Being an admin comes with its share of challenges, and we've all made mistakes along the way, and probably will still make mistakes in the future. Whether it’s a misstep in managing members, setting up the community, or overlooking something important, these experiences are an important part of the learning process.

 

So let’s help each other out! :D Share a mistake you made as an admin and what you learned from it. This way, we can all grow as community leaders and avoid those common pitfalls.

 

A few ideas to get you started:

 

• Did you overlook something critical in your forum setup?
  
• Have you had a membership or moderation mishap that didn’t go as planned?
  
• How did your community respond, and what steps did you take to fix things?
  
• What advice would you give to a brand-new admin to avoid the same issues?
  

Let’s swap stories and advice so that we can build stronger, smarter communities together!

I once created a new board solely for general discussions when I had all these forums/topics on my original resource board in the first place and then I ended up moving general discussions back to my resource board due to not receiving much traction on the new board. Suffice it to say, many general discussion topics from this move are now in the trash can and are only visible to staff members, so my board had to get a "fresh start" in producing general discussion topics. A fresh start is not necessarily a bad thing, but I think the move overall was a bad idea when the general discussion topics were perfectly acceptable on the resource board.

A mistake I had was hiringing too many moderators at first. I thought it would be a good idea to hire some solid staff before opening my forum (which to some degree it was) however, I found that it was a little more intimidating for new users as most of the posts/threads were from staff. It also seemed that it was almost always staff that replying and posting so it didn't look as active or inviting. That's definitely a mistake I would not make again. You really don't need a lot of staff when you are just starting off.

I had a case where I had a rogue influence and I didn't ban nearly quickly enough.

 

I'm not generally a fan of banning because the people who usually end up deserving one tend to be the kind of people who don't usually take no for a good answer, with the side effect that they end up using side channels to try to interact. This one particular individual ended up driving a number of the regulars off until ultimately the site was doomed. (Small sites have disproportionately large network effects)

 

This was not helped by the fact that even after the person in question was banned, there were all sorts of exciting doctored screenshots of conversations that never happened from Discord turning up, because the person was that hell-bent on destruction after they'd been told no.

 

Had I banned them sooner, chances are the rot would have been stopped before it was fatal.

I had a case where I had a rogue influence and I didn't ban nearly quickly enough.

 

I'm not generally a fan of banning because the people who usually end up deserving one tend to be the kind of people who don't usually take no for a good answer, with the side effect that they end up using side channels to try to interact. This one particular individual ended up driving a number of the regulars off until ultimately the site was doomed. (Small sites have disproportionately large network effects)

 

This was not helped by the fact that even after the person in question was banned, there were all sorts of exciting doctored screenshots of conversations that never happened from Discord turning up, because the person was that hell-bent on destruction after they'd been told no.

 

Had I banned them sooner, chances are the rot would have been stopped before it was fatal.

That's also a very good point. Sometimes if we wait too long to pull the trigger it may backfire. It's good to nip bad members in the butt right away before they get too into the community.

Mine was not backing anything up.

 

I had a weather-related forum. I bought out my competition - spent over $1,000 for their forum. The forum ended up having about 20K members and a few hundred thousand posts.

 

Then a database corruption occurred.

 

I never backed anything up back then. My hosting service did but not everything and their backups couldn't restore everything.

 

I had to start from scratch, and it never recovered. That forum has been closed for a long time.

 

Nowadays, I manually backup my forums consistently and store them on two external hard drives so I can have a backup of the backup.

Serious question: do you test your backups regularly?

Serious question: do you test your backups regularly?

Seldom really. The only time that happens is when I install a new development version. Instead keeping an old version, I'd like to copy the latest and do whatever it is that I want to do, on the newest version. So in a sense, I am testing it, just not as regularly as I probably should.

Sent out an email batch that included mailing to opt-out addresses. I had to apologise to members that got upset about the spam.

Mine was not backing anything up.

 

I had a weather-related forum. I bought out my competition - spent over $1,000 for their forum. The forum ended up having about 20K members and a few hundred thousand posts.

 

Then a database corruption occurred.

 

I never backed anything up back then. My hosting service did but not everything and their backups couldn't restore everything.

 

I had to start from scratch, and it never recovered. That forum has been closed for a long time.

 

Nowadays, I manually backup my forums consistently and store them on two external hard drives so I can have a backup of the backup.

Oh wow, I am sooo sorry to hear that! That must have been soul crushing and devastating! I've made that mistake before too to not back anything up and though it did affect me and the forum it didn't have such a major effect as it did on you. I'm glad you've learned from the mistake though.

The main mistake that I made when I was younger was not taking backups.

 

But now I make sure I have daily backups in place and another backup stored off site.

I started with Open Source. I always though the script does not make a forum great, the content do. But sadly that is just not true. For your forum to grow, you need a premium script that offers a lot of features and has a great appearance. I managed to grow a forum from 5k posts to 25 k posts within 3 months after migrating to premium software.

Mine was hiring someone I didn't know and she deleted the themes on my forum and installed themes that didn't fit the niche without consulting me first. Now I know not to hire random people to be staff on my websites.