Staffing How do you build a community?

[Josie 198]

How do you build a community on your forum? And by that, I don't mean how do you go about obtaining members- but what do you do with your members to create an identity that is unique to the forum? What do you do to make your forum the forum that it is?

 

This is something I'm extremely passionate about and have felt for a while that some RPs struggle with. I know it's pretty normal to have event sign ups and things like that, but from what I have seen they tend to require either a lot of time or for the member to have some sort of skill, such as coding or graphics abilities. For people who don't have a lot of time to do things ICly at the time of the event or can't code or make graphics, they can easily be left out. So, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out a way to help build community that doesn't involve that kind of thing, and have recently started up an experiment of sorts.

 

What I've done on my forums is create three kinds of events: forum holidays, community events, and weekend quests.

 

Forum holidays happen once a month and are just days where we have a silly theme, such as Talk Like a Pirate Day or Impersonate a Movie Character. Community Events are events where we all try to gather around and do something together, such as watching a movie or playing Cards Against Humanity. Weekend Quests are basically like silly scavenger hunts, where members are given a set of tasks to complete and if they've done that they get a little reward. The tasks are always things to encourage OOC activity and for people to interact with each other (like posting in plotters, putting up wanted ads, using the comment system, etc.), or are goofy things like "find 4 gifs of squirrels."

 

Participation in these is always optional.

 

Generally, I'm satisfied with the results of this experiment. Although most members do not participate in every kind of event, almost every member will participate in at least one type of event. So some members never do a weekend quest, but they will always do the forum holiday for example.

 

We also have a Minecraft server that we play on together sometimes.

 

But! What do you guys do?

Edited November 20, 2016 by Gothams Reckoning

[Bishop 172]

I'm not sure what I truly did, but damn it--it worked! I can say that I have the most amazing and safe space on the internet. Like we don't even play on the same board anymore but we have a group chat now that is just to hang in. There are 18 people in there all former players or current players, but overall just the sweetest and most fun people on the net!

 

I think it is important to have someone ground the gatherings. That I can say. When Skysails (my former site) closed there were a few drifters that admitted they felt lost and it wasn't even the site they were missing it was us! So that is why the chat was born. Now as we have a private board the same amount of excite and posts are still going, there is a peaceful calm, and it has truly been amazing,

[Elena 546]

I wish I knew, because I tried everything other forums had succeeded and I did not succeed. Or I did succeed once but it faded away in time, despite all my attempts. I am speaking with everybody but most people do not communicate among them and are not interested by contests, events, chats, things to do together as a group. So yes, I have a certain dose of disappointment now. But still going on and trying everything I can. I wish they would try what they can too, but many people avoid communicating and are there only to write once in a while.

[Morrigan 1,826]

Since I currently don't run a forum other than The Initiative I'll tell you what I did.

 

I got rid of the bad apples. Molded the ones that were souring into better people and formed a dome around it. I also defend the safety and the open expression with my every decision. I don't always have time to keep up with everything (as everyone knows I get behind a lot) but overall I make sure that it stays a place that people can feel comfortable and safe to chill and express themselves without fear of persecution for disagreeing with me.

 

(although I do love a good troll however everyone knows they can troll me in return).

[Mistress Of The Obvious 73]

I'm not sure what is best for my community yet. I have very lax requirements for activity, but some seasonal events sound like they could be fun.

 

I've thought about creating an optional Thread Roulette where people are paired off randomly if they sign up.

 

I have a potential treasure trove of events from ones unique to Japan or are western in origin, but are celebrated in Japan. Did you know Christmas is celebrated in Japan even though it isn't an official holiday? There's no Christ in it. It's a gift giving holiday. There was an older holiday around the same time centered on gift giving, so they blended. There are big Christmas trees and the traditional holiday meal is KFC, Kentucky Fried Chicken. When Christmas started gaining traction some decades ago, someone at KFC realized the mascot looked a bit like Santa Claus, so they decked him out like Santa and marketed KFC as a holiday meal.

 

There are activities associated around seasons like Hyaku Monogatari Kaidan Kai. You have a gathering of people in a circle and tell ghost stories, each one supposed to be scarier than the last. You light 100 candles and after each story ends, you douse the candle. It's intended to beckon the dead and usually occurs around Obon in late summer.

 

 For right now, I'm doing what Morrigan is doing. If I could like that post multiple times, I would. With the election here in the U.S. there were/are a lot of stressed people. I was able to be help with one particular member. I don't like politics being discussed because it leads to hurt feelings and disrespecting others. Yet, I do have that no one will be discriminated because of their political opinion in my rules. I'm happy to provide a friendly welcoming environment for my members. I check up on my members.

 

When advertising and hanging out on resource boards I can't tell you how many people in cboxes were telling people they should be scared, making "jokes" about wanting the elected president assassinating, ranting about moving to another nation, etc. The last thing you want to tell someone stressed is stuff like that, especially if they have mental health issues. Seeing so many advocate for social justice style safe spaces having no problem making certain groups including those they advocate for feel unsafe for the sake of virtue signaling to others, both amused and disgusted me. Apparently, that gay black Christian transgender man who votes Republican is only worthy of respect regarding certain aspects of himself, but not others.

