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Administrator, Category_Forum Administration, Category_Moderation, censorship, Community, debate, forum, free speech, freedom of speech, moderator, online, political, politics, protected speech -

Moderating Political Posts in Online Communities?

Moderating Political Posts in Online Communities?

Forum administrators and site owners should be careful when publishing any sort of public political statement. It is all too easy to get invested in politics to the point of debating, or even arguing. There are times when one side of any issue can be considered factual, with opposing arguments perhaps lacking any facts, evidence, or convincing theories. Those can be the most troubling to deal with for any moderator, whether they are in a televised debate or handling post reports on an online community board. It's important to understand the difference between providing a good user experience for your...

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Category_Forum Administration, Category_Hiring Staff, Category_Moderation, Content Creation, Joshua Farrell, New Forums, potential members, Staff -

Why You Don't Need Staff For a New Forum

Why You Don't Need Staff For a New Forum

Most people feel that when getting ready to open a new forum, or a couple of weeks into a forums life, they must hire some staff members to help. This normally comes in the form of wanting to hire 1-2 moderators and an administrator at the most basic level. However, hiring staff is often much more based on the feeling that having people with these roles makes them much more likely to contribute to discussion, and help grow your post count. There are many reasons why you should not hire staff, just for the sake of it, in this article...

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Activity. Rules, Category_Forum Administration, Category_Moderation, Finding a Balance, moderation -

Finding a Balance in Forum Moderation and Activity

Finding a Balance in Forum Moderation and Activity

For those who do not normally moderate, or those who are new into moderating forums, I bet you have wondered what you should do to balance your moderating of the forum and being active on it. I hope to give you a few tips to help you out in that field. Forum Rules When you write up your forum rules, which dictate what members can and cannot post and do on the forum, you need to figure out what rules exactly needs to be spelt out in being restrictive, and what rules you need to have that allows your members...

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Category_Forum Administration, Category_Moderation, Category_Security and Privacy, Category_Webmaster -

Fighting Spam Effectively: The Three Layer Defense

Fighting spam effectively can be difficult, but using three different technologies, it can be quite achievable. Forums do not need to use member validation, or impose the requirement to first post in a particular forum. Instead, a forum needs to use the following three techniques to form a passive and active defense against forum spam. Defense Layer #1: Good Anti-Spam Software The most important aspect to any spam defense is software. Within this "Layer," an administrator should use four different technologies to defeat spam. Those technologies are as follows. reCAPTCHA: Google's reCAPTCHA is currently the most effective anti-spam mechanism. There...

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Category_Forum Administration, Category_Hiring Staff, Category_Moderation -

How to End Forum Dependency on the Admin

New forums can often be compared to virtual children because of their dependency on their owners. Starting a new forum isn't easy and is not something for the light hearted to take up. Dedication is key for forum survival and unfortunately this is the key element where many forums fail and die out. A community is a start up business that thrives under good leadership and active staff participation. Without an active and near hovering administrator on call to supervise a new community the members lose interest and become lurkers and eventually cease to visit the site in it's entirety....

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