We've all done it, we take baby steps to learn and grow as moderators, leaders, team members. What mistakes have you made along the way that have helped to shape how you moderate or how you run your communities?
For me:
-One of my most formative forums where I learned a great deal about forums and moderation was notorious for having a very large mod team with a very strict ruleset. When I started running my own forums, I made the mistake of overloading the mod team and having a strict ruleset, it drove people away incredibly quickly, as it should have, and it took me far longer than it should have to realize the correlation. I finally started to just roll with the punches and eased off, and that was when I finally started to see successes in my forum ventures. I launched my longest tenured forum not long after, one that lasted for 17 years. It was a wonderful experience!
-While moderating for one of the largest gaming communities of it's time I made the mistake of taking on too many forums to tend to, spreading myself too thin and not being able to adequately moderate those forums. This was during the time when that community was so busy, so active that just looking after one forum was a chore. I had, at my peak, 7 forums that I'd picked up to cover. It was near impossible, things got out of control in a some of those forums and I wound up having to drop them. I wound up running the community side of that site some years later, one of the things I will always keep with me about my forum experience. I still make the mistake of spreading myself too thin, usually across too many different communities, but I'm getting a little better at reeling myself back in again...I hope
-One mistake I made in my early days of running a forum was having far too many forums for the number of members. I would a forum for this, a forum for that, a forum for individual games and so on. It got the point where the index felt like it went on forever. By the end, each forum had about 10 to 70 posts in it, and while the forum itself amassed a few thousand posts, it looked barren because they were spread through so many forums. That's when I learned to be concise with my forums and only expand outwards when needed. You get those same thousands of posts, but in fewer forums so people can see that your forums actually have activity to them. When a certain subject matter overruns a forum, then consider giving it a dedicated forum. Thankfully with forums gaining new features over the years it's become even easier to keep a condensed list of forums thanks to prefixes and click-to-sort organization, so you only need very generalized forums and you're good to go!
There are more...lots more, lol. I've made plenty of mistakes, it's how we learn, and boy have I learned a lot.
How about yourself, what mistakes have you made in moderation or administration?
For me:
-One of my most formative forums where I learned a great deal about forums and moderation was notorious for having a very large mod team with a very strict ruleset. When I started running my own forums, I made the mistake of overloading the mod team and having a strict ruleset, it drove people away incredibly quickly, as it should have, and it took me far longer than it should have to realize the correlation. I finally started to just roll with the punches and eased off, and that was when I finally started to see successes in my forum ventures. I launched my longest tenured forum not long after, one that lasted for 17 years. It was a wonderful experience!
-While moderating for one of the largest gaming communities of it's time I made the mistake of taking on too many forums to tend to, spreading myself too thin and not being able to adequately moderate those forums. This was during the time when that community was so busy, so active that just looking after one forum was a chore. I had, at my peak, 7 forums that I'd picked up to cover. It was near impossible, things got out of control in a some of those forums and I wound up having to drop them. I wound up running the community side of that site some years later, one of the things I will always keep with me about my forum experience. I still make the mistake of spreading myself too thin, usually across too many different communities, but I'm getting a little better at reeling myself back in again...I hope
-One mistake I made in my early days of running a forum was having far too many forums for the number of members. I would a forum for this, a forum for that, a forum for individual games and so on. It got the point where the index felt like it went on forever. By the end, each forum had about 10 to 70 posts in it, and while the forum itself amassed a few thousand posts, it looked barren because they were spread through so many forums. That's when I learned to be concise with my forums and only expand outwards when needed. You get those same thousands of posts, but in fewer forums so people can see that your forums actually have activity to them. When a certain subject matter overruns a forum, then consider giving it a dedicated forum. Thankfully with forums gaining new features over the years it's become even easier to keep a condensed list of forums thanks to prefixes and click-to-sort organization, so you only need very generalized forums and you're good to go!
There are more...lots more, lol. I've made plenty of mistakes, it's how we learn, and boy have I learned a lot
. How about yourself, what mistakes have you made in moderation or administration?