 What I learned from that experience is how I don't want to run my board. I don't want members to feel scared and intimated by me because they voted a different way or feel stress because I'm confirming their worst fears to them.

 

Since my site isn't quite officially two months old and I'm a first time admin, everything is a bit of an adventure. I consider myself at the very beginning of my site's life and am still wanting to create the site culture I want and gain more members.

[Robmin 10]

I'm not sure what I'm doing yet. I'm definitely putting up seasonal events (so the first event that ties in with opening is the Christmas party that'll last December-January) but I'm not sure beyond that. Gothams Reckoning I like your ideas though of weekend quests, may I use this?

 

Something I have done as a start is ban all mention of politics and religion OOC. While I'm quite happy for it to be referenced IC (Nick Fury having to be diplomatic to Trump anyone?)... lets keep OOC following what is considered polite at the dinner table . No mention of politics or religion thank you!

 

I'm also trying to start off some forum games both in the chatbox, and on the site itself. So I'm planning to really plug Chatbox Telephone calls/Chinese whispers. Where basically I might post a sentence, next person comes along changes one word etc to see what ridiculous sentence we can get at the end.

[Elena 546]

We never banned politics and religion in our c-box, and I think it is a good idea not to. Because this is how people can learn a lot of things. When our c-box is active, sometimes one can read about the election process in various countries, how the EU functions, about Brexit and Grexit, about the refugees, but also about Balkans history, various religious holidays and traditions in different countries... It makes the conversation more alive and more interesting. We have international friends in order to learn more, about their political system, health, education... It widens the horizon.

[Josie 198]

1 minute ago, Elena said:

We never banned politics and religion in our c-box, and I think it is a good idea not to. Because this is how people can learn a lot of things. When our c-box is active, sometimes one can read about the election process in various countries, how the EU functions, about Brexit and Grexit, about the refugees, but also about Balkans history, various religious holidays and traditions in different countries... It makes the conversation more alive and more interesting. We have international friends in order to learn more, about their political system, health, education... It widens the horizon.

 

I can see both sides of it- allowing those topics, or not allowing them.

 

While my site doesn't have a ban on these topics, most of my members are also people I've known long enough to trust that they could have a civilized conversation about the topic- or at the very least, will remove themselves from the conversation if they do not wish to engage, instead of getting their knickers in a twist. It can be more difficult to tell how things will go with strangers, and if that is not the kind of conversation that you want to monitor then it makes sense to not allow that kind of talk either. I suppose it just depends on the kind of community you want to foster- one more focused on what is going on on the forum, or one that considers outside factors, too.

[Robmin 10]

6 minutes ago, Elena said:

We never banned politics and religion in our c-box, and I think it is a good idea not to. Because this is how people can learn a lot of things. When our c-box is active, sometimes one can read about the election process in various countries, how the EU functions, about Brexit and Grexit, about the refugees, but also about Balkans history, various religious holidays and traditions in different countries... It makes the conversation more alive and more interesting. We have international friends in order to learn more, about their political system, health, education... It widens the horizon.

 

Part of the reason for the ban is the current political climate and the fact that at least one of the boards I'm there's a lot of bashing the 'other side' and a lot of 'well people in the UK shouldn't have an opinion this is an american thing'. I've got fed up of all the bashing threads basically, in the future once the political climate has calmed down as much as it will I'll probably remove that rule, but for now I don't trust people to actually behave civilised to each other. Makes me sad I've had to enforce that rule but, people can still get some polticaling from in character at least. 

[Elena 546]

I think we are both. Because one can't ignore the realities of life, and things are seen differently from distance. Me and our Greek member @Miltiadis see things closer in Balkans than a Finnish and Americans do, We have a Danish Army sergeant who had been two rounds in Afghanistan and has another perspective too... And some people take for granted that only how things are in their country is the only way they are done, if not discussing.

 

We never had @Robmin's problems though. There were theoretical discussions, questions, willingness to be informed about what happens elsewhere, how and wjy.

Edited November 21, 2016 by Elena

[Icewolf 258]

I don't mind that people have different opinions on politics, people being of different religions or even the LGBTQ community, but what I do not like to see is people using these to bash others. Brexit became an annoyance for me over the summer because there were certain people who tried to make those in favor of it feel like they were trolls, uneducated, racist, etc and I've seen the same thing happen over the US election in regards to Trump supporters. I'll not even go into the number of times I've seen people try to use feminism, LGBTQ issues and race issues to divide people and have a go at folks (on both sides, I might add.) I want a diverse community to develop for the forum, but I also want people to respect each other and see it as a place where people can just rp in their favourite fandom, and not use these things to split a community up.  In some ways, I just don't see why these issues need to be brought up when what brought people was the fandom in the first place. I wouldn't want to stop people talking about these things but I don't like the trend of belittling people that appears to have grown up around it.