barrens, he probably would not have stuck around so long and the mess that happened would probably have not happened.
In the end, my userbase is happier that this poster is gone. My co-workers now make fun of me by mispronouncing my last name. And I'm amused to death that my humble website could have incensed someone so bad that they felt compelled to make two completely off-the-wall insane rants about me.
Building an Online Community Part Three: Henry Kissinger Edition
One of the most important parts of being a community leader is diplomacy. This is true if you're the President of the United States, or if you run a community website. You'll need to know how to intervene in fights, how to deal with "competitor" websites, how to defend yourself, how to moderate discussion, set boundaries, make rules, and most important, keep the place "loose" enough to make people not hate you and want to come back. You'll notice that this article is really about running a discussion forum, which is the heart of most community sites.
I mentioned in part one that I am a member of the forums on SomethingAwful.com. As of the moment I am writing this article, that forum has:
- 104,370 users, with 2,688 logged in right this second.
- 2,240,902 threads, with 58,878,342 individual posts.
- Banned 10 users today, and 6,960 users banned total.
SA has some pretty strict rules. As a whole, the community respects these rules. Those who don't get probated (banned for an arbitrary amount of time), or banned (they can't log in until they re-register their account.) In the worst case scenario, a user can be perma-banned, which means that they are unwelcome to come back, and if they make a new user, that user will be perma-banned as well. Given that it costs $10 to make an account on the forums, it costs money to be an asshole there. (And yes, that means that they have made over one million dollars in registrations over the course of several years.)
If I had rules like that on my forum, the place would turn into a ghost town. Why? Because what makes SA so popular is the wide variety of content, the (relative) quality of the posts, and the overall sense of community that they have. Most forums can't afford to run like that, so you need to be able to let things slide more.
I will admit that I am a bit of a control freak. I would prefer all of my users to post their posts in the appropriate forums. I would love it if people didn't post non-Pine Barrens related photos in the photo gallery. I would really love it if discussions were always relevant and on-topic. I'd be thrilled if people didn't post huge images in their posts that break the tables and make it so you have to scroll from side to side to see an image. It just doesn't happen that way. You need to either deal with these in stride (and not by banning or yelling at your users) or you need to not try to run a website.
On the other hand, if you have a user who is trolling your forums, being abusive to other members, and not really contributing anything to the site besides chaos, you need to take action. Give a warning or two, and then ban them. Be prepared to take abuse from that person through email, or field complaints by that persons friends (if he has any on your site). But the most important thing is to be firm and don't back off your decision, unless you're totally convinced that you did the wrong thing.
It's this idea of moderation (both in attitude and in keeping an eye on discussions) that is so crucial to running a successful community.
Another important thing to discuss is having help. If your site is big enough, or if you have a busy life, you may find it helpful to have someone help you out. Typically these people are either admins or moderators. Admins have more control over the entire site, while moderators can typically just close/delete/move threads, edit posts, etc. I have read that it's a good idea to only have one admin - yourself. Everyone else should be moderators, and if the site is really large, break moderators up so they only have specific forums to be responsible for. I generally agree with this principal. Certainly it makes it less risky for you, the site owner. If your other admin's account gets hacked, you could be locked out of your forums. If you have a falling out with the other person, they could cause you a lot of problems. I'm very fortunate to have someone I trust very deeply as a co-admin, but my experience should be the exception, rather than the rule.
Finally, don't be afraid to take a stand when you have to. I recently did a redesign of the website. In general, most people liked it, but a lot of people had problems, or complained about generally minor things. You could go crazy trying to make everyone happy, which is impossible to do. At the end of the day, this is still your website, and how it's presented and run is a reflection of you. Don't be afraid to not listen to everyone's ideas, especially when it comes to very subjective things such as design. On the other hand, if your community is in agreement that something you did was a detriment to the community (a bad decision, or maybe you redesigned a menu and now it's really confusing) swallow your ego and listen to their argument. Maybe what they're saying makes sense. It's always a give and a take.
It all boils down to this: Don't act like a jerk. Be cool, treat your users well - but don't let them walk all over you - and they'll come back.
Building an Online Community Part Two: If You Build It, They Might Come
Now that you've decided to jump in and build a community site, you need to figure out exactly how you're going to do it.
Back in the early days of the web, people wrote plain HTML files and uploaded them to their web servers. Doing that has the benefit of the site being really fast - the web server doesn't need to do any processing or database lookups, it just hands the browser the file. The problem is of scale. The very first versions of the site that would eventually evolve to NJPineBarrens.com were coded like this, way back in 1998 or so. Even then, without a lot of content, it became difficult to maintain an ever growing number of static HTML pages. Quite often you'd get into a situation where a minor change to a menu, for example, would require the same change be made to several dozen files. Without good QA, it's easy to miss files, and eventually you're looking at having a site that has a number of bad links, typos, or has an inconsistent look and feel.
