Building a Community

The heart of a good BitTorrent site is a good community. This is a hard subject to address, which is one reason I've hitherto avoided it. However, it's also a very important one, so I'll do my best.

Easier than describing how to make a good community is perhaps how not to do so. I know of a group of people that are trying to create a community out of whole cloth, which strikes me as ridiculously naïve. That said, they're more knowledgeable than I am, and if they succeed, the more power to them.

However, in my experience, good communities are things that are not made but simply come about of their own accord. The best you can do as administrator is to focus on creating an environment that fosters a strong community. I've already outlined factors that can poison a community: strong emphasis on ratio, paranoid pre-emptive action against potential undesirables, heavy-handed and arbitrary moderation, and so forth.

People like to be free, to be able to speak their minds without fear of repercussions. They will naturally gravitate to a place where they feel that they can do this. Make no mistake, the world doesn't need another 4chan. In fact, the world doesn't need the 4chan it already has. As always, it is necessary to find a balance between the extremes of staff control and utter chaos – to moderate in moderation, as it were. Trying to entice people become active in the community is doomed to failure. Rewards for high post counts are ridiculous; people are too hung up over post counts anyway, and it's harder to break in to a community where post count equals status equals worth as a person. It may not seem that way to you, but it will to the newcomers.

This is where things get difficult. It's up to you to find your own balance. All I can do is lay out the questions and leave you to answer.

If you've got any more points you'd like us to cover before shutting this bad boy down, now's the time. Don't be shy!

Donations

In light of yesterday's post, I'm going to spend the next few days addressing questions as they come up. Today's question is regarding encouraging donations.

In my experience, people are generally pretty decent sorts and will do what they can to support their favorite site, and I'm assuming that's you. I'm not into pushy salesmanship, and I don't think it's necessary. It is annoying and compromises the tone of your site, but more importantly, it crosses a rather important legal line between facilitating the sharing of copyrighted material and outright selling it. Where you want to stand on that question is entirely your own choice, but I like to stay on the light side.

However, I'm not opposed to the idea of buying ratio, as long as your site doesn't make it necessary for users to do so. Ratio represents a contribution to the site, and there are all kinds of ways to contribute. Some sites also provide ratio bonuses for long-term seeders, and I think there is very much the same thing going on here. If you've contributed, I have no problem with recognizing you for it.

I have a slightly less sunny image of donor/ratio perks, though. Any features that you provide to VIPs are features that you are denying to other users, which in turn prevents your site from being as usable as possible to as many people as possible - kinda the point in my view. Providing recognition is fantastic, but adding concrete features is a little more questionable. VIP-only forum boards will fracture your community, since the VIPs will tend to hang out with their kin and other users will never really be pulled into the fold.

In terms of recognition, I suggest simply giving users more control over their own profiles and the way they are presented to others. I know some sites allow avatars only to power users. However, since I only ever notice peoples' avatars rather than their usernames, I want to encourage as many people to have avatars as possible. You could allow people to customize the way their username is displayed, add more info to their profiles, maybe add custom stylesheets. None of these things have any practical use, but they provide a degree of social status as a reward, and that is enough. Of course, the ubiquitous donor star is a must.

I suggest placing a clear donate button on every page, but nowhere obtrusive. In keeping with my previous point regarding selling copyrighted material, I would keep it away from torrent description pages. Make it clear to your users that donations are always appreciated but never expected. A simple button in the header or footer ought to be plenty. I like Demonoid's approach of using an animated GIF that flashes briefly and subtly every couple of seconds. It draws attention without being too distracting.

Demonoid also has a neat donation system. I'm not sure I should be detailing it here, but you should be able to get some idea by making a donation yourself, or going through the process up to the point where you're asked to key in your PayPal account. Basically, donated money is received not through Demonoid but through a third party site, so PayPal can have no complaint. Very clever.

Big-Tracker Finances

As I mentioned yesterday, I am seriously strapped for time this evening and won't be able to continue my announce-writing series as I had intended. I'll do some coding over the weekend and hopefully get things going again on Monday.

Early in the life of the blog, I discussed the financial logistics of running a small tracker. Well, TorrentFries grew out of that phase. As you grow, so does the complexity of your bookkeeping.

Obviously, the cost of hosting increases as you move to faster and faster servers. However, things also become a lot less predictable. I've previously advised that contingency is a good thing, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of finances. While you're small beans, you will probably be paying the same cost every month for a long time. Hosting is predictable, although we were impacted by the dropping US dollar, which caused our hosting costs (charged in euro) to increase without any benefit to us. Of course, we were growing and becoming richer as time went on, so that was more annoying than difficult.

