Another good point on continuity, is to continue your own presence. Or at least the presence of who your regulars see as the site manager.

I’m busy in real life at the moment so don’t have much time for the net, and because I was the main overpowering presence as site manager the forums have gone quiet.

I’ve learnt from these mistakes and making only minor tweaks now to improve the community whilst keeping lay-out, design, functionality the same – and also put in place a new site manager whilst demoting myself to ‘site developer’, in the long run she will become the main presence and is loyal, there everyday, everyone knows and loves her and thus is much more suited to the job than myself who can’t always be there.

My mom and dad are both only familiar with the very basics of computer usage, and they tend to get frustrated when some subtle change has been applied to a site they frequent. Even my relatively young self gets aggravated when say Facebook decides to implement something which the majority feels is a necessary modification, but which “everyone else” could certainly do without, yet as with many things the majority seems to rule.

I think a powerful online community would incorporate more AJAX elements which allow the user to shape their interface to a community’s resources. I’d like to be able to drag-and-drop, determine where certain gadgets appear and tie those to my profile to be remembered at each visit. Implementing these would detach users from the data, leaving them to shape the interface to view that data in a way they’re comfortable with over the long term.

still, if sites were going to dissalow annonymous users… well..
1) how do they know that adam is real? or that george or matt are for example

2) so what if you use a real name. what diff does that make

how many adam smiths are there in the world>

the only way of security is to ahve the people registered with an email address and to log their IP address (and log it everytime they come online)

and ensure that “privacy” will be null and void.

How many people make full use of Facebook’s privacy settings and block their full names and other personal information? I don’t know the exact numbers, but I’m pretty confident it’s only a tiny proportion of active members.

The real issue here was change. If people knew from the outset they had to use their real names, there wouldn’t have been a problem. Letting people build a reputation and then forcing them to use their real names was never going to work.

Thanks for sharing your links – they certainly add to the conversation and bring a different perspective, which is a good thing.

I think bringing up Facebook and the fact that people on Facebook are not anonymous doesn’t discredit Blizzard’s decision at all. Facebook’s privacy settings allow users to choose whom they can grant access to their online activities and other information. Blizzard lifting the veil of anonymity on its users removed this choice.

The fact of the matter is, had Blizzard gone ahead with the real-names-on-forums plan, it would have further marginalised people who are already marginalised in online communities, and driven them away from Blizzard official forums. For a better understanding of how Blizzard’s plans could have affected users who are already vulnerable to abuse by the majority (young white men on Blizzard forums), read this post from a woman gamer:

http://www.metafilter.com/93492/But-my-name-really-is-Deathblood-Blackaxe#3171416

And here are a few links from women gamers and others about the whole fiasco: http://geekfeminism.org/2010/07/07/another-round-of-real-names-will-solve-everything-blizzard-edition/

As a community manager, it’s important to understand that not everyone in a community is the same. There are people who rightfully have concerns, and whose concerns should not be diminished simply because those concerns are not a part of one’s experience.