Enter the database driven web site. These types of sites often have a smaller number of static HTML pages, and all (or most) content is stored in a database. Generally these types of software have templates that you edit to establish your look and feel, which means that if you want to change colors, or add a menu option, you only do it in one place. Most larger websites now run using software that fetches content out of a database. The really good thing is that a lot of this software is free, open source software that is relatively easy to use. In fact, many webhosting accounts offer "one click installs" of some of the most popular software.
When designing NJPineBarrens.com, I followed the formula created by SomethingAwful. SA has a "front page" of articles, and a separate message forum. I also knew that I wanted to offer free image hosting for my members, so I needed some sort of software that would facilitate members uploading their own pictures to their own separate areas. Unlike SomethingAwful, I wanted to integrate the forum and the front page to more closely tie them together. (I would eventually stop trying to do this.) I needed a content management system for the articles, a forum software for the message forums, and a gallery software for the uploaded images. I ended up choosing Postnuke for the CMS, pnPHPBB (a modified version of phpBB specifically for Postnuke powered sites) and Menalto Gallery (since it also integrates in with Postnuke) for the image gallery.
I don't want to give the impression that this is the only way to go. You can build a community website without forums, although it's much harder. You can build a community website without a front page, although I wasn't interested in just running discussion forums. Blogging software such as WordPress is one of the newest vehicles for community building, offering you the webmaster a vehicle for rapidly posting new content, and users the ability to leave feedback as comments on articles. I'm a huge fan of WordPress now, since it can be molded into doing anything from a blog software to a content management system by a relatively decent sysadmin.
Over the course of several days in September of 2002 I set up my site, integrated the three pieces of software together, and designed the look & feel for the site. In part one of this series I said that I am not a web designer, and I stand by that statement. I'm fortunate to have a good eye for design, and unfortunate to be very OCD about the look of my websites. I wasn't happy until the site looked professional enough -- this is one of the aspects of the site that I believed help draw people in the early days. I was competing against a very well designed and beautiful website, so mine had to look equally as good. (It didn't, but it was close.) I wanted a site that didn't look like someone in their early twenties made it, yet was fresh, vibrant, and easy to use. I have been designing websites since 1994 or so, so I have enough background in design to understand what works and what doesn't work, and more importantly, how to make it work. In all honesty, if you're unfamiliar with HTML, PHP, CSS, or any of the other numerous web languages, you're better off hiring someone to do the design work. You'll spend far less of your own time and the results will be well worth it -- providing you hire a good designer.
The next aspect of building your community is getting the word out. On all of the forums I was a member on, I added a link to the site in my signature file. That meant that every post I made had a somewhat small, inconspicuous link back to my site. I got the bulk of my early visitors from that method, although I felt really bad about using someone else's site as a vehicle to promote mine. I eventually stopped posting in the two other Pine Barrens community websites and devoted myself exclusively to my own. In the long run this worked out, and I believe was the "best" thing to do -- I know I'd be upset if someone came on my website and started posting links to their own new Pine Barrens website. Eventually, having enough content and enough people linking back to various articles on my site brought the site's ranking high enough in Google to put me within the top four entries for most Pine Barrens searches in Google.
It took several years for NJPineBarrens.com to get this big, and there were a number of times that I was extremely discouraged by the lack of progress that it had made. Just because you built it, doesn't mean that they will come. There's any number of reasons why people may not be attracted to your site - anything from it being an ugly design to the personality you convey online. Quite often, it just takes time. During this time, you should focus on adding as much content to your site as possible.
Over the years I have changed the software that has run the site (Postnuke to Mambo to Joomla to WordPress, PNphpBB to phpBB to vBulletin, Menalto Gallery to Coppermine Gallery to PHP PhotoPost Pro) several times. This was mostly to add various features or address security concerns. I've also changed the overall design a number of times, which is probably one of the worst things you can do, and is my biggest fault as a webmaster.
First, by changing things around too much, you risk breaking the URL's that Google knows about, so if a visitor comes along and tries to access an article they found on your site though Google, they could get a 404 (internet speak for page not found) error. Not only that, but if you change too much stuff around, you can make it hard for people to find and re-read articles they have run before. Finally, as the site grows and you get a number of people who have been with you a long time, you'll find that there are people who don't take to change well, and will complain when you make too many changes. In a lot of ways, they're right -- you have a good design, why change it? It's hard to argue with that logic.
In my next article, I'll be going into running the actual community, and showing you how to walk the tightrope of making people happy.