Editor: In this two-part post, Patrick Groome, the administrator for the Penny Arcade forums, shares some of his community management best practices. Part 1 of this post can be found here.
4. Creating too many categories
Over specialising categories is a common problem that manifests itself differently in communities old and new. It most commonly manifests as a gigantic front page, filled with every possible permutation of the community’s general topic. A community about games might have separate categories for firstperson shooters, thirdperson shooters, side scrollers etc, where they would better be served with either a category marked “Shooters” or simply an overarching category marked “Games”. Continued…
Editor: In this multi-part post, Patrick Groome, the administrator for the Penny Arcade forums, shares some of his community management best practices.
1. Not keeping the house clean
Perhaps the most important part of running a forum is perhaps the dullest. The daily, routine business of keeping your forum clean. Remember that every day is going to be someone’s first visit and if they see a forum strewn with spam and troll threads, this will be their first impression. Equally, if a new user has their post left in the spam filter for hours, they’re unlikely to come back and try again another day.
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Reputation is an important concept in online communities because it lets community members and moderators know who can be trusted and it allows members, who have invested their time and effort into building the community, accumulate reputation capital which can bring real-world benefits such as influence or employment opportunities.
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There are two ways of integrating your Vanilla forum to your website: customize the theme so that it looks like your website and point a sub-domain at it or embed it into a page on your website. (Like this.) Embedding your forums has the advantage of integrating your community forum with minimal theming effort but there are a couple drawbacks:
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Older, more established communities can have their own unique set of challenges. One of the biggest challenges for the community manager of a large, established online community is to overcome the feel of the “old boys’ club” and to make sure new members don’t feel excluded.
When a community has been around a long time, it has its own culture, its own stories and lore, and its own inside jokes. New people already have a daunting enough challenge just learning the ropes, but when they see nothing but a bunch of people who know each other, and who refer to things they have no connection with, and tell stories that they weren’t there for, it can feel the same as walking into a biker bar in a small town; the record screeches to a halt and everyone turns to look at you as you stand in the doorway.
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