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.

Barometers to see whether it's going well:

* Someone says "I just swapped back to the old skin and it looked WEIRD and BAD"
* People talk about interface *improvements* rather than interface *changes*
* People talk each other into trying the new skin
* People are curious about upcoming changes
* People ask you to fix other little rough edges while you're in there

Chucking this into the community management thread 'cause it reminds me of a thing that happened to me:

Our out-of-character chat area used to be called "Banter." We changed the name like five or six years ago. We had good reasons for doing it, not ones that I remember off the top of my head, but I do recall there was much discussion about it.

Players continued calling it Banter, and still do to this day. Everyone knows that it's called Banter.

So yeah posts are still gonna be called toots.

A thing I learned the hard way is that if you're gonna make a change, or even *talk* about making a change, do it late morning. Don't do it late at night just before you go to bed, because then when morning comes everyone's been talking about it all night.

That means that you spend half the day catching up with everything everyone said (and driving yourself bananas while you're at it), and it also means that the conversation has probably veered wildly into Speculation Town while you slept.

As an admin you've really gotta look after your own mental health very carefully, 'cause there's a lot of work involved that boils down to doing other people's emotional labour for them.

By that I mean calming down people who can't calm themselves down, helping people to remember that the admin is a person too, and where necessary removing people who've gone too far down paranoia rabbitholes to still interact with the community in a non-harmful way.

This is pretty tiring.

Expecting your admin to be good at his or her or their job is a BIG ASK, honestly.

Expecting them to be good at it in a way that benefits you, specifically, all the time, is just flat-out nuts.

An admin's job involves occasionally annoying or inconveniencing some portions of the userbase, for the benefit of others. You're gonna have to do that. It's gonna suck.

Online Community Management Thread Continued, a thing that happened today in which I wanted to talk about harmless misunderstandings.

In my game, you can make Mementos. These are items to which you assign a description and some text that appears when you "use" them. You can gift them to other players, show them off in your bio, attach stats to them, use/query/gift them in conjunction with little programs in player-owned buildings, that kind of thing.

Anyway, a long-time player in good standing made a memento that talks about someone called Kim Keller. The memento used the colour blue heavily. At the bottom, it said "Thank you LEO."

Being unfamiliar with the work, I DDG'd for Kim Keller, and turns out they're some republican arsewipe. This, plus the blue, plus the "thank you LEO" made me wonder if this was some sort of blue lives matter nonsense, but it seemed very out of character for this player, so I messaged them about it.

Turns out Kim Keller is a character in a series of graphic novels made by a guy who goes by the initials L.E.O. It had absolutely nothing to do with the police and it was all just a series of coincidences that led up to a harmless misunderstanding.

But if *I* had that misunderstanding, it's reasonable to assume that my other players might also have the same misunderstanding, and have cause to feel unwelcome or unsafe.

So we talked about it a little and we ended up erasing the memento, which I didn't feel good about (I would have preferred to just change it so that it didn't set off any potentially harmful misinterpretations).

The important part here is catching these things early, because if someone misinterprets this thing to mean blue lives matter, and talks about how that makes them uncomfortable, and the creator isn't around at the time, then that sort of convo can spiral.

Online Community Moderation Thread Part 93819: the same story going round and round forever

Been watching this Scott Cawthorn thing play out (the Five Nights At Freddy's guy, who it turns out was secretly donating the game's profits to far-right abusers while publicly donating to useful groups to give himself a veneer of respectability).

If you've been moderating for a while you'll see the same social mechanics play out over and over like clockwork, and you'll feel frustrated at this.

You'll be like, "This only last happened a couple of years ago, don't people learn?"

Remember, your site has new users since the last spin of the merry-go-round. Some of them are in their teens!

The FNAF community is handling their Milkshake Duck situation poorly because they trend so young that for many of them, *this is their first Milkshake Duck.* Their first ever! You remember how much you flailed and how much of an ass you made of yourself during *your* first Milkshake Duck, don't you?

