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)
The NYTimes has lost all control over the Cooking Community Facebook group they created and so instead of moderating it they've decided to completely abandon the 77,000 member group to its own recognizance and take their name off of it. Which is somehow absolutely hilarious to me
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).
So on Improbable Island we scrapped the "No politics" rule, talked about why we were scrapping it, but also made it clear that politics was not the primary focus of the site.
This has worked alright for us, but it's not something I'm comfortable saying EVERYONE should do in the same way that I'm comfortable saying everyone should have a Code of Conduct, everyone should allow avatars, everyone should have a clock and an FAQ, that kind of thing. You'll have to decide for yourself.
Internet Ent Community Management Thread, pt999
I just updated my Code of Conduct (which is over eleven thousand words - it's PROBABLY not the biggest CoC on the internet, I'm sure others have longer, but it's certainly a lot for most people) to include a bit on using the chat channels as a support group.
We had a few people come in and just vomit their family drama and interpersonal problems aaaaalllll over the global, public chat channels. And as I type this I'm realising "vomit" is the word
Like, if someone's doing the rainbow yodel, they're clearly having a bad time and they could use some help, and it's a bonding moment to hold someone's hair while they're talking on the great white telephone. But if someone's laughing at the pavement and you're a stranger to them, you're gonna react to their technicolour yawn with more of a yearning for it to be over and cleaned up quickly.
The context matters, here.
We can extend this awful metaphor even further, because we all know the experience that a public call to Ralph can often set off others, and that's exactly what's been happening - this behaviour gets normalized VERY quickly. It tends to go unchallenged because nobody wants to be the one to say "Dude, I don't know you, I don't know your godawful housemates, dumping your problems on strangers who didn't ask to hear them is a crummy thing to do, take it to DM's."
That's YOUR job! 😬
Some folks, upon being told "Hey, talk about that kind of thing with your mates, not with strangers," might respond with "But I don't have any mates 😔"
Gee I bloody wonder why
Internet Fogey Community Management part "my knees hurt," SLURPING UP THE DRAMA WITH A STRAW
A subthread to this thread had me asking a reader to write down a chronicle of the internet drama leading up to a fracture of a long-established forum, so that I could rubberneck at my leisure.
At an earlier point in my life this would feel like asking someone to bottle their farts so I could enjoy them later, but these days I've leaned into it and it's more like watching table saw accident videos.
These days I read about Ravelry's catastrophic site redesign and I go "Haha yeah I know ALLLLL these people" and I can pretty readily predict exactly what's gonna happen. That comes not from just running a big site for years and years but from rubbing my hands together while poring through the agonizing details of other site implosions.
Reading drama-summary posts and comparing them with actual posts made on the site is often instructive!
Online community management thread pt "numbers are meaningless"
Remember when I said early on that the user interface goes a long way in setting the initial tone of the site?
Go read this massive thread by @zensaiyuki about that. https://mastodon.social/@zensaiyuki/102683452946911475
Internet Community Management Thread continued: earlier in the thread I talked about tactics abusers use to abuse and how it's important to be aware of those tactics and to make your site members aware of them too, in order to build community immunity. Here's a Fediverse deep dive into DARVO courtesy of @hafnia:
The current Big Thing I'm working on in Improbable Island is an interface overhaul.
These are FRAUGHT. Bigger sites than mine or yours have collapsed because of getting new interfaces - either the new UI was too different to the old UI that people loved, or the new UI just plain sucked even outside of comparison to the old one.
Ravelry's ugly and migraine-inducing New Look is a famous recent example.
Ravelry's redesign is a series of mistakes which compounded one atop the other until things got really, really bad. The mistake train stretches even past the interface redesign and into their handling of the pushback of the redesign, and it's still chugging along.
This compounding of mistakes is actually pretty common. It's easy for us to see a series of bad decisions and go "Why didn't they correct things at X point?" but c'mon, we've all been there. A mistake early on leads to more.
Ravelry's first mistake was in doing an interface redesign in the first place.
Ideally you should never do a complete, ground-up redesign of an existing, well-loved site. There are reasons why people love the site!
Folks tend to get into complete redesigns because of reasons that don't actually matter.
Example 1 (Ravelry): You're doing a brand overhaul, changing your logo, and you want the site to match.
I promise you, you are the only person in the world who cares about brand cohesion.
Example 2 (metafilter & others): You're doing a new interface because google says you have to.
Again, your users don't care what google thinks. Why would they? Your search rank dropping is your problem, not theirs, and thrusting an unnecessary interface change on folks is just an attempt to take google's problem (which google made your problem) and make it into their problem.
And that's problematic.
Example 3: Your codebase is old and creaky and your site is still laid out in tables etc, and you just tried adding some new feature and it's a big pain in the bum because of all the creakiness, so you decided to recode it all and heck, why not give it a new coat of paint, since you're in there already.
Again, your users don't care! Who gives a heck if your site uses tables! That just means it'll probably still work in twenty years!
The only people who care about your HTML or will ever even look at it are other web designers, and as I'm sure you're aware by now, nobody cares what web designers think.
(except other web designers of course)
So these are all bad reasons to do a big ground-up site redesign. In general there aren't good reasons!
Example 4: you're redesigning your layout to make the header smaller, or take stuff from the top of the page and put it on the side instead, because computer monitors keep getting shorter.
This is actually legit. At least until we get the whole screen situation under control and start making computer monitors again instead of just small tellies, we're gonna have to deal with lousy displays, and putting stuff on the side instead of the top can help in that regard.
Anyway, Improbable Island's retheme falls into category 3, rewriting because the old one was a big pain in the bum.
Because this ain't my first rodeo, the very first thing I did was to recreate the old theme, as near as "to the pixel" as I could, in modern HTML/CSS.
The second thing, because Ravelry is fresh in my mind, was to LOUDLY and PUBLICLY and ENTHUSIASTICALLY and REPEATEDLY open the beta testing period to *every community member.*
Seriously, whenever I'm in chat I'm asking folks how they like the new theme, getting feedback, and converting people over to the new theme.
Ravelry only opened their beta theme test to a handful of people. Don't be like ravelry.
Next, I made some very small improvements and ran them past the people using them. Most were small quality-of-life improvements, adding spacing on specific elements to avoid finger mistakes on mobile, that kind of thing.
Then, I made one big dramatic change, but tied it to a new feature (backgrounds that change depending on what you're doing in the game) that would be impossible in the old interface.
And people love it and are excited about it.
You *can* do an interface change humanely!
To do a successful interface overhaul, you have to be intimately familiar with the reasons why people love your site, and the things they love your site in spite of. Fix the second and leave the first well alone.
The things in the middle, the things people are indifferent about, can retroactively become people's favourite things if you mess with things too much.
You want your members to feel that you're being slow and careful and considerate. To have them feel that way, first you have to actually BE slow and careful and considerate. Second you have to SHOW them that you're being slow and careful and considerate, by making changes gradually - testing locally and then uploading and asking for feedback on each one.
Let users be a part of the process and make it clear that this redesign is for THEM more than it is for you.
Dan moved, see pinned toot