Eventually, it is likely that donations will outstrip expenses. Don't let it go to your head and don't squander the money. A big site is always in danger of being taken offline or even coming under threat from the copyright police. Having a slush fund handy is invaluable, since you won't even be able to beg for money with the site down. At one point, we had as much as $800 in reserve, plenty to get us a new server if need be. In fact, we were saving up to build our own box to colocate somewhere friendly. That didn't end up happening, but it certainly could have with a few more months. At the time, we were making about $30/mo in ad revenues (Project Wonderful is not the most profitable provider around) and over $500/mo in donations, although donors are fickle and hard to rely on – another good argument for a slush fund.

Now, running into trouble with PayPal (which I assume you are using for your finances) is another concern. I suggest spreading your wealth across multiple accounts, a few hundred dollars in each. If one goes down, you still have access to enough money to tide you through until things get sorted out. Don't use Tor while accessing PayPal. If your geographical IP jumps around too much, PayPal will automatically flag your account as potentially compromised and will freeze your funds until you confirm the account with a credit card. Prepaid cards are handy there, but a massive pain in the ass nonetheless.

How you choose to use your donated money is entirely your own choice, but I have no ethical problem with paying for personal projects that have direct benefit to the site. For example, I bought Coda with donated money, and paid for a course in UNIX administration that significantly improved my ability to do my job. I went from absolutely thumb-fingered to only moderately thumb-fingered, and I think the cost was worth it.

Since there is a massive time investment involved in the operation of a torrent site, I wouldn't begrudge you making a profit, either. The excess donations I received would have amounted to something in the ballpark of $1/hr, and I don't think that's unreasonable. However, profiting from the site opens a whole new can of worms. Profiting from copyright violation puts you in different ethical and legal territory. The implication of sale is what landed the EliteTorrents admins in deep shit, and will get you kicked out of Spain, too. As always, it's a personal decision as to where you want your tracker to go, and I decided to take the high road.

Botbusting

Okay, this week has heated up a great deal for me, so it doesn't look like I'll be able to continue my coding series until Monday. In the meantime, I want to talk a little about combating bots of different sorts. OnionRings knows more about the technical and security stuff than I do, so he may have some stuff to add or correct. Maybe he'll do some stuff about tightening up the backend, but my expertise is on the frontend/touchy feely stuff, so I'll just focus on that.

A CAPTCHA is an image that is (ideally) impossible for a computer to read but easy for a human. It's used to verify that a user is not a bot, rendering brute-force attacks unfeasible. However, even if it is easy for a human, it's also very annoying. For that reason, you need to use them with moderation.

The biggest technical threat is brute-force attacks on account logins. If someone gets the password of the admin account... well, I don't have to tell you the kind of hurt that can result. Combating this can be as simple as implementing brief (15-minute) bans after a certain number of failed login attempts. I don't think it's feasible to use CAPTCHA in this case because it's something that everyone will be presented with, especially if they don't have their browsers set to keep them logged in. I dislike entering more than a couple of them a day, and any unnecessary ones annoy me. However, if you implement temporary IP bans and change your password regularly, it should afford you a reasonable amount of protection. Other options here may be to require CAPTCHA on all attempts after the first one (decided by IP, not cookie), or to create an account that is used only for administration and give lower permissions to your regular account.

You can use CAPTCHA on registration, but I don't like to spend too long filling out registration forms, either. Besides, a human can register, then let a bot loose on the site. It's still not a great solution, although if you have fairly generic registration forms (or use an unmodified script), that may be a concern.

Instead, I suggest requiring CAPTCHA on a user's first few posts/comments/messages. After the first few, no more annoyances. One idea I just came up with and have yet to implement is simply to require CAPTCHA for all users with a 0/0 ratio. If you're using your account, you're likely not a bot.

No matter how careful you are, some will inevitably slip through. As I've mentioned before, proactively promoting moderators means that what does get through can be dealt with reasonably quickly. This is especially nice in the case of porn spam with images attached, which is never nice to be presented with unexpectedly.

If you have any other suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

How Not to Admin a Tracker

I'm assuming most of the audience that is actually moving in the tracker direction is running or planning to run a small operation, for the time being at least. That means spamming all over the place for your site, and that means your previous identity (with all its slip-ups) is irrevocably connected with your site.

