What exactly is the job of the community manager? What specifies a community manager? Well, let’s put it this way. The community manager is the face of your company in the community. The one who makes sure the users in the community are happy. You keep them updated with news, keep them entertained with contests and you also take feedback. Of course you also listen to the other people in the company to make sure everything goes smooth. What happens if the community manager is a pure asshole with no care about the users in the community and how the community is going? The community goes to SHIT.
On professional websites there is always one, two, three or more community managers. These are the administrators of the forum and will with the help of either volunteer moderators or paid moderators make sure your forum is free from spam and any other troublesome users that only registers to troll and flame your userbase. On private websites the owner could be seen as the community manager, he pays for the hosting and sometimes he also got knowledge with the back-end of this website. If this is not the case then he got either friends to help him out with the back-end server stuff or it gets handled by the server host. So what happens if your forum fucks up? You let the technicians take care of it and stay away because you might end up fucking it up even more.
Recently a case of this actually happened, the owner isn’t exactly what I would consider a good owner. Disregarding the plans his technicians have put together to get his forum back up running and doing his own shit while he has absolutely no clue how to do it. Know what happened then? Well the forum did come back up for a little bit, ended up straining the webserver even more and fucked it up for every other person who got hosting on the server. This is a true story and happened these recent days, I have taken the story from other blogs of the technicians. End result? Technicians got fed up with the retarded owner and decided to stop helping him, if he does not want their help then why offer it, especially since the help is for free!
Why would you give a total “fuck you” in the face of the people who are trying to help you? The people who knows this shit better than you do and are actually able to fix this without fucking everything up more than it should be? Yea sure the owner pays the bill but what is a community without actually having the goddamn website and forum up and running and a happy userbase? On top of that, webhosts will kick you the fuck out if you strain their servers so much that other people being hosted on it gets problems with their websites too. I have seen hosts do it many times, either that or they tell you to upgrade to a plan that is either a VPS (if previously on shared) or to dedicated (if you run VPS already). Might not always be the case but yea, that’s one thing that can happen.
No people, this is not how you run a community. It will bite you in the ass because the people who are trying to help you will not exactly show any mercy by not telling the world what kind of incompetent fuck you are. The story always gets out no matter what. The technicians posted the stories themselves, I am helping them by spreading the word. Other people are of course too spreading the word. I have been a user of this community for a couple of years now, apparently it was very good back in the days then everything went downhill. The amount of quality posts went down as most posters just came to dick around in the local spam forum, you know the place where you can do basically anything without getting in trouble for it. Then that shit gets out of hand, infests every other forum there and people get butthurt about stuff. As the owner/community manager it is YOUR responsibility to make sure these things do not happen. Of course by making the spam forum in the first place you keep spam away from other forums, but wait, there’s a better solution. DO NOT MAKE A FUCKING SPAM FORUM!
I have run forums before, I run one at the moment even though it isn’t popular or in much use but that doesn’t mean I don’t have some experience when it comes to this stuff. I have helped out managing forums with thousands of users, hundred of users or just a couple of users. Some forums have died due to a shitty community or just a simply dead community while others survived and are still living happily these days even after I left them. Some forums had their own spam forum to keep forum games and such away, I personally do not mind forum games in the General Discussions forum depending on what kind of game it is, why make an own place for that? General Discussions is for absolutely anything as long as it’s not just herpderping around, that is considered spam and will be locked and moved to a trash bin forum (hidden) or simply deleted on sight.
I will admit, the title of this entry is misleading, but hell it made you click didn’t it? By the way, the recent happening I have been talking about is about DoujinStyle and the shitty way the owner handled the situation of the forum database taking up too much shit because of the heavy load from the spam forum. See? A spam forum only brings issues. You may not agree with everything I write here, and some of the stuff I’ve written might be way off but hell it’s some suggestions and shit. Want to run a forum or work as the social media/community manager at a company? Then don’t do stupid shit.
Keiro’s Blog entry - http://shattered-tears.com/the-doujinstyle-fiasco/
Karusune’s Blog entry - http://karusune.com/?p=410 & http://karusune.com/?p=415
Kradorex’s Blog entry - http://xeron.digibase.ca/?p=wtf-doujinstyle







