I’ve gained a lot of experience running and working with bulletin boards in my day, although most of my experience has been based on numerous mistakes. In 2004 and 2005, I established a number of communities, but most of them wound up being unsuccessful for a number of reasons, and that’s pretty much how I learned NOT to run a community.

Well, a few weeks ago, Patrick O’Keefe (of phpBBHacks.com fame, as well as a number of other communities and websites), released a brand new book called Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards. Patrick was on phpBB Weekly #050 back in February, and in addition to talking about phpBBHacks.com on that episode, he gave us an early preview of his book. Since then, he sent copies to both myself and David Lewis for us to read and review. (Plus, we’ll be giving away an autographed copy on phpBB Weekly #061 on May 10th!) I recently finished the book, and am quite excited to have the opportunity to review it.
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Tags: administrators, book, communities, forums, guide, guidelines, management, Managing Online Forums, marketing, Patrick O'Keefe, phpBB, review, staff, tips

As many of you know, I’ve been working with phpBB for a long time, and I’ve been an active user on phpBB.com for almost four years. Nine months of those four years were spent as a member of the MOD team. While their team members do a great job (particularly given that they’re all volunteers), I still find that I have a number of bones to pick with them, and my greatest bone to pick has to do with how they communicate with other members.

I’ve been reading a book that I got from Patrick O’Keefe (of phpBBHacks.com et al) about how to create and run successful community forums (which I’ll be reviewing in full on this blog in a week or so), and one of the biggest things that has been stressed in that book is your relationships with your users and staff. Quite frankly, it’s a book that I think the phpBB team members should read, because I think that they really need to improve their relationships with the users on phpBB.com. Although they’ve repeatedly claimed that they’re trying to work on improving this, they usually tend to carry some kind of “I’m better than you” or “I know more than you” connotation when they communicate with the members on phpBB.com.

A very clear example with this happened yesterday. A few days ago, I started a topic on phpBB.com in response to the phpBB2 Retirement, and the topic started off well. Some people were very glad about the change, others were reluctantly accepting of the change, and some others were disappointed about the change, but it was an intelligent, productive discussion. However, around about page 5 or 6, when some of the team members (who shall be unnamed in this blog post) began arguing with the points that were made by some of the users. This in turn resulted in those users arguing back, which began to cause the atmosphere of that topic to turn a bit sour. (I wasn’t posting through this time, just watching.)

It was on page 6 that a user who had just registered called big_board_owner started making some admittedly poor comments about phpBB’s support policy, as well as claiming that the development process only took like 20 minutes and that he was “offering” his services to do security fixes for phpBB2, even though he flat out refused to listen to the team members who were saying that it takes a WHOLE lot more time than that to produce updates.

Now, granted, that user was agitating the topic and not behaving appropriately. But by the time I got towards the bottom of page 8, I started noticing that the posts that the team members were writing seemed just as rude towards him as he had been to them. Eventually the whole topic turned into a big fist fight between the team members and other members who had ganged up with big_board_owner, to the point where derogatory language was being exchanged in a couple of posts. Eventually, one of the team leaders had to end the dispute by locking the topic on page 12.

I’m not going to deny that the user was being inappropriate, but I feel that the team members sank to that user’s level by arguing with him. The point of the topic was not to argue about who was right or to argue that phpBB2 shouldn’t be retired, it was to discuss the fact that phpBB2 was being retired and to share our opinions on it. Quite frankly, I’d blame the team members for being the first ones to blame others of having “invalid” opinions and for hurting the general atmosphere of the topic. We all have opinions, nothing is going to change that, and the team members shouldn’t consider it their duty to “convert” everyone to the “correct” way of thinking.

The team members need to understand that they are the ones who set the atmosphere on phpBB.com, and as such, they need to hold themselves up to a much higher standard than the other users. This is true for ANY community. Any community will end up with users who sign up simply to cause trouble, and it should be up to the administrators/moderators to deal with that user in the appropriate fashion, NOT to argue with those users. What does arguing do? It makes them angrier and gives them even more reason to misbehave, and this hurts the community at large. Because of the way that the team members mishandled this situation, that topic for discussing (not arguing) the retirement of phpBB2 is now closed and now no one has the opportunity to share their opinions on this very important topic. Having worked with the team members before, I know many of them tend to prefer arguing with these users for their own entertainment and enjoyment rather than thinking about the interests of the community at large. As team members, they should have dealt with that user privately and not permitted him to take the conversation in a bad direction, but they chose instead to argue with him and effectively helped him with his goal to take the conversation in a bad direction.

The way that that topic materialized should be embarrassing to the phpBB team members because it shows that they do not know how to deal with users who register simply to stir up trouble. I for one think that if any reasonable kind of friendly community discussion is to be able to persist on phpBB.com and not fall into the kind of wormhole that the phpBB2 Retirement topic fell into, then the team members really need to take a look at their actions and rectify them, or they are going to find that their rapport with the users will turn sour very quickly.

Tags: administrators, community, discussion, forums, members, phpBB2, shame, team members, topic, users