photo credit: SmithGreg

I recently had a member on one of my communities start a thread to review a book, which he criticized. Most of his review was fair, but there were some parts that I felt were a little harsh. Still, it was appropriate for our community.

As an author, I do sympathize with other authors because when you really invest of yourself to write a book that means something to you, there is a vulnerability in that. I also don’t want our community to be known for unfairly harsh reviews so while the review itself was OK, I went ahead and replied to steer the topic toward productive discussion.

The next thing I did was to invite the author of the book to the community. I told him about the discussion that was occurring on the community and made clear what was being said. I explained what our community was about – that it is a friendly, respectful community – and encouraged him to join to offer his thoughts.

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photo credit: mikecogh

In a perfect world, the members of your online community would contact you through the method that you direct them toward.

But, this isn’t a perfect world and you can’t expect that people will always do so. Going beyond that, you can’t really be angry if someone contacts you through a publicly available email address or instant messenger username. Well, you can, but I don’t know if there is any purpose.

Instead, what you should do is direct them back to the appropriate channel by contacting them through it. For example, I prefer the private message system on our community for most sensitive issues. If this is one of those instances, then I might respond to an email or instant message conversation and say that I am going to continue the conversation through the private message system and then do so immediately, answering their inquiry.

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photo credit:
kristin_a (Meringue Bake Shop)

Today is my birthday and, as with every birthday for the last however many years, I have received a bunch of email messages from communities (seemingly all powered by vBulletin) wishing me a happy birthday.

I no longer visit most of these and the email didn’t make me visit them again. Some of them I simply registered on to post a quick thank you or ask a question.

This got me to thinking about how you can celebrate member birthdays on your community. To celebrate it, you have to know it – so, you have to ask your members for the month and day of their birthday in their profile.

Year isn’t important and even if you have it, you don’t want to wish someone a “Happy 56th Birthday,” just a “Happy Birthday.” People can be sensitive about their age.

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photo credit: Lars P.

In my last article, I discussed the danger of letting community guideline violations slide and how, if you let a violation go without the proper attention, you may be risking one of the most important elements of community management: consistency.

On Google+, Justin Kozuch, Lead Researcher at Pixel to Product, Community Manager at OSL Marketing and Host of 49Pixels Live, shared the article and started a discussion, asking community managers, “what tactics have you employed to create a consistent experience for your community members?”

I took the question down the moderation route, because that was the subject of my article and, also, moderation is, perhaps, the most important thing that we can do to ensure a consistent experience.

When it comes to moderation, there are a number of things that I do to help this process. Here are some of the big ones.

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photo credit: mikecogh

If you manage an active community, like I do, violations to your guidelines can be a dime a dozen.

Most of them are probably fairly simple – your garden variety spam, duplicate posting and what not.

Mix that in with some copyright infringement and some culture setting guidelines, like those to do with disrespectful comments and vulgarities, and you have a majority of what you have to deal with on a regular basis.

In the sea of violations, it can be easy to think “what does it matter if I let this one slide?” Some common scenarios where this may occur:

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photo credit: Sean MacEntee

Sooner or later, some sort of technical issue will affect your community over an extended period of time.

Your account will be suspended by your host, you will experience an impractically high level of load for the server you are on, a hard drive will crash or, perhaps, you’ll have some good old fashioned downtime.

It’ll happen. Don’t doubt me on this. Over the last 11 years of managing multiple online communities, I have seen numerous issues crop up that weren’t fixed in an hour or two. This experience has helped me to understand what a community manager can do to limit the impact of these issues and get things back on track.

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photo credit: @boetter

Support forums exist for seemingly every form of popular technology and even for most forms of less popular and mainstream technology. They can be dedicated to specific trades or areas of knowledge, to specific brands and products and more.

From web hosting to consumer electronics, from official communities to unofficial ones, support forums often represent the greatest collection of concentrated knowledge aimed at whatever it is that they cover.

I’ve participated, at various levels, in a number of them over the years and have run phpBBHacks.com for 10 and a half years and PhotoshopForums.com for 8 and a half. My experience has led me to believe that truly great support forums often share 3 specific principles.

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photo credit: music2fish2 (eric lanning)

ren asked: “What [do you] do when upgrading to new software causes a downturn in user engagement? How [do you] get it back?”

Thanks for the question, ren. For me, it relates to the general issue of change on communities and what you can do to make your changes more meaningful and widely accepted by your community. That is what I am going to cover in this article.

So that we stay focused, I am going to assume that you have given the change a lot of thought and have determined it to be worthwhile. If you have a staff, you have also asked for their feedback and improved the proposed change to a point where you are excited about it and are looking forward to rolling it out.

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I am one of the co-hosts on the SitePoint Podcast, a weekly podcast from SitePoint, one of the largest web development communities in the world.

Recently, I led a community management roundtable that spanned two episodes and featured Matthew Haughey, creator of MetaFilter; Sarah Hawk, Community Manager for SitePoint and Venessa Paech, Lead Community Manager for Community Engine, former Community Manager for Lonely Planet and co-organizer of Swarm Sydney, an upcoming community management conference.

The idea for the roundtable (as well as the selection of the people that would join me) came from SitePoint Program Director Lisa Lang.

We discussed topics like the evolving community manager job title, why forums matter, integrating various social media platforms with your standalone community, the gender diversity of the profession, the danger of community metrics and more. You can listen to the shows and read the transcripts on SitePoint, published as episodes 119 and 121.

photo credit: Danny Nicholson

There is a certain train of thought that suggests that as a member becomes well established on your community, that you should give them more rope when it comes to your guidelines and greater flexibility regarding them. In fact, it’s more than a train of thought, it’s a pressure.

As someone becomes more of a presence on your community, garners greater influence and becomes someone that you hopefully like a lot, the relationship can become more complicated than it was at the start, when they were new.

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