You'll continually go through the same stories over and over until a portion of your userbase is old enough to recognize these cyclic events, and then you'll keep going through them because you have new users, but the old users will roll their eyes and go "Pfft, kids today."

The solution - I'll say it again! - is to list common harmful social mechanisms *right there on your website,* so people recognize and derail them on the fly.

(surfing random waves of algorithmically-amplified emotion is not a healthy thing to do during a traumatic event. A Community Consensus will attempt to form within literal minutes of the news breaking, regardless of whether anyone's had time to sit with their emotions or not.

Of course shutting down a subreddit while it's at the absolute peak of its traffic is unthinkable, because corporate-owned internet wants us to think that numbers going up is good.)

One wrinkle to the "Shut it all down and let people think for a minute" approach is that for a non-zero portion of the userbase, this community IS how they think, how they process, how they identify themselves, and suddenly yanking that away and forcing them to sit with their own emotions would be cruel to them. I'm aware of that.

I said earlier in this thread, "You will have to deliberately hurt someone." That's important to keep in mind if you want to run a community website.

Online Community Moderation Thread continued, red flags for an early ban:

* using "god" or "hero" or "deity" or other wanky self-aggrandizing crap in their username. You'll wanna be up to speed with the semi-obscure names of almost-forgotten gods that undesirables tend to use, including spelling variants (we had a guy who named himself Asmodius who ended up in prison, you can probably guess why but it's actually worse than you think).

A common denominator between many of the folks you'll want to ban from your website is that they all want to see what they can get away with.

More often than not, they treat everyone around them the same way. That includes work colleagues, intimate partners, you get the idea.

Someone who consistently bends the rules will eventually victimize your other users, if they're not already doing so. You'll find out when half a dozen come forward at once.

Ban before that point.

(me, early in Improbable Island days, a twentysomething dumbass who thought he knew better despite being in the internet's Edgy Cringe Is Cool Actually era: "Haha lol I have a cult"

me, very shortly thereafter: "oh shit I have a cult, this is Bad Actually"

me now, a latethirtysomething dumbass who thinks he knows better but at least does know better than he did ten or twelve years ago: "Don't let folks turn you into a cult leader kids, it's Awful Actually")

(lotta Actually going on here huh)

Earlier on I said "If it's make a new rule for one person or ban the person in question, just ban" - I also wanna make clear that codifying your community norms, writing them down as part of your CoC in a descriptive (as opposed to prescriptive) way to remind you and others of what the community is like when it's at its best is Good Actually.

I also wanna reiterate that online community management is tricksy and subtle and sometimes contradictory

Online community management thread part ten billion: hobby degradation

Another awful online social dynamic I wanted to highlight (in case you hadn't had enough of those by now) is the zombie-consumerism takeover of the hobby forum.

It works like this. Rich guy joins the forum and starts posting pictures of their massive collection of gerbil tanks, admin doesn't say "Hey this site is "look how nice I am to my gerbils," not "look at my huge bank account," piss off Richie Rich," trouble ensues.

Many hobby communities end up like this.

If the "I'm rich, look at my stuff" posts are left up then they'll inevitably become popular because folk like shinies. Popular posts set the tone, especially if you've been shortsighted enough to attach visible engagement numbers to posts.

(adding a "high score" to casual social interaction is a really bizarre thing to do with predictably awful results but sites do it anyway for quick dopamine hits)

You'll get more of these sorts of posts.

@ifixcoinops As a side note. Those guys are a pain in the ass irl too. My friends and I brewed beer in a 5 gallon bucket for years. A well-meaning friend decided to buy a fancy bottom fermenting conical blah blah system and it was the first time we had to toss a batch because of bacteria.

We decided to start playing darts at the pub and this same guy had to buy the most expensive set he could find. Interchangeable weights, 5 types of flights, laser sharpened tips.

@sconlan @ifixcoinops I never felt like it was a money thing for him. He just got so excited about a new hobby that he had to go all in.

We started playing War Hammer as poor grad students and I was buying dwarf units as I had money and time to paint. He showed up to game day with a huge elf army. Thankfully he stopped short of buying it pro-painted.