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.

So when you're making a change to a Cosy Mode website, it'd damn well better be one of those quality-of-life improvements that doesn't have a dramatic effect on the general *feel* of the place.

Also, the way I approach making changes has evolved over the years - I spent a long time trying to please everyone, and this just made me miserable because there are lots of people who hate ANY kind of change just because it's a change, and people who love it for the same reason.

These days I'm very upfront with people that if they have strong immediate feelings about the change, I'm not interested in hearing about it for at least a week, because that feedback just isn't useful.

Because we're in Cosy Mode and I have a good relationship with my players, people actually go along with this! They even pre-empt it! They say "I hate it, but I hate change in general, gimme a couple days and we'll see." That's enormously useful.

My wife this morning: Dan, here's something for your community management thread!

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/erinbiba/status/1372380021483048969

The New York Times ran (well, kind of ran) a cooking Facebook group for a while and now they're washing their hands of it entirely.

(twitter link in case pussthecat's Nitter instance is down: https://twitter.com/status/1372380021483048969)

I dunno whether I'm right or not and I don't really care, 'cause it's reminded me of a story I've seen played out hundreds of times.

Site about gerbils appears, attracts gerbil enthusiasts. Member makes thread about gerbil sightings in film and TV. Thread meanders and begins to talk about the media and not the gerbils in it. Some pedant says hey is this a gerbil site or a TV and movies site, and the Off Topic Section is born!

Alright so internet community management thread pt11111, the bloody off-topic section.

Alright so as these gerbil fanciers get to know each other and start bonding over their love of specific tangentially-gerbil-related media, they start opening up about explicitly non-gerbil-related media, and then about non-gerbil topics in general.

This is fine, this is what happens when communities get to know each other. But are you still running a gerbil enthusiast website at this point?

At least, until you get some newbie turning up and going "Uhhh, so is this a gerbil site or not?" or some grumpy veteran saying the same.

So now you're bollocksed, because you've observed it. Everyone will chime in and say it's one or the other and nobody will agree on what it is. Its wave function is collapsing!

Anyway a thing to be aware of, especially if your forum is about things that people might have only a fleeting interest in, is that you may well get to the point where nobody's talking about gerbils anymore, they're just chatting.

I mean that's fine. Heck look at what happened with Twilight fan forums, the fans grew up and aged out very quickly but had made lots of friends and stuck around.

But now folks are showing their non-gerbil selves and talking about other stuff...

...and Politics and Religion might come up.

On Improbable Island we've gone back and forth on the "No politics or religion" rule, because we're a relatively old website. We've scrapped "no politics" for now because Gamergate redefined what is and is not "political" in a way that's relevant to our particular subculture until it was no longer possible to in good conscience keep the rule (people of colour in games = political, whites only = not political, guess we're political then).