[Egon Vennik]

Moderation to any forum based community is a challenge and hard work comes with dedication and patience which will give you a positive results to your community forums, this is a easy guide to any forum administrator if started a new forum or going through a less or zero activity on his/her board. I am trying to write what I understand and believe after being a member , admin and mod for several forums from last 3 years. Hope this will help somehow.


Ask these questions to yourself

1. What your forum is all about?
2. What are you giving to the visitors and members of your site?
3. Why anybody will join your forum?
4. Who is your competitor/rival and what he is giving to his members?
5. What different and unique you are giving than your rival/competitor?
6. How much your forum site is user friendly? Did you ever been a member to any community forum?

If you have answers to all of the questions above than continue reading…
Someone typed the URL of your forum and made a first visit, stand for a while and searched some ongoing discussions and topics, after reading some he finds it useful and decided to register, next time same person when got logged in asked his friends to join your forum too, you received some clicks and good activities, all forum Administrator want the same thing which I wrote but not all get succeed in doing so because of many reasons.


Like…

• your site is dull and dead with no activities, posts etc.
• your forum skin color is pathetic
• the domain name is hard to remember or very un professional
• spammers made there second home your forum.

Some important points to note while administrating forums which could help you in improving your venture.

YOUR USERS: They are your backbone, give them freedom, give them honor and respect and make them feel comfortable in your forum, your site should be user friendly, attractive, add some cool mods and hacks, do some competitions and games to entertain your users.
Keep in touch with them through mass e-mails but don’t make it often or it will consider as spam.

YOUR PASSION: Your love and craziness for your forum is very important, you should be the most active member of your community than anyone else. Put your every effort in doing study and research on your forum theme which it is built on.

YOUR DEDICATION: “you made it and they do it” its wrong, “you made it and you have to do it’’ yeah ! that’s right! If you think that you made forum set the categories and everything now people will come and start posting than you are absolutely wrong because no one will do anything till they wont get anything, so make a useful content for your forum which will help the guest visitors and new members to have read. This will somehow make them to register or to post at least “Thanks” to you and this will be there start.

YOUR PATIENCE: You wont get 100,000 members in 1 month, sometimes you will also notice that you are the only one in your forum from last 1-2 weeks and that will be a hard test for you where you can easily loose hope but don’t do this mistake, hold on and think what happen wrong and where? Try to overcome the mistake and start again but have patience, according to many professional’s interviews and articles I read I come to know that any forum will take about 6 to 8 months to grow and become active.

YOUR ATTITUDE: If you are an Administrator than don’t think that members are your employee, in fact members are higher than you because if they don’t exist your forum don’t exist too. Be friendly, supportive and understanding with your members, try to listen to there every queries and questions and come up as soon as possible with necessary actions or answers, if you don’t make your users happy you will loose your forum soon.

YOUR ACTIVITY: Its an oxygen to your forum, keep your members busy by giving them something new to talk, read or to discuss, find what your members are interested in? for eg if you own a sports forums than don’t start a topic related to politics or animals rights because you have members with almost same interests for sports and nothing else. Keep off topic forum to talk anything else but don’t talk or make posts which bore them.

YOUR STAFF: Your mods are the one who plays a major role in your absence, appointing them is giving them a responsibility, be professional and bit friendly with them, give them honor and reward for there good work and guide them if they go anywhere wrong, it will be best if you get a moderator with same mind like you, moderator should know what administrator wants from them. Keep a close eye on a newly appointed mod, his activity inside forum and outside if possible.

KEEP UPDATED: Keep yourself updated with latest news, technology or your forum topic related subjects, keep on visiting good informative sites and other forum boards to know what's new going on.
Forums can be a happiest place to hang around if the Administrator keeps these things in mind and implement it on right time.

[rhydian]

great post, as alot of you will notice the sites with like 100k+ members all have been around for at least a year or 2, do not give up so quickly. after a while you will notice your community doubling as more and more people see more and more links all over the web and then you will have a great thriving community.

[anna_maria]

great informations in your post...and very helpfull for my forum...thx

[rosemujib]

I ran into a few posts on moderating which I just haven't seen before. Being a moderator of anything -- a company meeting, an off-site, or a business event is a tough job. If you are working with panelists, they really get all the glory but you, as moderator have the toughest role, which is to keep everything moving forward, keep the discussion interesting, and basically interrupt people who are going on and on.

I've not met Frank Catalano, but know of him. Here are his tips for great moderation.

The reason this topic caught my attention is that this is a specialized task and so very important. The whole business event can go down in flames with a moderator who is not with it. Without preparation about the panelists - their possible issues and opinions, plus knowledge of what is important to the audience - it becomes a very boring event. I say this because I am traditionally not a big fan of panels, yet I help organize them for the MIT Enterprise Forum and elsewhere periodically.
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[jolies1]

Someone typed the URL of your forum and made a first visit, stand for a while and searched some ongoing discussions and topics, after reading some he finds it useful and decided to register, next time same person when got logged in asked his friends to join your forum too, you received some clicks and good activities, all forum Administrator want the same thing which I wrote but not all get succeed in doing so because of many reasons.
Like…

* your site is dull and dead with no activities, posts etc.
* your forum skin color is pathetic
* the domain name is hard to remember or very un professional
* spammers made there second home your forum.

Some important points to note while administrating forums which could help you in improving your venture.

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[sksenthil]

Moderators need to prepare more than panelists because they need to be able to stir up the pot with questions about the latest industry controversies and hot issues. It's hard to do this in real time, so prepare the questions in advance using multiple research resources. If you don't have enough industry knowledge to stir up the pot, then decline the invitation to moderate the panel.

Suppose everyone accepts the no-PowerPoint rule, but a panelist comes up with the clever idea of showing a “brief” corporate video. Again, the answer should be, “No can do.” Frankly, if a panelist needs either a PowerPoint presentation or a video, he's probably not articulate enough to be on the panel, so get rid of him if you can.

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[jasweri]

I'd like to stress the value of moderator posts. With good, active moderators you have a steady stream of high quality posts from a credible source. You can't just be an enforcer of rules, you have to be a contributer as well.

As far as moderation goes, zigx is right on the ball, the tone of your forum is absolutely dictated by the tone of the moderation.
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[sivabharan]

Those are some really good tips, especially the one about being an active admin. I often leave myself logged in even when I am away so that people will see a very active admin.
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[darel60]

Hi, These are good tips , especially how to be active in the community.
Such a nice sharing dude, Appreciate your work.

[stela]

Nice tips...i am sure it will work...