10 (Super Fun!) Ways You Can Kill Your Online Community
Recently, on the e-mint discussion list, a member was asking for some suggestions for a list of 10 ways to kill your online community, with some humor. Taking approximately 10-15 minutes, I came up with a quick, fun, spur of the moment list and I thought I’d share it with you!
1. Don’t have any guidelines! We’re all adults – and cursing is fun! Weeeeeeeeee…
2. Since we’re all adults, it’s not like you actually need to visit your site much. A few times a month should be good.
3. Create an open group that anyone can join called “Moderators” and let anyone who wants to join in and move, edit or delete whatever they want. They’re here to help!
4. As the administrator, when you post, try to set the worst example possible. Since humans all strive to be better than one another, this will force your members to be awesome!
5. Post count is EVERYTHING. Make sure you tell people to post as much as they want, as few words per post as possible!
6. Don’t have an introductions area or anything like that. Joining in should be a challenge. Only the strong survive!
7. Promote the moderators who remove the most posts to administrator and give them full administrator access to ban, etc. They’ll certainly be wise from removing all those posts.
8. Member feedback is stupid – they have no idea what they’re talking about. If any member offers feedback, tell them to shut up and “get back to the post factory.”
9. Branding, schmanding. Don’t worry about using consistent language when it comes to your logo. Speaking of that, don’t worry about a good domain name. Choose something like gurl-gamerz.net. Again, make it a challenge!
10. Make ALL of your forums private. Not only will it make it impossible for potential members to find you in search engines – but, it makes it look like you offer free and super cool warez music and videos! And who wouldn’t want to join a community with free WaReZ?!
For the comments: what would you add?
