photo credit: Asiatic League

At the start of every year, I have a clean, empty calendar. On my computer, I have documents that contain lists of important dates, which I have created so that I don’t have to remember them and, as such, can’t forget them. I open these documents and add all of the important dates to my calendar.

Some of these items are personal, some are professional and some are even related to my communities. Just like you want to remember a friend’s birthday, you want to remember when your community launched. To aid you in remembering, you should create a list of important dates that you can refer to at the start of every year.

Certainly, the day that you launched is a big one. The passage of time is one of the important milestones that you should celebrate with your community. But, are there any other important anniversaries of meaningful events in the history of your community? These would also be added to the list.

photo credit: marc falardeau

It has become very common for online communities to require a validated email address in order to use an account.

Validated means that the member entered the address, they were sent an email message with a link in it that they had to click – they viewed the message and clicked the link. Since they were able to access the link, that means they received the message and have access to that email address, which is real. Hence, validated.

This is a good thing because it gives you a verified means of contact. But, like any contact information, it can eventually slip out of date and when someone stops using an email address, or loses access to it, they sometimes forget to update the address in their profile section of your community. If they do this and lose their password, they may not be able to reset it. And when this happens, they may contact you.

La da da da… hey hey hey… goodbye.

Social media monitoring. There are so many people who say they do it and there are many vendors that say they offer it. The secret? Many of them don’t.

As I put my thoughts together, Jay-Z’s “D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)” was speaking to me. The fact is, I know some of these people. Or they know me. Saying what I am about to say isn’t politically correct. This might offend my political connects.

I received an email from someone at a “social media monitoring” company with some pretty big organizations listed among their clients. It doesn’t matter who they are because they aren’t the only one. But, the emails we exchanged help illustrate the problem.

photo credit: Jetske19

I love phpBBHacks.com. I spent 11 years managing it. It was my biggest, most successful community. And that is why it was so hard for me to give it away.

phpBBHacks.com was launched on April 6, 2001. I created it because I needed it. As someone who used the phpBB forum software, I wanted an organized directory of all of the hacks and customizations that were available, so that I could make my phpBB do what I wanted it to.

I wasn’t alone in this. The site grew to be visited by tens of thousands of people every day. What I created was the largest unofficial resource for the most widely used community software in the world.

photo credit: rmartz

There is a particularly sensitive discussion being had on one of my communities right now and, as you probably know from dealing with sensitive discussions, they tend to take more attention from moderators than your average thread. This one is no different.

With that in mind, this thread also hasn’t been that bad, either. Most people who have participated in the thread have done so in an appropriate manner, with respect to our user guidelines. But, it is rare when you have a sensitive thread where there aren’t at least a couple of people who run into trouble.

I have had the good fortune of speaking at South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive for the last 5 years.

Only a small percentage of people who apply to speak are accepted, so I am very grateful for the opportunity and have worked hard to offer solid programming for attendees to the event.

For the next iteration of the conference in March of 2013, I have put forth a proposal that I am really excited about: Scaling the Management of Your Online Community.

More than a year ago, I asked you what an advanced community management presentation looked like. I received some great answers, but one particular theme developed: it was all about scale. It was all about how you change as the community grows and the demands increase.

photo credit: kidsire

I watched the Home Run Derby this evening. For non-baseball fans, it is part of the yearly All-Star Game festivities, where a selection of players try to hit as many home runs as they can.

Robinson Cano, the second baseman for the New York Yankees, was the captain of the American League team this year, having won the competition last year. He put on a great show, with his dad pitching to him.

The All-Star Game is being held in Kansas City this year and, leading up to the Home Run Derby, Cano had said that he would like to see a Kansas City Royals player make the 4 man American League team. The Yankees and the Royals, are both in the American League. Not that he would pick a Royal, just that he would like to.

photo credit: Lance Shields

I recently had someone who wanted to post nude images in a thread on PhotoshopForums.com. When they learned they couldn’t, they made a sarcastic comment about how I was afraid that “little Billy” might see the images.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard something like this, basically suggesting that because I didn’t allow nudity, profanity or something else along those lines, I was being a “soccer mom” or prude, or I was making a moral judgement of them.

It’s odd how people judge things or think they know something, when there may be much more to the issue than appears at first glance. Sometimes because they don’t like that they can’t do something.

photo credit: cdedbdme

Sometimes, it is easy to think that the communities we manage will face dire consequences if we are not around for a while. And that thought leads to a fear of being away.

That’s understandable, but it’s not accurate or healthy. You don’t want to build communities that depend on you for simple existence. It says more about you if you are able to step away and have the world not end, than it does if you step away and it does.

This takes different forms for different communities. If you run a forum, you probably have moderators who can handle most issues. Even if you don’t have moderators, and the community is small enough, what’s the worst that will happen? So, your members may have to look at spam for a couple of days. Or some porn link. They are going to have to do that whether or not you are away because that stuff will stay up until your visit. This, among other reasons, is why it is important to set reasonable expectations with your members.

photo credit:
Pink Sherbet Photography

Unauthorized hotlinking is one of those rare issues that most community managers (and most web savvy people) will universally agree is a bad thing.

But, agreeing it’s a bad thing and taking action against it can be two very different things. It can be tricky to catch because people may share a lot of images on your community. Do you check them all?

If the community is small enough, you can. But, even if it isn’t small enough to do that, you can randomly check a sample of images posted. You can take action against any that you see. You can include it in your community guidelines and inform those who do it that they should not do it in the future. You can encourage people to report it and then take those reports seriously.