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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YouTube comments have a terrible reputation and deservedly so. YouTube is massive and there are a lot of people posting nasty and offensive things on the website.

At the same time, even though this is true, we don’t have to reserve ourselves to accepting this as the norm in the comments sections for our own videos. It comes down to what your standards are, how much you care and how much you are willing to work.

Soda Tasting, my 5 day a week soda review show, is now more than 6 months old and the majority of the comments made regarding my videos have been made on YouTube. I wasn’t 100% sure what to expect, but so far it hasn’t been that bad.

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photo credit: bradleygee

April 1 has come and gone and, besides the fact that I need to work on my taxes, that also means April Fools’ Day has happened. Every year, I consider what I might want to do, discuss it with my staff (if applicable) and execute it. It’s almost like a feature of the community, when people expect it.

On KarateForums.com, we announced a brand new etiquette policy. This policy detailed how members on our community should address senior members – those with 1,000 or more posts and members of our staff. If a member has 1,000 or more posts, they must be addressed as sir or ma’am. But before you can reply to them, you must privately request permission from the senior member. Once approved, you may respond.

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photo credit: Trinity

Alex Papworth runs a premium member community and recently asked if I would talk about how you can encourage your members to participate in your community without annoying them.

“I’m keen to encourage participation,” he writes. “Especially to ensure people feel they are getting value but I don’t want to push people when they have busy lives and become a ‘nag.’ Do you have any suggestions on how I could manage this balance?”

Thank you for sharing this with me, Alex. When we talk about encouraging people to participate without annoying them, I think there are two things that you need to consider carefully.

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photo credit: chuckychoi

“Don’t Yuck My Yum” is the title of a recent episode of a show with ze frank. On it, Frank talks about moments in his life where he has liked something that was otherwise harmless, only to have people suggest to him that he should stop liking it.

“The yum getting yucked is when you like something harmless – and harmless is the trick here and leads to my confusion – when you like something harmless and someone tells you to stop liking it,” he explains.

I think we’ve all experienced those moments where we like something – a song, a TV show, a movie – and had someone tell us, either with their words or the expression on their face, that they thought the thing we liked was terrible and/or embarrassing. And, certainly, we’ve probably done it to other people.

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photo credit: Caden Crawford

My friend Jared W. Smith recently sent me a link to and asked for my thoughts on an article on TechCrunch by Sarah Perez, “The Best Platform for Online Discussion Doesn’t Exist Yet.”

Ms. Perez laments the current state of online comments and discussion, saying that TechCrunch has been missing the “sense of community that blog comments once provided.” Hence their switch to Livefyre. “But there’s no system alive that can bring that [sense of community] back, because that era of the web is over. And it has been for a long, long time.”

Tired of short comments and noise, she wishes that more people would take the time to read an article and comment in long form. The proposed solution is some sort of system that tells you whose opinion’s carry more weight. Ms. Perez criticizes commenting systems for “competing on features” like crowdsourced anti-spam techniques because they don’t “really improve the nature of online discussion.”

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I am a big fan of “Saturday Night Live” and, as I thought about it, I realized that the cast of SNL has a lot in common with the members of an online community.

The show is now on it’s 38th season and, according to Wikipedia, the program has had a total of 132 cast members. If you look through the list of cast members, you’ll notice a lot of names that you know, but also many that you don’t.

The changes that occur with the SNL mirror the changes that your online community experiences with membership.

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For more than 6 years, I have wanted to start a web video show focused on reviewing soda. I love soda and I am passionate about it. This summer, I finally acted on those aspirations when I launched Soda Tasting.

There are new episodes released 5 days a week and views to my videos are rising, slowly but surely. More importantly, I am having a blast doing it. So much fun. I’m interested to see where it can go. I have already released 60 episodes.

I believe that my community management experience aides me greatly in growing the show. In turn, certain things that have happened have made me think of strategies that relate to community management.

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photo credit: VinothChandar

This is a guest post from Richard Millington of FeverBee. For community managers, Richard’s blog is a great source of ideas, suggestions and observations that will make you think. He recently released his first book, “Buzzing Communities.” He has given me 2 copies to giveaway and I have decided to do a random drawing of those who comment on this post. So, if you’d like to win a copy, please comment below by December 12 at 8 PM ET!

Community guidelines don’t change the behavior of your members for one simple reason: your members don’t read them.

You can test this for yourself. Use Google Analytics and measure how many members visit your guidelines page. I bet it’s less than 1%. And the 1% that take the time to read the guidelines probably aren’t the people that are likely to break them.

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The more that I read Adrian Chen’s story about Violentacrez, who the writer labeled  “the biggest troll on the web,” the more angry I became.

Not anger in the sense of uncontrolled emotion, but anger as someone who has managed online communities for a long time and helped, in whatever small way, to establish this field as a profession. Most of that anger was not directed at the troll, but at Reddit. If you prefer, you can substitute disappointment for anger – they both work.

Let me be clear. Michael Brutsch, the troll in question, disgusts me. I don’t have any compassion for him. I would have fired him myself if he worked for me. His actions are deplorable, his explanations are ridiculous. He is responsible for his actions.

This story is not an attack on anonymity because he wasn’t anonymous. The moment he told other Reddit members who he was, that anonymity vanished. He trusted people who turned on him and gave him up. Chen just put the pieces together – the pieces that Brutsch shared with others.

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