Chances are, when you first got involved in the P2P community, you were scared shitless. If you weren't, you should've been. If you were paranoid, you should have made a new account unrelated to any other you might have online. If you didn't, go do that now. Otherwise you're opening yourself up to a whole world of hurt. After a while, you start to relax, to become blasé about the whole copyright issue, and you start to get sloppy again.

Now take this unconcerned you and put it in charge of a BitTorrent tracker. You're probably a little concerned, but that goes away fast. It's just a small operation, after all. It can't hurt.

The problem is that small operations have a way of becoming big operations, and your behavior has a way of sticking around. Even if you've been careful to delete posts as you grow, the curse/blessing that is archive.org will remember your transgressions. All of a sudden, you're at the head of a booming site, and oh shit, what have you done? You go to cover your tracks, but it's too late, of course.

Chances are that if you're headed down this road, you're not far along. You can still change now. Don't make these silly mistakes. If you're going to be involved in your own community, which I recommend, create a new username for it. Don't let hubris enter into the equation. It's tempting to join other torrent sites and go "look at my awesomeness!". Don't. Your admin username should be used only in the context of your own site, and in your dealings with other sites. It's tainted in a different way, and it's dangerous to mix things together.

As well, it's helpful to have an alter ego. Create somebody that is plausibly of the same character as you, but comes from a dramatically different background. Trust me, it's a good idea. You're role-playing, and you should never drop that identity, even with your closest online friends.

Of course, this is the product of much painful experience. Do as I say, not as I do. Accessible as I want the prospect to be, it can be dangerous work, and you have to take it seriously, no matter the size of your site.

The Rules: Writing a Constitution

Yesterday I walked into a shop and was greeted by a sign thanking me for not urinating in the produce. Wait, no I wasn't. You know why? Because there are certain codes of behavior that are implicitly expected of all members of a society. Yet somehow sites feel the need to inform me that I could be banned if I start stirring up hell in the forum. Great, thanks for that.

Quite simply, there are some things that just don't need saying. Sure, you're going to get trolls in your forum, but making a rule telling them to go away is going to do nothing for you. Rules are for the people that genuinely care about their standing with the site. The people that are just around to make trouble aren't going to be reading your rules, and certainly won't make a point of abiding by them. You can't legislate common sense.

So what are your rules for? They're for people like me. I'm a member of a bunch of different trackers, and whenever I sign up, I always take a peek at the rules before I get down to business. I know what a BitTorrent tracker is, I know the usual etiquette, but I just want to find out if there's anything special about how your site does business. Do I have to post in rhyme? Have a cute, fuzzy avatar? Download only certain torrents? I don't want to dig through a bunch of bullshit about obeying "the moderators [sic] expressed wishes! [sic]" in order to find out what really matters.

Conversely, a lot of sites that have automatic ratio bans (which I've ranted about in previous posts) won't detail these bans in their rules. The hardest and fastest (and most variable) rule of all is somehow overlooked. The staff don't have to touch it as the banbot does all the work, but it's the rule with the most impact on new users, good and bad alike. Whether or not I agree with the concept is a moot point, at least tell me.

You're writing a constitution here, not a criminal code. If you've never read your country's constitution, go do it. It's probably available online. In general, they're pretty succinct and accessible for all their importance, and you'd be surprised what rights are being violated. Your criminal code, by contrast, is probably a few thousand pages long. The constitution is basically a vague statement of purpose, while a criminal code gets into the nitty gritties. Since your moderators are not police officers bound by the letter of the law, you don't need a criminal code. You simply need to give guidelines by which your site should operate.

A lot of sites have 15-20 rules, mostly the stuff that came preset with TBdev or whatever they're using. In my mind, you should be able to get everything you need in less than 10, preferably 5 general rules and 5 upload rules, in addition to the behavior that one normally expects of a generic good member elsewhere on the internet. The fewer rules you have, the better.

That's not to say you should have people responding to your moderation actions complaining that they didn't know something was against the rules. If it's the sort of rule a person can't be normally expected to know, then by all means throw it in there. Otherwise, forget about it. You're entrusting your moderators with plenty of discretionary powers, so you don't need to spell everything out.

I'd finish up with some examples from TorrentFries, but quite simply, it's stuff that applies only to that site and to none other. That's kinda the point.

Peer Management

Okay, I'm not in fantastic condition at the moment, but I want to keep things going. I'll just grab on to a recent suggestion – discussing ratios in a community context – and run with it.

Basically, any simple, closed system will be balanced, no matter the context: total uploads will equal total downloads. No matter how your tracker records data, it will always be tracking as much uploaded data as it does downloaded data, neglecting hash fails.

