13
votes
Do downvotes affect the health of a small community?
Downvotes control people. Beyond that, it's really your decision whether "control" is a good or bad thing.
Many decisions in the architecture and UX design of any service come in the distinction of ...
- 363
12
votes
Accepted
What's A Good Member to Moderator Ratio
The short answer is: It depends.
The longer answer is that it depends on several factors of your community.
There is not a golden moderator to user ratio that can be applied to all communities. The ...
Andy♦
- 6,892
12
votes
Accepted
Astro Turfing to help jump start a community
The big problem with Astro-Turfing is that the questions may well be of questionable quality or not even real questions at all. This is because you are sitting there thinking of theoretical issues ...
- 6,565
12
votes
Accepted
How should a tech company communicate on Twitter?
Fortunately, you have an advantage here. By stating that you just want to appeal technical users, you don't have to break down everything on a non-technical level. This will make the communication way ...
- 3,785
11
votes
How can I encourage and promote community moderation?
I'm elaborating on ChrisF's answer of building in moderation tools. This is important. But, that's not all there is to it. Every piece of forum software I've used has the ability for users to flag a ...
Andy♦
- 6,892
11
votes
How to fill a dating site with users BEFORE the release?
Don't go the fake account route.
When, and it will be when, the real users of your system find out they'll be upset and angry and more likely to quit your site than they would if they thought that ...
- 6,565
10
votes
Accepted
How can I tell if a small specialized community is dying or if the long time-scale of activity is natural?
If the normal state of affairs is low activity (days per post rather than posts per day) then it's going to be difficult to prove that the current hiatus is part of a downward spiral rather than a ...
- 6,565
10
votes
Accepted
Can't ban and the physical world has no "ignore" button; how do we deal with a disruptive member?
Since his wife is already aware of and working on the problem, why not start by having a chat with her about the issues. She is going to have the most familiarity with trying to deal with his ...
- 5,963
10
votes
Accepted
How can I effectively moderate a something that's not yet a community, and prevent it from abuse, while maximizing normal user experience?
One option you haven't listed yet is invitations. These were used in the early days of LiveJournal and Gmail (among others) to control growth; they're also used (though easily bypassed) for Stack ...
- 10.7k
9
votes
Advantages to storing content locally vs outsourcing it to a 3rd party
The big advantage of outsourcing content storage is that you don't have to do it yourself.
Depending on your site and what content people need to upload you could be saving yourself a lot of disk/...
- 6,565
9
votes
How long should I give a community to develop, before killing it?
I initially voted to close this question as too broad, but then I decided to answer in the negative. There is no general formula.
At 8 days, you aren't talking about killing an existing community. ...
9
votes
Accepted
Effective way to manage a film production community
First of all, as you've noticed, a team of 70 unproductive and rude people can be much worse than a team of 10 focused and skilled people. You need to start letting people go when they cannot meet ...
- 2,729
9
votes
Accepted
Community rules as a barrier to entry
I get what you mean by "barrier to entry" You are saying that the rules limit seem too limiting to users when they first sign up. When I began writing rules for my community, I realized it became too ...
- 348
8
votes
Accepted
Increasing Engagement on a new Gaming Blog
First off, step back, and think about some questions.
What is the special thing about my blog?
Can I solely handle the gaming blog?
Am I up to partnerships, or ads?
Can I do some cross publishing, or ...
- 3,785
7
votes
What should I do if users on a related site continuously attack and misrepresent our community (including accusations of criminal intentions)?
To this good answer I would add: consider creating a page on your site where you (dispassionately) lay out the facts. Don't name the other site (why give them publicity?) and don't get into "they ...
- 10.7k
7
votes
Accepted
What should I do if users on a related site continuously attack and misrepresent our community (including accusations of criminal intentions)?
There are several different options. On the diplomatic side, you could try to talk with the owners of the other site about the problem and try to get them to stop. Make it clear to them that you ...
- 5,963
7
votes
How can I encourage and promote community moderation?
Build in the moderation tools to the everyday use of the site.
You'll either need a reward system so that you can automatically detect those users that are participating well (like the reputation on ...
- 6,565
7
votes
Accepted
How can I create a community around my Twitch livestreams?
I have to disappoint you.
You're asking the question regarding building up an audience. A lot of streamer and people who operate in the same business, e.g. youtuber, have the exact same troubles as ...
- 3,785
7
votes
How to fill a dating site with users BEFORE the release?
You can do fake profiles, but be very clear that they are examples and rank them lowest.
When the first new users join the site, congratulate them for being "Founding Members" and give them a badge ...
- 1,800
7
votes
Decision by consensus vs deciding by yourself as the leader of a group
For lower-impact decisions, like setting a deadline for something or (for a local community) choosing a restaurant for our informal get-together, I usually announce a plan barring objections:
I'm ...
- 10.7k
6
votes
Accepted
Reducing sign-up as a barrier to entry
One way to reduce the cost of entry is to not make people create yet another username/password pair that they're going to have to remember (and that you're going to have to manage and keep secure). ...
- 10.7k
6
votes
Do downvotes affect the health of a small community?
Small communities are small. Therefore everybody knows everyone. People can grow closer due to this behaviour because the probability to interact with the same user more than once or twice is higher. ...
- 3,785
6
votes
Accepted
How can I effectively moderate a chatroom without always being there?
I notice you've tagged IRC, so here are some IRC-centric ways to solve your issues.
You could use +m channel modes to moderate the channel whilst you're away. This won't do much aside from prevent ...
- 557
6
votes
Accepted
How do you handle moderation with early stages of a community?
Make sure everyone that is participating on the community know the basic convivence rules and the consequences of breaking them up. That will give you the ground to remove the users that are ...
- 636
6
votes
Accepted
What should we do when a small community loses its leadership?
First, one of the most important aspects of community leadership is ensuring ongoing leadership by recruiting and fostering other leaders.
So, only knowing what you said about the original organizer, ...
- 1,800
6
votes
How can monolingual members of a bilingual online community be made to feel more welcome?
I have been in a trilingual coalition in an online game. It consisted of three distinct clans, one Russian, one Polish, one Turkish, each had its own armory, leaders and rules (and, of course, members)...
6
votes
Replacing Discourse and Slack with a single platform?
Discord seems to be tracking Slack’s development most closely in terms of modern and friendly UI. It’s free, which seems important to you, and if you use a bot I think you’ll get most of what you’re ...
- 131
6
votes
Replacing Discourse and Slack with a single platform?
I have found the winning solution to be integrating the chat platform with the discussion platform using either the relevant plugin for the discussion for, e.g. the Discourse chat plugin or some of ...
- 162
5
votes
How can I encourage and promote community moderation?
Stress the fact that you can't (and won't) read every single word written on the site, and that good moderation starts from good flags from the users.
You need to build a culture of flagging where ...
- 544
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