2008 January | Online Communities | Build an Online Community

30th January, 2008 | Community Moderation | Forum Development

Fantastic forum members make fantastic staff members

*This is a guest article from community developer Zane Friedman*
One of the most important factors of your site is your staff – your administrators, moderators, and in some cases chat operators. In this article we’ll go over what makes a good moderator or administrator, some specific roles that different moderators and administrators should take, and [...]

Online community safety - My BBC radio interview

The day after I wrote my article on the potential dangers of social networks, I was contacted by the producer of a BBC radio station - they were looking to run a feature discussing the potential safety risks of online communities and wanted to hear my view. I shared my thoughts and opinions with the [...]

Revealed: My online community revenue breakdown

I listen to the readers of this blog - an online community will always struggle to succeed if the community developer fails to listen to its members. I consider a blog just as much of an online community as a forum or a social network - all are based around interaction and dialogue sharing.
Readers of [...]

Warning: Social networks are a haven for spammers and scammers

Online communities are a hugely important part of the online experience. I have no doubt that their importance will continue to grow as people look to harness the power of the Internet to chat with friends, network and find new people with similar interests. Advertisers will also become more attracted to social networks and other [...]

Building a community: Starting the design process

This is the fifth article in what I hope will be an indefinite series about the processes involved in developing a brand new community from scratch. I am currently developing a brand new online community and will detail its development on this blog. As I have said before, I think it is far easier to [...]

The easy way to decide if AdSense is right for you

Many websites make their initial revenue through Google AdSense for the simple reason that the program is easy to apply to and is easy to implement. The contextual advertising often helps ensure that the ads being shown to your visitors are relevant to your site’s content, making the ads far more appropriate (and likely to [...]

Should you ever change your domain name?

I was recently contacted by Smiley, a regular Community Spark reader, who asked me the following question:
I’ve bought www.friendlychatrooms.co.uk since I can’t get my hands on friendlychat.co.uk without the hyphen. Would it be more beneficial (search engine wise) to simply forward friendlychatrooms.co.uk to friendly-chat.co.uk or would it be more beneficial to change the site’s [...]

Do you make these promotional email mistakes?

Marketing and promotion is important for every website - after all, if nobody knows about you, how can you expect people to find your site? One way to inform people about your website is through the use of individual, personalised emails - for example, if I find someone asking questions about building a forum I [...]

How to use Google Analytics to identify popular forum threads

Interaction is the key ingredient of any community website. When your forum is young, it can be hard to determine just what gets your members talking, therefore it is important that you keep an eye on your traffic statistics to understand what forum threads and posts your members like and make more of them!
Use Google [...]

The wrong way to redesign a community website

I have written before about the importance of working with your community members before redesigning your website. By involving your members in any decisions that need to be made over the future direction of your site, you are encouraging their loyalty by making them feel valued.
How one online community failed to involve members
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