Large Communities

[Tommy Huynh]

For those of you who manage large communities (1000+) members, what are some of the biggest tips and suggestions that you have? 

I'm starting a forum that has a targeted user base. We're expecting hundreds of members at least. 

How do you deal with so many people?

What are the best ways to moderate and delegate administration? 

[nariadreaming]

We have 10,000+ and counting. And over 150 boards and sub-boards

My best advice is to have enough staff to deal with issues. In our case, that means 40+ mods and 10+ global mods, along with 4 admins.

You're not going to please everyone, and there will always be people who complain for the sake of complaining. Learn to ignore them

[Kami]

I no longer manage a large community but I used to; I think my exp. still applies (hopefully).

1. Make a distinction between 'staff' and 'members'; I don't mean in an aloof sort of way, but you need to figure out the best way to ensure your members understand that while staff members are also forum members, they do hold a position of authority. I had an experience once where a staff member tried a little too hard to be buddy-buddy with everyone after receiving his position. As a result, he was not taken seriously when trying to moderate threads and disputes and I had to step in. Eventually, he wound up being removed from the position due to ineffectiveness.

2. While I echo nariadreaming's suggestion of having enough staff to deal with issues, I also recommend adjusting as necessary based on your member count. Having too many staff members can also be detrimental to a large forum as not having enough.

3. Communication, communication, communication. All staff must be on the same page on policies and decisions. To this effect, clear & concise stickies on expected staff behaviour and responsibilities (I'm of the mindset now that shorter is better -- long posts tend to lose people in my experience, even staff). Back in our heyday (circa 2006-2008) we also had weekly staff meetings between admins & gmods via phone or skype to discuss goings-on on the forum, what we needed to adjust, concerns board moderators had, and so and and so forth, with someone taking notes on the meeting so as to type up the key points for a post for the board mods to read over. Even if there are still disagreements between staff members, the decisions reached must be in the majority (short of a word-of-god admin decision). Along the same lines, having a plan for if X staff member is unavailable is also very necessary -- eg: if the head admin is gone, then the deputy admin takes over, if they're both unavailable then the next person in the chain of command, and so on.

4. If you communicate, delegating is honestly really easy. In all my time as an admin there has been very little to no confusion amongst my staff on what their responsibilities are because I've laid it out explicitly.

5. This one will possibly be controversial, but I firmly believe large forums function better if there is an expectation that members know how to behave themselves. You don't need to hold everyone's hand, you don't need to have long and tedious pages of rules, you don't need to always take the time to provide lengthy explanations of why X rule is in place. I believe that forum rules (barring specialised rules, eg: RP character creation rules, or rules governing the content of a specific board, etc) should all be a matter of common sense; while rules are important, someone behaving with even just a smidgen of self awareness should be in no danger of misbehaving, even if they've never read the rules. I made the mistake in the early days of running things to try and hold everyone's hand and provide detailed explanations for every action and decision I / other staff members made, would repeat myself ad nauseum when a member misbehaved to try and 'get' them to understand why their behaviour was not allowed / acceptable, and so on; this is just exhausting and impossible to keep up if you have 1000s of members, so try to not fall into it early on.

I might post more if I think of it, but these are the big ones imo.

[nariadreaming]

Oh. Get used to dealing with the Asian spam that tends to hit support. We have been averaging 2-4 of those spammers registering daily. We don't have restricted registration because of the volume of real humans that want to join, so it's something we deal with

[Tommy Huynh]

Aug 26, 2016 3:17:04 GMT -8 nariadreaming said:

Oh. Get used to dealing with the Asian spam that tends to hit support. We have been averaging 2-4 of those spammers registering daily. We don't have restricted registration because of the volume of real humans that want to join, so it's something we deal with

We're expecting at least a few thousand members. Though, since this is a super niche group, restricted registration is enabled.