Back to talking about the growth phase of online community development, the Excitement Phase where you're watching your numbers suddenly go up.

This is where you find out that the things that you didn't bother writing down because Everybody Knows are not actually the things that Everybody Knows.

I'll take an example from my game, which is a multiplayer text adventure. This really happened.

One day, you've got a few hundred active users and Everybody Knows that there's a fountain in the centre of town. You didn't write the fountain, it's a thing that players decided was there and started to roleplay around and they talk to each other and Everybody Knows about the fountain.

The following day you get linked from somewhere big and you've suddenly got two thousand people on the site.

Now, there's no fountain for a while. Because you didn't write it down in an FAQ, and the people that figured Everybody Knows about it are now outnumbered by the people who don't.

This is an example from game fiction, but the same happens for community norms. Hell look what happens here whenever Twitter does something stupid. Everybody Knows we don't do screenshot dunking for clout chasing here, until a few thousand people pile in and suddenly we don't.

If Everybody Knows, then WRITE IT DOWN!

Keep an eye on veteran users who are very quick to welcome newbies.

Keep two eyes on them if they don't interact much with other veterans.

If you see them invite newbies to a Discord or some other off-site comms where you can't keep an eye on them, get out the bloody microscope and cast out your feelers along the whisper networks, 'cause you might well be dealing with an unreported creep.

(don't let the community members know you're sniffing around the welcome wagon. Genuine friendly welcome wagons are an unambiguous good, don't jeopardize them by making them feel self-conscious or suspected of foul play.

Hey, I never said this was easy. It's a balancing act.)

A big problem with online communities is they tend to be put together by techy computery programmy logical people, and folks like that tend to assume that people behave rationally, that the things people do make sense, that there's some sort of order behind people's behaviour.

There bloody isn't. People torture themselves for no reason at all, and make you watch. Every five minutes some techy person starts an online community and is shocked, SHOCKED, to find that people are basically bonkers.

Anyway these computery programmery types reckon hey I'll whack together some cool new social tech and I can just spend all my time coding to make it better and people will be happy.

Bollocks. If I spend 20% of the time I devote to my game actually writing the game, then that's a code-heavy week. Programming is not what you need to be good at, to do this kind of thing.

People isn't even what you have to be good at, it's not enough to be a very social person, because people act really differently online than they do IRL.

Being Very Online isn't even what you need to be good at, because that only gives you an end-user's perspective, which is useful sometimes but way less often than you think.

Really the only thing that can make you good at admin'ing an online community is doing it for a long time and talking to other admins.

Hey, sorry if you wanted some kinda Ten Neat Tricks thing.

It's very hard, often painful, you're invisible when you do a good job, very visible when you mess up, everyone thinks they can do a better job than you (and the only thing that convinces them otherwise is trying it (and nearly all will never try)), and there are no shortcuts. That's it.

AND ANOTHER THING while I think about it, on the subject of the Decline phase of a community website's lifecycle, which can be characterized as either Sustainable Cosiness or Tragic Heartbreak depending on whether or not the people who are there actually want to be there:

If you're ever on a website and you find yourself thinking "Man, this website's culture is super toxic, I'd better increase my involvement so as to provide a good example and thereby improve it," then CHRIST JUST RUN

Like I applaud your motivations but RUN

RUN RUN RUN

THIS IS WHY HALF THE PEOPLE ON REDDIT ARE STILL ON REDDIT

"I'll upvote the good stuff and downvote the bad stuff because this is an Important Website and there should be good people on it so that when the media runs a -" RUUUUUUNNNNNN

"If I leave, then there'll be one less good person on the site, and sooner or later it'll just become -" IT'S TOO LATE ALREADY RUNNNNNN

THE MONSTER IS BEHIND YOU AND IT'S GOT YOUR ANKLES!

More on community management and banning people? Sure yeah more on community management and banning people.

Ban the nazis? Sure! That's easy. No, really, it's easy - only websites run by really rich and often evil people claim to find it hard, and that's because they just don't actually WANT to, even though hosting nazis costs them money and goodwill.

It's incredibly easy to ban nazis, which is why nazis aren't high up on the list of worries for the typical online community.

You see someone openly being a nazi, you ban them, they're easy to deal with. The sort of users who can actually be troublesome are the ones who don't quite, technically, break the rules, just push up against them here and there, trying to find boundaries, see how far they can take things. Sometimes for years.

Often they're well liked, which makes it hard to ban them because you might fear fallout. Unfortunately you HAVE to ban them, because they usually turn out to be creeps.

These folks often turn out to be creepy abusers because they don't just do this boundary-testing with your site rules and established culture. They take the same approach to other things in their life, including interactions with your other members, which the like to take off-site so you can't keep an eye on them.

They push, they see what they can get away with, and they push a little more. They're often funny and charming.

There's often a whisper network about them.

Be prepared for blowback when you ban these creeps. When you finally do, it'll look less like you banned a known abuser/manipulator to keep the community safe, and more like you smote them down because they had half a toe over the line. Be prepared with the logs you've kept on this person and statements from other members who've interacted with them.

You DO keep logs of all moderator/user actions, don't you? Start now. If you don't, abusers can fly under the radar for a long time.

If you think the "banning folks" part of running an online community is all about seeing some guy spout racist slurs and bringing the hammer down on them, you're gonna be disappointed. People are sneakier than that.

A thing that's really worked out well on Improbable Island is telling players right in the CoC about the sort of tactics that abusers like to use, so members can recognize them. https://www.improbableisland.com/coc.php

It's not enough to simply ban abusers when their victim comes forward, because abusers never (and I mean NEVER) have only one victim, and the one who comes forward is never (and I mean NEVER) the first.

