Dilip Posted February 3 Share Posted February 3 If you skip social media and assume that it is not going to ruin your chances, what is the biggest threat running an online community? How do you handle it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoelR Posted February 3 Share Posted February 3 This is a really interesting question, and I always think of threats through a variety of factors: - Internal threats - External threats - Technology threats - Social, legal, or member threats There are risk factors in each of these categories. It's hard to identify the biggest! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dilip Posted February 3 Author Share Posted February 3 The last one would be too much for people who run forums as a hobby. They might never have the kind of resources to defend problems like a legal notice. Visiting a lawyer or engaging in a legal battle is too much of a task for a regular forum owner. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoelR Posted February 4 Share Posted February 4 2 hours ago, Dilip said: The last one would be too much for people who run forums as a hobby. They might never have the kind of resources to defend problems like a legal notice. Visiting a lawyer or engaging in a legal battle is too much of a task for a regular forum owner. Well, I'm a real example of someone who has a lawyer on retainer for my "hobby website." He helped me review my website terms, assessed my entire website, and helped me with countering legal requests. Once you hit a certain size or popularity - even if you're a hobby website - the legal risks can become too much to ignore. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dilip Posted February 4 Author Share Posted February 4 That is very good. Anyone can start and make a good forum from their armchair. But the real threats like legal liabilities are not easy to deal with. They need dedicated effort, knowledge and investment. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maria Posted February 4 Share Posted February 4 I would call it a threat but rather an issue and in my opinion, the biggest issue with running a community is finances. You need a lot of money to manage a community, if you want to attract a lot of members and activities. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dilip Posted February 4 Author Share Posted February 4 I partially agree. In some cases, if you can attract a lot of members, they are more than enough to pay the bills. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoelR Posted February 6 Share Posted February 6 On 2/3/2024 at 9:58 PM, Maria said: I would call it a threat but rather an issue and in my opinion, the biggest issue with running a community is finances. You need a lot of money to manage a community, if you want to attract a lot of members and activities. Money is a tool. It can help you accelerate your plans, by hiring people to do things that you can't (or don't have time!) to do yourself. With that said, in my other main community - which has 50,000 members - I never spent any money for about the first 5 years of it. It was all myself and one other volunteer. No moderators, no other admins, no staff. Looking back, I probably should have spent money sooner but I never really thought about paid work until the last couple of years - and the lightbulb went off. I'm now much more strategic with using money as a tool, to help me scale, to help me accelerate, and to help me do things that I don't have the time to do. But it's tightly controlled and I have clear outcomes of what should happen with that money. 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Maria Posted February 7 Share Posted February 7 I know a lot of people who have managed to build nice communities without spending much. All they have spend is on domain, hosting and software. However, I also know people who have spent a lot of money in building communities. I think it all depends on your level of skills and your niche. Some niches are more attractive for communities. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dilip Posted February 7 Author Share Posted February 7 If you know enough about a topic and know how to talk to people, there is a good chance that your community is going to be a success. But things go bad when a competition choses to go rogue or some community drama happens. There is a limit what we can do on open internet to ensure fairness. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted February 7 Share Posted February 7 Joel makes an interesting point about types of threats, and he's not wrong. The following are not exhaustive but the obvious big ones I've seen over the years. Internal threats - the main one to watch out for, I think, are the disenfranchised. People who were happy, even enthusiastic, who have become disillusioned and start discouraging people from participating. Also, an admin team you can *trust* implicitly, both in terms of personalities/attitudes and technical skills (or ability and willingness to recruit someone, even sporadically, as needed) External threats - the main two are whether the niche you're in has a finite lifespan fundamentally (beyond the normal community lifecycle behaviours) and your direct competition taking action. The former is if you pick something like a TV series as your foundation, it's usually only going to run for so long before it ends up stopping, and unless there's a spin-off that gets picked up, or you can segue into something else, it's a finite lifespan before you start. As for competition - there's your drama source, whether it's your competition trash-talking you to the Venn diagram overlap, or they're coming to outright poach people, and all of the social engineering in between. Technnology threats - whether your platform is actively hindering your community and whether you need to do something about it (e.g. a photography forum possibly wants to spend some extra effort + time + money? in getting a *good* user experience sorted out, making it as easy as possible to get content in, beyond the usual experience for media). Of course, there's the other matters that come from tech - social media and its inherent competitive factor. Social, member or legal threats - as you can see I tended to consider member threats both internal and external threats rather than a separate threat category. Legal is an obvious contender in multiple ways: not just ensuring compliance with copyright/posted material (I have had to assist with too many C&Ds over the years), but ensuring compliance with variosu legislative efforts that governments are putting into online activities (e.g. GDPR for privacy, PECR for cookies and privacy), and having a lawyer on hand at some stage becomes a sensible precaution. Though being aware of your responsibilities and making obvious good faith attempts to resolve things will go a long way in absence of one - but it's not a replacement, it's a less effective substitute. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoelR Posted February 8 Share Posted February 8 Thinking of threats is probably a good annual exercise. What I think is most important is not that you map out every threat and your response, but about having a framework. There's always the risk of problems (even problems that you can't imagine!), so having a process - communicating with members, communicating with your moderator team, moving quickly, bringing in expert advice- is foundational. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pete Posted February 8 Share Posted February 8 Of course - security (in all its forms) is a journey not a destination. And having a process, or at least some kind of plan to follow, will help you in all outcomes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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