photo credit: huskyte77

It was 10 years ago today that Heidi, known on KarateForums.com as ninjanurse, joined my staff on KarateForums.com. In honor of this occasion, I wanted to share with you the announcement that I posted on the community to mark this occasion and let that speak for itself. One note: a Sensei is what we call a moderator. Here is the announcement:

Hello,

Thank you for visiting KarateForums.com.

It was on this day 10 years ago that Heidi joined the staff of KarateForums.com. 8 years, 1 month and 2 days of this she has spent as a Sensei. To put this in perspective, KarateForums.com itself has been online for 12 years, 3 weeks and 6 days.

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I tell people to listen to their customers and their community. You should. But what I’ll never tell people is to do whatever their community tells them to do or, worse yet, orders them to do. This is especially true for creative professionals: musicians, singers, actors, directors, writers and performers of all kinds.

I was reminded of this today as I was reading comments on the Facebook page of Robyn. Recently, she collaborated with comedy fake rap trio The Lonely Island for “Go Kindergarten.” The group, which I’m a big fan of, just released the music video for this song, which also features hilarious cameos from Sean “Diddy” Combs and Paul Rudd. I’ll include an embed of it in the bottom of this article. Fair warning: it is for mature audiences only.

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permanently scatterbrained

I always laugh when I see someone say that Sean “Diddy” Combs isn’t “relevant.” Whatever that means. As if time has passed him by and no one cares what he does.

I laugh at the irony because the self-important people that make these remarks are always vastly less “relevant” than Combs. Far less people have paid for anything they’ve done and far less people care about what they do now.

Combs is a master of long term relevance. Bad Boy Records, the music label he founded 20 years ago, is still around and is still producing hit music. Seemingly every other similarly sized, hip-hop focused label from 20 years ago is gone. That’s the way of the world. Success is generally fleeting.

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photo credit: Tracy O

I was browsing Admin Talk when I saw a thread titled “$600 for a forum without revenue?” A member named Soliloquy mentioned that a forum they liked was up for sale for $600. It has over 70,000 posts, 4,000 threads and 1,500 members. But it does not make any money as there has been no attempt to monetize it.

Online communities can offer a lot of value to people. Providing them with answers, helping them with a challenge they are facing and building strong friendships. But if you should ever want to buy or sell a community, the discussion will come down to monetary value.

With you talk about buying or selling a website, which is what an online community usually is, there are often revenue based formulas that are thrown around, such as 12-24 times monthly revenue. While it is OK to consider these formulas and even use them as a vague guideline, you should not use them as a rigid standard. Often, they do not equate to a proper valuation of what a community is worth.

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photo credit: timlewisnm

The other day, I was looking at the Twitter stream of an acquaintance of mine and I clicked on the username of someone he was talking to. I opened that person’s website and I found myself thinking, “that sounds familiar.”

It took me a while to place it, but then I realized that the person was a spammer. Or, at least, they had spammed my community previously. They had joined in 2007 and posted a few spammy messages, even going so far as to encourage people to click ads on his site or commit click fraud, as it is commonly called. I removed the messages and banned the account.

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I recently completed a full review of my own monetization efforts and I made the decision to turn over the vast majority of my ad inventory to BuySellAds, which I originally wrote about here in September of 2010.

What this means is that I have listed most of my inventory for sale in their Marketplace and that if anyone wants to buy an ad directly through me, I simply send them to the BuySellAds profile for my website (for example, here is the one for KarateForums.com). From that page, they can select the inventory they want, make the payment and upload their creative. All I have to do is approve it.

Previously, if someone came directly to me, I tried to handle the transaction myself with the aim of keeping a little extra money. But, when I thought about it, I decided that letting BuySellAds take care of it made a lot of sense.

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photo credit: Reeda

I have managed KarateForums.com since it was launched on May 21, 2001. I’m not a martial artist, and I’ve always been very open about that, but the site was my idea, I’ve been running it for more than 12 years and I’m very proud of it.

Something funny happens occasionally with new members. Because I’m not a martial artist, they appear to think I am dumb. For example, I recently had a member who chose not to believe a veteran member’s description of their experience in the arts. Which is cool and not uncommon. They asked some questions, which is also fine.

But when they didn’t get the answers they wanted, they grew rude and disrespectful and even started to become a roadblock on the thread, preventing the discussion from progressing in line with its actual purpose.

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When phpBBHacks.com turned 10, back in April of 2011, I hosted a live streaming celebration for 3 hours. I was joined by a co-host, a friend and former staff member of the site (Jared W. Smith), and together we spoke to a slate of guests that I lined up. They were all people who had contributed a lot to the community.

The very next month, I did the same thing when KarateForums.com turned 10. Except that instead of one guest host, I had 3 of them and they each guest hosted for one hour.

I ran these events off of Tinychat, where I was on video and I had a friend of mine (Jonathan Bailey) patch the others in over the phone (since, for the most part, they weren’t comfortable joining me on Tinychat or being on video). On the phpBBHacks.com event, my guest host was on video. For the KarateForums.com event, none of my guest hosts were.

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photo credit: Phillip Pessar

An escalation policy for your moderators outlines what situations need special handling and what should occur when they are identified. For an example, see the BBC’s policy.

The idea is that some things simply transcend normal, everyday issues. Suicide threats, grooming of children, etc. When they are identified what should happen? That’s what an escalation policy is. What action should a moderator take?

That action might simply be referring it to someone else in your organization who is more specifically trained for these issues. It might mean referring it to the administrator or community manager. Or it might mean sending relevant details to an outside party, such as the police. This will vary by your community, country, the size of the organization and what your lawyers tell you to do (if you have lawyers).

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photo credit: jo-h

There are no lessons to learn from this situation. Thank you.

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