Avoid a culture of bitchyness
Unfortunately, it is very common for a website to create a culture of bitchyness if the administrators fail to discipline members early on. In the worst case scenario the bitchyness starts with the admins themselves, in which case the site is doomed to it. If the admins don’t know how to behave in a supportive manner, nobody else has a chance turning the site around. I have witnessed this with many websites. One that springs to mind was a community for photographers; the idea was to share your photos for “constructive criticism...
read moreWhy are Finns so easy to hang out with online?
Tell me if you agree (if you can). This is a thought that just popped into my head and I’m not sure if my hypothesis is accurate or not, but I’m going to share it with you regardless. Over the years, I’ve ran several Finnish language communities and tried to start at least equally many in English, with very little luck. I just realised, that from the get go, the Finnish communities have a different feel to them than the English, even though the same person – me – runs them. The same feel is present in other,...
read moreNewsletter magic
If you are running an active community online, you might have considered writing a regular newsletter, then debunked the idea thinking “Everyone is here already, what possible reason would I have for a newsletter?” Check out your statistics. How many of your members have logged in since they first found your site? Quite a chunk, I would imagine. Life happens, sites are found and sites are forgotten. A newsletter is a great way to remind your non-readers that you and your community exist. I started writing a newsletter for my...
read moreThe perfect set of rules
On the post Handling conflict on a forum I was pondering situations that put your discussion group in danger. One of the best ways to pre-empt a problem is to come up with good set of rules, that are easy to read and easy to understand. Most free boards and site packages come with a default terms of use, but practically nobody ever reads them, so they are useless in the sense of creating harmony, but perfect for covering your ass legally. If you can be bothered to read them through yourself, I congratulate you, I haven’t yet… So I...
read moreHandling a conflict on a forum
I’ve been running discussion boards of different topics for years… I would say since 2001 but I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve learned a lot of things, one of them is that no matter how innocent the topic, there’s always going to be problems with members not getting along – and it’s often your job to stand in the middle. The following is to ponder about how to handle these situations with as little interruption or damage to the board morale as possible. When ever there is a group of people who don’t...
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