February 8th, 2007The secret to a successful forum
- the cool admin’s guide -
Ok .. so you’re thinking about having your own community and getting members, posts and why not, revenue. You just planned this and now are eager to startit all. How can you be the perfect forum admin? What do you need to do in order to have all people admire your skills and work?
1. Hosting and domain
We all know that a site needs to have an address and some space it uses. You have to look for a really cool free host and a nice subdomain name. Your address needs to be long and cool: thebestforumever.thebestfreehosting.com … if it’s not over 40 characters long, you’re failing as a great admin. Who cares that your members will have to either bookmark the forums or write that huge address down? You know that bigger is better and that applies to your forum address too.
There are some who tell you to get a domain name, something short and easy to remember. Don’t listen to them, they’re just envious on your long address. And pay for hosting? Are you out of your minds? How will you get successful if you’re paying from the first moment?
Who cares you’ll have to move into another hosting plan after you make it big? And what if you lose posts and cannot move the database? Let those members post again. Members love getting to zero post count again, even after making 10000 posts. And starting the forum from the scratch once again is another occasion for you to show people what a good manager you are.
2. The script
After you settled for that cool and long address on that free hosting service it’s time to use a cool script. Head up to an illegal download site and put your hands on a paid script: either VB or IPB. What if you don’t have the money or the willingness to pay? They are both good scripts and it’s cool to have one on your forums. Who cares there are free legal solutions? You need to set a tone in that community. Show your members how cool you are and chose a cool script.
3. Layout and logo
In almost all webmaster sites you’ll be told to have a unique look for the skin and a nice logo. But why bother? People come to your site since you’re such a wonderful admin and you have so many things to offer. So what if your site looks just like 1 thousand others? It’s not your problem. Let the members and visitors see the uniqueness and coolness in there.
And let’s face it, changing the layout means work. A lot of work. You either do it or pay for it, but how can you hang out and brag about how cool you are as an admin when you have to lose time to mod that theme?
4. Categories and organization
Another annoying idea: “start small”. How can you have a big forum if you’re thinking small? Of course people who say this know nothing about this and they are not cool admins. Start with many many categories. Don’t go anywhere under 30-40 categories. Try to get to 50 if you can. If you hear anyone preach “get less categories” just show off your 50 categories forum and make fun of their 5 category forum. Yours is stretching vertically better than theirs. You forums are BIG. People need to know you are very well organized and that you think big from the first moment.
5. Posts and topics
Another chance to receive some bad advice from people who think you really don’t know what you are talking about. They all come and tell you to start new topics and have a lot of quality content on the forums. Yeah, like you can be bothered to do this. Let the members start topics, they love the site and want to work for you. As for the quality content, if you can get your message through on the SMSs and chat, what’s up with the forums that people cannot comprehend them? Why write full words and sentences? Who cares about the people who don’t understand them? Who cares about quality? Put hundreds of replies (don’t stop even if you’re double-posting) .. just get many many posts. Then you can brag how big your forums are.
As for starting new topics: all the members there absolutely worhip the forums, it’s their problem to post topics. You are the cool admin who just has to exist and all the others do the work if they love the community so much.
Another thing that makes your members love the forums a lot is for a lot of personal and chatty messages. Poeple like to read these posts and hope that someday they’ll know others personally so that they can chat inside the topics like this:
adam: hey … julia .. wazzup
julia: cool, 10x, u?
adma: cool. come to me tonight
julia: sure. love ya
and the topic can go on and on.
You don’t need private messages, why keep all the other members who don’t know Adam or Julia away from this exciting conversation? And the best thing is when such discussion appears in the middle of a popular topic … it just shows how cool Julia and Adam are.
Another thing you must think about is offer some very racist, xenophobic and sexist opinions. People love a person who has so many things to say and the courage to put all things down. It shows them again that you are so confident and know so many things. You need to post some very mean messages and mock at people who are disabled, share another political, sexual or religious beliefs. Not to mention those who are of another race than you: they need to be shown who’s the perfect one.
6. Mods and admins
Another thing you must have: tens of mods, super-mods and admins. I mean you are a leader, you need an army to lead, don’t you? How can you tell others: I have 100 mods working for me and be the worshipped leader you want to be if you don’t have many “soldiers”. We recommend you to have at least 15 mods from the first day. Make many of the members mods. It looks very cool to have a 100 member forum and 60 of them to be mods and admins. And new members won’t be put off by this at all, they love seeing they are the only ones not to be mods. Gives them some goal to strive for.
7. Rules and guidelines
Who needs rules anyway? Those clumsy admins who cannot deal with a situation when it arises without covering themselves with tens of rules. You don’t need them. You do as you please and when someone complains you just tell them: buzz off. It’s a cool expression and shows again how cool and collected you are as a good administrator. From time to time you can also play with the accounts. Change passwords, edit messages to make people look stupid .. they love this and can’t get enough of it.
8. Overall activity
OK. Let’s get this straight from the first minute. You’re not a slave to work on that project. Who cares the members noticed an error? Let them wait. You do have a personal life and you need to spend some time with the gang to brag about the awesome community you have. How can you do this and be cool when all you do is work on that forum? So … let them wait for 7-14 days at least .. That shows them you’re so busy and they are ruining your plans with all this error reporting. After these days have passed consider giving some response such as: “we’ll work on it” and then let some more days pass before doing anything.
Don’t give in whenever they ask for something new in the forums. You installed the forums and they’re functional. What could you do more than this? And if they do have the nerve to offer some feed-back try to hijack the thread and put them one against the other. Nothing is more thrilling than having your members fight. If they are too calm, try to send some private messages and claim another member said something bad about them. They love this and it would make the forums very active. And you could enjoy their fights each day.
Try to read all their private messages and even post them in forums. Members love this, it makes them feel special.
9. Advertising
You want money, don’t you? For this you need to have some campaigns running. Not just one, many. And banner rotation campaigns, and a huge list of affiliated sites. You don’t exist if you don’t have at least 50 links to affiliate sites. The ads need to be many and noisy if possible. Try pop up, pop under ads, huge banners, ads with sounds and those so cool ads that cover an entire page on mouse hover. Members love them and just can’t get enough of them. And if you can have some adult sites promoted with some explicit ads, you’ve nailed it. Those 12 year olds who might read the content love these ads. In the end someone needs to show them all this stuff, ain’t it right?
10. Promotion
So you have started the best forums ever, but people don’t know about your project just yet. You need to register in as many forums as possible and just open a thread about your cool community. You don’t worry about this. Some admins that just die of envy will consider it spam, especially if the 2 forums are on the same topic, but they just don’t know what they are missing.
And if you do stick around for more than post, make sure in every message you bring your site up. Link to it, even if the topic is totally unrelated.
Follow these easy steps and be ready to become the coolest admin ever. And if your forums do survive, please let me know 
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Note: I do hope all my visitors here understand this is an ironic take on admining. If you do try this and succeed, then by all means let me know. It would mean that I got it all wrong from the first day I started running forums.
