Anyway, put the issue aside and concentrate on the people posting - this is a personality type to be aware of and remove proactively - they'll chase off other members (the new ones especially - they're attracted to ignorance, not to enlighten, but to scorn) and then fight among themselves until the community implodes.

I'll say again: doesn't matter if they're right. The ones who are right can often do the most damage.

Anyway, back on track, different area of online community management. It's important to have an area on your site where you can knock ideas around with casual users, ideas on how to improve the site or the culture or whatever. This area needs to be ephemeral - comments need to disappear after a little while.

Folk are much more inclined to have a natural, casual, low-stakes back-and-forth when it mimics everyday chat, and this is where really good ideas tend to come from.

Online Community Management Thread pt 22: what time is it

People on your site, if they're friendly and like each other and the community's big enough for this to happen, would like to set up events. Things like cocktail hours, group watches of silly movies, that kind of thing. You're a savvy admin and you know these make good bonding experiences so you want to encourage them.

Put a clock on your site!

It doesn't have to be a big obtrusive fancy clock that looks bad, you can put a little one in the footer. It doesn't have to take up any extra resources, you can just echo the current timestamp as YY-MM-DD HH : MM : SS UTC.

The UTC part is important. That means everyone sees the same clock, set to the same time, and that's the point.

The clock is there to remind people that they're all on different timezones, and give them a common reference point by which they can plan their events.

Anyway people will still tend to plan events around their local timezone, unless you tell them that that's what the clock's for, it's to help cut down on people turning up an hour early or late because they were thinking of a different timezone.

Don't make "use the clock" an actual capital-R Rule of the site, that's a bit heavy-handed. Just talk a little bit in the FAQ about how it helps people, and folk will use it.

I make these announcements on my site 'cause folks do a lot of events (and maybe they do so many events because we've got the coordinating-times-worldwide thing sorted out and agreed upon as a community).

Other time-related suggestions you can make to your community:
* Be wary of planning events to start at midnight because people often get the date wrong (this is why ppl say "one minute past midnight")
* Try to get used to 24-hour time
* Check smoke alarm batteries at DST start/end

In similar spirit, remind your American users that if they want to be understood online they should use the metric system and the YYYY-MM-DD date format.

Again, don't make this a capital-R Rule with Consequences Should It Be Broken, just phrase it in the FAQ to be clear that people will have an easier time understanding and interacting and helping if they don't have to convert back-and-forth between units.

I have a whole section in my Code of Conduct about common misunderstandings that arise from having different timezones, measurements, date formats etc, and it's right upfront that these were suggestions and hints and not enforced rules - nonetheless, people very quickly decided that everyone being on the same page was a good and useful thing.

Don't expect people to find this information in other places online. Put it on your site, and tailor it to your users.

Speaking of annual celebrations, you might be tempted to get user's birthdays so you can send them a "happy birthday" message or whatever.

There are many reasons not to do this. First, if you make birthdates mandatory then your site will spend the first half of New Year's Day running slow 'cause it's sending out ten thousand happy birthday emails to people who are now over 120 years old. Second, for those who tell the truth, you're now holding and processing personal data. You don't want that.

Every bit of personal info you have about your users is a legal liability and bait for hackers. Treat personal data like toxic waste, keep it as far away from you as possible and minimize your exposure.

What you actually need from users is a known-good email address and the last few IP addresses and browsers they used (to help spot when an account has been compromised). That's it. Anything more than that is WAY more trouble than it's worth.

Online Community Management Tips From When The Internet Made A Noise, part 78: this is not specifically about community management but there's some overlap with how one starts and promotes one's website and it's good to take a holistic view of the whole kinda Situation because all the parts are interconnected and changing one affects another...

There's a bloke on my website who runs a furry fantasy basketball league.

HOW INCREDIBLY SPECIFIC IS THAT?

Like, think of how many people are furries.

About half the people I'm following okay, yeah, granted, but Fedi is pretty furry - in the general population of the world, or even the English-speaking world, not THAT many people are furries.

In fact if you walked down a Pittsburgh street two weeks before Anthrocon and pointed your Furry-Detecting Ray at random people, I bet it'd only make the fox noise for... maybe one person in fifty?

So we're already pretty specific!

But that's not specific enough for this guy, oh no! Of those bare handful of people who are into the furry, he then whistles his audience down to furry basketball fans.

And not ONLY basketball fans, mark you, but basketball fans who are enough into basketball to understand and enjoy a numbers-based fantasy basketball league AND who are furries!

Just imagine the Venn diagram of this guy's potential target audience, imagine that tiny amount of overlap in the middle.

And yet, this guy's website has been online for a long time, and remains popular, and brings this guy a lot of joy.

It's probably because although there are very few people who would be into his thing, to those people, his thing is ABSOLUTE CATNIP. It's a thing that's incredibly tailored for them, and it's the only game in town.

This is a degree of specicifity that is ONLY possible on the internet!

(*whittles not whistles, damn autocorrupt)

Anyway, this is how I run my website too. It's not for everyone! It doesn't *try* to be for everyone! Instead it scratches an itch that people can't really get scratched in the same way in other places.

Don't try to make something that everyone loves. That's a recipe for mediocrity. Make what YOU want to make, and let people fall in love with it.

Never worry about your thing being too niche.

Like, I say of Improbable Island, "It's not for everyone." That's kinda euphemistic. Seeing the success of massive websites recalibrates our expectations and our goals, it makes us kinda hesitant to say things like "It's not for everyone," this kinda soup of maximum-reach propaganda creates an atmosphere in which it actually feels like sticking your neck out a bit by admitting that not everyone will like your site.

Try this: "Most people WON'T like what I make."

Uff that gives me shivers

I'm retiring the default font on Improbable Island and introducing a range of new ones to replace it. One potential stumbling point of Cosy Mode is that the people left on the site are there because they love it very much, and might find even small changes and improvements upsetting.

You have to keep changing and improving - the devices that people use to look at the website change, the underlying technology gets updates, the world moves on.

We've got ourselves to a place where the site has a charmingly retro aesthetic but with more modern usability features, and we're trying to tread the line between retro and usable.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing to satisfy, because people aren't nostalgic about the thing itself but about their lives at the time they experienced it, and how it made them feel. They want to feel that way again.

@Felthry That's what's so awesome about them, when they run low on battery you plug them into the console and boom, wired controller!

An inbuilt feature to remind you how much previous versions sucked, genius really

@ifixcoinops It's not really the same, though.

I also like the knowledge that this controller is definitely player 1 because I can follow the wire attached to it and see it's plugged into port 1, or the way you didn't have to pair a controller or anything, just plug it in and start using it
-F