To this day I often make decisions or respond to people in ways I later regret. The best thing to do is not respond to emails that raise your emotions for at least 24 hours. This gives you time to put things in perspective and ensure your response is adequate and professional.

Vic – I couldn’t agree more. I didn’t realise just how much hard work was involved in blogging until I started doing it myself!

I like what I saw over at your blog and will make time to have a full read over your content in the next couple of days.

I care about my members a great deal. Not just because they use my site. I care about genuine people who just want to chat full stop, that’s why I’ve worked hard over the years on several different sites as staff trying to help them and keeping the perverts out etc.

I treat my loyal members good, because without them my site is nothing. My site, being new, is dead right now, I’m not even ranked on Google yet, according to Matrix statistics I’m being found by only approximately 50-80 people per day through search engines, I guess that isn’t too bad for just 6-7 weeks, so I’m slowly growing, but without loyal regular members to be there to welcome these new people, I’d be up shit creek!

I take their comments, criticisms, suggestions etc very seriously. I’m very involved with my members. I hesitate to call them “users” as I think the term “user” is very impersonal, and makes people feel unimportant. “Oh, you’re just a user. You’re nothing”

Whereas ‘member’ means they’re actually PART of the site.

I often have a chit chat with my regular members in the chat room and in PM on the boards, I think they’re comfortable knowing if they’re ever unhappy about something, they can tell me without any backlashes.

That makes me feel good knowing that.

I seem to be doing all these things right, but the worse thing a community owner can make, which I make often, is be impatient. I often lose my rag at not getting found quicker. I’m against spamming and I’ve told 2 of my loyal members off, because they decided on their own to go and spam to fill up the room.

These members got quite annoyed because I told them off for spamming, which in their eyes, they were just trying to help advertise the site, and now they’re not spamming the chat room is dead again until it gets found through organic links..

I really don’t know whether I was right in telling them off or not, perhaps I should have explained more calmly as to why I am against spamming.