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Forums are a different beast than Stack Exchange. Forums encourage and promote discussion. Stack Exchange actively discourages discussions (see the "Ask questions, get answers, no distractions" section) and noise. Bumping old topics on a Stack Exchange site should be actively providing additional information that helps solve a problem.
On a forum, ...
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This depends largely on the nature of the issue. If he is being rude to other users, keep things professional and explain to them, through the most private channel available to you, that his rudeness is not in keeping with the guidelines of the community and that the behavior needs to change if he wishes to remain part of the community. If he doesn't ...
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There are two basic approaches you can take, the friendly talk and the big stick. They are not necessarily exclusive.
The friendly talk
With this approach, you post something like the following to the main thread:
This argument is not constructive. All it's doing is making people upset (or frustrated as they try to ignore it) while making our forum look ...
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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 rather than posting about real issues you are facing.
When Stack Overflow started they used this approach and if you can find the first questions, while they may ...
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reddit is one specific case that operates a bit differently than most other forums. There, threads are ranked by "hotness, which takes into account votes on the post and the time it was posted. As a thread ages, its hotness decreases, and the frontpage is in fact cut off at 24 hours. This is all part of designing a system that shows new content, rather ...
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It's best if, when deleting a message, a moderator explains why to the user, but sometimes that doesn't happen for whatever reason. The real opportunity for the moderator to change the course of events here came with the second posting (first reposting). Instead of just deleting it again, the moderator should have contacted the user, explained the (now) ...
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Disclaimer: The following answer is the result of a few days' investigation by a non-expert in the field, drawing entirely on publicly available sources. It should not be taken as a comprehensive review of the literature.
This question piqued my interest but I don't know of any data or studies that address the very specific comparison you're asking about. ...
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Private Communication
This sounds like a good time to speak with said person in private either through a private message or alternative communications.
I typically use this approach to community influencers who I don't want to moderate in public, but also need to get them back on track to following the guidelines. Speaking with them in private adds a ...
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Often the biggest deal is if it is adding something or not. Bumping a topic is often seen as ok if there is something significantly meaningful to add, however generally on a forum, the topic is discussed to completion and satisfaction of the community and a record is then kept of the discussion. Barring any major new information to add to the discussion, ...
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That "tracing bullet" theory is not unlikely at all. Automatic spambots often try to figure out how posting on the website works technically. They do that by entering a message into every form field they find and then re-spider the whole website to see if the input they made appears somewhere. This works better when the messages they use are designed to not ...
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One argument which may or not work depending on the venue is that colloquial, abbreviated, misspelled or grammatically incorrect English is hard to understand for non-native English speakers.
Bad grammar makes it hard to parse sentences. Where's the subject, where's the verb? What word is this word a complement of? A native speaker can often understand non-...
answered Sep 28 '14 at 1:39
Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
1,7601 gold badge11 silver badges29 bronze badges
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It depends.
Do you think that it is necessary? What is the age of your community? Is your community focused on answering question or hunting achievements then? These are question which you have to answer.
You have to consider that getting badges can result in spam and unprofessional answers. The age of your community is considerable too. Although you can't ...
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Reddit has some features that you can take advantage of to ease the transition. I'll highlight a couple that stick out in my mind as ones that would address your specific concerns:
User flair
You can enable "user flair" on a subreddit to allow users to assign images or custom text next to their usernames on post and comments. Here's an advanced ...
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One of the big factors in this why it's featured.
If it's featured to publicise some event then it should expire around the event itself. Either just before or during the event. How long before the event should you post the publicity? Again this depends on what the event is. If it's a real world event that will require people to travel and make arrangements ...
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I don't know of a tool that is easily integrated into many system. These types of analytic are built into each platform and the developers of each platform pick out important information for the most common use cases.
I've summarized several key elements from different platforms I've utilized. Depending on how skilled you (or your team) is technically, you ...
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As others have said, you can't get the leadership of a community to behave in a way contrary to how they feel like behaving. The most you can do is bring up the facts of what is happening to ensure they can't claim ignorance, but then it is up to them to decide how they are going to run their community (because it is their community since they are the one ...
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Related, yet different, to the previous answers is utilizing the "Groups" functionality of PHPBB. You can place your established users (or a subset of users that you wish to allow to vote - perhaps just those that are interested in the contest itself?) into a group.
Host your contest voting in a subforum that you've set up to only allow this group to vote ...
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Thinking in terms of how to help a new viewer of your virtual community become interested enough to continue reading, return, and become motivated to react or even contribute content is the way to approach this question.
Typical social media factors would apply here. What's an optimal percentage for your community depends on the nature of your audience, ...
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Unless your community has explosive growth from the start, you'll be starting with a community size that can be moderated by a very small team (possibly just you). However, since you likely don't want to monitor user interactions 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you are going to want some kind of help.
Are you working with others to build this community from ...
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We know that StackExchange discourages extensive discussions. This is not the case in some forums.
Sometimes people don't even care too much about solving the problem itself, but only the new things they have found or their inspirations from the topic. One could say they're more like chat rooms, but organized better.
On some forums, as you have said, they ...
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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 looking for except threaded conversations. I’ve seen some servers where they’ve been very creative about setting up categories of channels to facilitate tracks ...
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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 your own code.
Slack and Discourse win at different things - trying to combine their functions into a single service will likely result in several compromises ...
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Honestly, particularly for blogging and other content management platforms, it comes down to trying them out and seeing how you like them. The features sets are remarkably similar for most of the platforms out there, however the subtleties of how they implement features and how they flow differ greatly.
Trying out the platform, looking at how the plugin's ...
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Basically you can't prevent "drive by" voting.
It's perfectly legitimate for several people to share the same IP address - work colleagues, people logging in from internet cafe's etc, just as it's perfectly legitimate for someone to only log in from a single IP address. If there are multiple accounts then you can't automatically assume bad faith.
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