Everyone has seen them. They invade your e-mails with useless information ranging from bogus vacations to prescriptions for pills that either don’t work or you don’t need. And in an online community, they’re worse, pitching their wares in public.
You know them as spammers, the scourge of the Internet. And historically, spammers and their non-human counterparts, spambots, have made life for community managers miserable.
Earlier this week, I had to ban a troll. I only consider it memorable because for the online communities I manage, trolls tend to be few and far between. However, if you happen to manage a community that is prone to these type of users, you may run into this issue much more often.
Trolling has been around as long as the Internet. They are, in their basic form, one of the most potentially disruptive and, as a consequence, damaging element to building and manageing your online community.
Like any other project, online communities must have one person who has the power to make sure everything runs smoothly. In this case, that job falls on the shoulders of the moderator.
Online communities have called this person by other names, such as administrator, director or other names users call them when they don’t get their way. But their functions are all the same: To keep the community functioning and a viable place for users.
So, you have an idea for building an online community. The problem is that your technical capabilities aren’t very strong. In this day and age, however, the lack of technical savvy is no longer a deterrent for creating and maintaining an online community.
You just need to know where to go. Here is a small sampling of some of the sites that can allow you to get up an running without having an advanced degree in Computer Science.
Years before TOG Solutions was created, I spent some time building communities online for other interests that ranged from reading of college newspapers to hunters seeking cooking advice. This, of course, was at a time when blogging was just getting popular, and all of the current popular social media sites did not exist.
Today, while the idea of online community has grown exponentially, thanks to the light-speed emergence of social media, the concept still remains the same: Build your own online presence in hopes that others like you will join you.
