One of my communities; Camaro and Firebird Forums has been online for a bit less than 2 years now.  While it’s been a slow growth in terms of registrations, we’ve gained a very solid and committed member base.  Even when registrations may look as if their a bit slow.  Compare them to previous months and you might find a nice growth rate and percentage from month to month.

Below in the screenshot, you can see my month by month registrations over the past year.  You can see the growing trend overall.  This is something you want to see in a growing community.

12 Month Registrations

Myself, as well as many other administrators love to visit our sites often to make sure everything is working out well and nothing is going wrong.  It’s also nice to see in real-time your site grow and everyone interacting with one another.  One problem I see quite often though is Admins get burnt out.

Why do we get burnt out?

First, I’d say that new (or relatively small) communities can really wear out an admin when you’re one of the only consistant posters.  Many people start forums expecting users to just show up, sign up, and start posting which is most often not the case in the beginning.  That is the overall goal but it isn’t easy to attain right away without some content in your forums before hand.  This is why adding content when starting (or even before going live) is a big help to getting started.  As a admin builds up content and doesn’t see a fast growth they’ll grow tired and fade out or give up entirely. I’ll post a more in-depth article of tips on Starting a Forum with content later.

On the other hand, you can have a very large site with an adminstrator who’s trying to keep up with all the new threads, private messages, emails, etc… that come with a large user-base.  It’s easy to get caught up and stay on your site for hours but at a point you need to remove yourself from your site and probably the computer in general.  It’s not worth slaving yourself for hours only to lose interest with your site.

As I’ve said many times before, hard work and patience are two of the most important keys in creating a successful forum.  You want your forum to endure for a long time, and beating yourself up mentally will only hurt you in the end.  We all need to have lives outside of our business/community.

As some may have noticed, I just recently designed a new theme for the site here.  That is one of the bigger changes with the site, but I’d also like to announce a few other changes as well.

Forum Consultation

I’ve decided to begin Online Forum Consulting on a one-on-one basis.  I’ve been around for a quite a while now and have personally made some good and bad decisions to affect my communities.  While the bad decisions were not the best thing for me at the time, I learned from them so now anyone who’s new won’t have to make those sacrifices.  I’ve been a forum administrator and owner for over 5 years and I’m proud to say I now have 2 flourishing forums.  I’ve built up and sold 3 others.

If you’re new to administrating forums and communities it can be a very daunting task to stay on top of everything.  I’ve managed to make my admin duties much less intense by some simple and some not-so-simple time management decisions.

Not only have I been an administrator for 5+ years, I have continued to stay on top of all the forum happenings over this time.  Everything from the differences in free forum software choices, to vBulletin modifications and styles.

If you’d like more information or a quote for a online consultation, don’t hesitate to Contact Me

Forum Etiquette is a tough subject for many administrators and users alike.  What is the right way to discuss topics with people?  What slang of typing should we use?

I am one of the people who you’ll always see use proper (or what I consider proper) grammar and spelling.  I find it almost tough to take someone who spells horribly, uses tons of internet and leet (1337) characters in their posts.

Not only is it a bit annoying for me to read on my forums, I get worried it may detract from older, experienced members of a niche from registering when they see childish “text talk” on a forum where real ideas and problems are being exchanged.

I have guidelines in my forums to discourage people from talking in many of the common short-character languages that the internet has created.  I don’t want to hurt these people’s feelings, but it’s not professional or entertaining to me or many others who want somewhere they can read sentences, not a paragraph with no punctuation or periods.  It’s actually come to the point where I notice that users who use proper grammar and spelling get helped much easier in my Camaro and Firebird Forums.  Why would my other users waste time on attempting to read something that is more of a strain to them when they can just move on to the next post and help someone who put some time into their thread knowing that people are there helping them for free.

I guess that’s the end of my soapbox rant for the day.

I’m happy to say that my main community focus for the past year; Camaro Forums is almost to 1,000 members. It’s taken me a bit less than 2 years to get this far on this forum.  That may seem like a long time to some, and short to others.

I am happy to be where I am currently with F-Body Online (FBO).  While many others dwarf FBO, we’ve managed to carve out a spot in the camaro and firebird world with nothing but hard work.  I’ve not paid a single dollar in advertising, adwords, or anything of that sort for this forum.  I’m not boasting about that because if I did have the cash to throw at it, I probably would have given in and done it but it didn’t work out that way.

Because of the age of the forum and its size, it’s become a very tight-knit community with very little drama (that’s VERY rare on an automotive forum especially) and one of my biggest concerns is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable posting and asking questions.  Think about it- If you’re running a community based on users posting and interacting with others, being intimidated isn’t going to help you at all.  I’ve received dozens of messages and emails from users just letting me know that we’re one of the most helpful and respectful communities they’ve been a part of and that lets me know that what I’m working for is worth it.

I’ve got some very big plans in store for FBO in the very near future.  One of which I’ll give a little hint to here right now.

I just recently purchased a book that should interest most (if not all) Forum Owners. The Book is “Managing Online Forums” by Patrick O’Keefe. Patrick is well versed in forums as he owns/manages more than I can probably count, runs the largest phpBB modification community (phpBBhacks.com) and is the owner of the iFroggy network. Anyways, on to the book…

I’m not a big bookworm to be honest (not at all really) but this book caught my attention as I haven’t seen anything like it yet. I sat down with it at Barnes and Noble to see if I thought it’d be worth the time and money in buying and reading it. I was impressed at the detail that Patrick goes into for just about everything you need to know to own and manage a forum.
The book details many of the tough topics such as moderation, problem users, guidelines, and much more. Patrick gives many of his real-life examples and tips he’s gained through almost a decade of forum management. You’re most likely not going to agree with Patrick on all of his issues, but he explains his reasoning and tactics so that you can at least see and decide what will work for your and your community.

I’m about 3/4 of the way through the book as of right now and enjoy the read so far. I definitely suggest any Administrator gets this, or at least gives it a try. It’s got something for just about any level administrator-whether you’re still brainstorming a community you’d like to grow, or already have a booming forum.

I’ll update this as I finish the book.