You can't be reactive about abusers. You have to create an environment in which:

1. Victims are likely to recognize abuse when it's happening to them;
2. Victims feel empowered to come forward with a report and they know they'll be taken seriously;
3. Abusers are wary of abusing.

And this is HARD. And there's not really a thing (apart from having a guide to common abuse/manipulation tactics right there on your site) that I can recommend to every online community, they're all different.

One tip: make very clear that men, specifically, will be believed if they come forward with a report. Most progressive/leftist spaces take "Believe women" as a matter of policy, and that's great, but men are even less likely to report abuse and they really do need it spelled out.

Make it very clear that you're aware that anybody, regardless of their race, their gender, their sexual orientation, their socioeconomic class, or really anything else about them, can end up in an abusive relationship or situation, and that you're there to help.

Seriously, if you're doing a Spring Clean of creeps and you even IMPLY that you're aware that men get abused too, men will come forward with their own stories about the creeps you're already investigating. This happened on my community.

After you ban someone for being an abusive creep, you need to let the community know you've banned them for being an abusive creep. If you don't, then they'll contact other members off-site and continue the abuse. When you do, you'll get many more reports as people now feel empowered to come forward, and you'll feel like crap because you didn't know this person was doing these awful things.

You'll also get lots of angry messages of disbelief because abusers are always funny and charming.

So now, for a lot of folks, you're the evil admin who banned a beloved community member. And to some others, you should've known they were a creep sooner.

Remember, you have power. These people sending you horrible messages are punching up.

Don't get into this game unless you've got a thick skin. Don't get into this game unless you can put yourself in others' shoes and understand why they might act the way they do. Don't get into this game if you expect people to *always* be understandable.

This came up in the thread: we all know the story of the bartender who kicked out the nice, polite, respectful nazi because he knew if he didn't then the nazi would go tell his friends and then the bartender would be running a nazi pub.

Those bans are STILL easy. You won't receive ANY blowback, because everyone knows nazis are bad. It takes seconds and you don't even need to announce a ban like that, any more than you need to announce bans of robo-spammers, nazis are just noise.

Seriously, nazis of any description are not a problem at all on any well-run website. We ban a few every month, it's nothing, they're easy to spot, they don't even register as an issue, I've instance-blocked a few here on Fedi just while writing this thread.

As a community manager, you don't need to worry about nazis unless you're managing a nazi website, and if you are then you're probably not reading this thread.

Abusers are hard to spot and hard to ban. Nazis are easy.

Here are a few people who are harder to ban than nazis:

* Abusers who are clever enough to fly under the radar until a lot of people like them.
* Creeps who, when they suspect they're under investigation but before they get banned, post criticism of mod policy so as to make the ban look retaliatory.
* Serial abusers who don't fit the model of what people think when they hear "serial abuser" - not necessarily straight, cis, white, rich or male.

* Abusers who are themselves victims of abuse.
* Neurodiverse abusers who are not aware of the abuse they inflict on others, or who claim they are not aware.
* Wealthy abusers who pay a significant proportion of the site's hosting bill, without whom the site is in financial trouble.

Banning any of these people is EXHAUSTING and will make you and others feel TERRIBLE.

Banning nazis is morally uncomplicated and only other nazis or American journalists will have anything to say about it.

There's really only a few websites that let you be a nazi, reddit, twitter, stormfront, facebook, 4chan are the only big ones that come to mind, every other website treats them like spam and bans them without even thinking about it.

If someone tells you that it's difficult and morally complicated to ban nazis, you're not talking to a community manager, you're talking to a nazi who runs a nazi website.

Some of the bannings I've done were like trolley problems, nazis aren't.

How about this one: someone on your site who hints that they might hurt themselves unless other members talk to them. They're an emotional vampire, burning out members left and right, and you really really wish they could get some help, but they live in some godawful hellscape where mental healthcare costs lots of money and they're poor.

Do you ban this poor, obviously hurting person, who's inflicting a lot of hurt on your community?

Do you try to help them, knowing you're not the first and you won't succeed and you won't be the last, investing dozens of hours that you could be spending making cool things for your other members?

Do you ban them? There's a small but non-zero risk that they might literally kill themselves if you do that.

Taking no action is tempting, and would be the worst decision you could make.

I've been in this position more than once.

THAT'S a hard decision. It's NOT a hard decision to ban a nazi.

If you make the wrong decision at any point, it'll follow you around for years. Even many of the correct decisions you make will get you vilified.

It takes a decade of first hand experience, minimum, to get good at this, but the expectation from users is that you'll be perfect from the getgo.

The job requires empathy and ruthlessness at once.

Yikes this thread went from "Here's how to run an online community" into "Here's why not to run an online community" huh :P

This whole big long thing, and I'm gonna have a lil break from it but I'm probably not done, is why when people bang on about Eugen's latest screwup I'm more inclined to give the guy a break than a lot of other folks.

It's also why, when someone asks for a feature and says I can probably code it up in a day or two, I'm inclined to dance around them pointing and laughing and holding my belly

Oh haha I'm not done at all, if your community is successful enough to stick around for a decade (hardly any do) then the world will change around it and the dumbass jokes you made ten years ago will have aged badly. So you just rewrite them or remove them, right? You gotta keep up with the times.

Someone will notice and shout at you for being overly PC. I mean fair enough, that's better than being shouted at for being insensitive - oh no now everyone's talking about what it used to say 😬