Therefore, when the ratio tracking system is altered, you will do nothing but alter the community dynamic. There will always be supposed gormless bottom-feeders at the bottom of your scale, and theoretical paragons of virtue at the top. Sorta. In my experience, chronic leechers are mostly those that simply haven't been initiated into proper torrent etiquette. I know in my early days of torrenting, I was quite unnerved by the prospect of others being able to connect to and download from me. To be sure, I didn't go out of my way to do this, until it became a point of personal pride to maintain a ratio above 1.0. It is only my involvement in the community that drove me to do this.

Now, think of an open site like The Pirate Bay. The tracker is simply a collection of its parts, each behaving according to their own conscience. The leechers leech according to their desire for gratification (or lesser experience, or lesser ability), while the seeders do so because of pride or generosity or simply because the swarm is so slow they end up uploading far more data than the download size by the time they complete. And you know what? It works. It may not work well, but it works.

Now, ratio-obsessed private trackers choose to whack off that bottom demographic, the people that are disinclined to share. That's all well and good, but you simply move the community's scale. Instead of having the true leechers at the bottom end of the scale, now you have the metaphorical middle class down there. In my experience, such systems tend to drift ever upwards as users are banned for poor ratios – in other words, as the bottom end of the spectrum is chopped off again and again. Obviously, these systems rely on new registrations to add a continual stream of new members to slow or halt that drift.

This is compensated for by free leech days, golden torrents, what have you. However, the only people that will participate in this activity are those that are genuinely concerned about ratios. They're not downloading torrents because they want to, but because it will improve their status in the community. To me, this is contrary to the purpose of file sharing. You share what you've got because you want to share it, and people accept what you're sharing because they want to have it.

Basically, these events are designed to fix a system that doesn't work properly all the time. If you need to schedule special events to compensate for your model, you must be doing something wrong. I would prefer to have a system that works in the same way and with the same effectiveness every day, rather than just once in a while.

So where's the solution? I don't have an answer. I don't think anyone does. I certainly do use a couple of private sites, but I also use the big boys when they have what I need or when I don't feel like destroying my ratio trying to seed back. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," comes to mind, but I can't deny that swarms on private trackers do seem to perform better, so clearly something has been fixed or at least improved upon. Personally, I would prefer to see more personal treatment towards leechers. I believe that most leechers simply haven't been properly introduced to the social protocol (heh) associated with torrenting. If someone is actually intentionally and knowingly violating accepted behavior, they will take pains to hide it by using a cheating client of some sort. Therefore, wouldn't it be logical to take some means to inform the uninformed? I prefer not to participate in a community that is ultimately built on fear. It smells bad.

This is just meant as some food for thought, and hopefully will dispel some feelings of superiority on either side. Again, I'm sorry for my unfocused meandering, for my inability to make a solid point, and for any typographical errors I may have made. I'll probably read this over sometime when I'm in better intellectual shape and say, "I can't believe I said that," but there's nothing to be done. At least you got a post.

I had intended to write my tracker tutorial this week, but ah well. I'll do it sometime in the future. Stay tuned for that.

BitTorrent Communities

I didn't want to bore you with too much Linux, so today I'll write about the elements of a BitTorrent community from the eyes of a member of a handful and an admin of one. I would encourage anyone that still reads our posts to comment with any questions you might have, and we will try to address everything we can.

When analyzing BitTorrent communities from an admin perspective, I often consider the following goals.

1. Maximize uploaded material quantity
   
2. Maximize upload quality
3. Maximize user involvement

This three-legged stool seems to have a visible balance. In the case of large tracker sites, often there is more quantity paired with less quality and user involvement. Smaller private sites sometimes have higher levels of quality and user involvement, but sometimes less quantity. These three legs on my stool help each other. For instance, more user involvement helps upload quality and quantity. Good upload qualities and quantities attract user involvement. When creating a community, it's critical to have a clear idea of your goals for these three items and let that define the 'feel' of your site.

Maintaining higher standards on torrent descriptions coupled with user comments improves at least perceived quality. When users have a way to gauge the details of the torrent data without downloading, they'll be more comfortable engaging. Have an explicit example of how torrent descriptions should look on the user upload page. Instead of simply titling your comments section "Comments" on the torrent page, consider something like "Comment on this torrent's quality".

When users aren't downloading or uploading material, what are they doing? Many sites consume users' excess time through interactive forums and shoutboxes. A lively forum can be the mainstay of a community. Conversely, a dead or hostile forum can turn away would-be outstanding members away. Be friendly and don't let users or moderators become short with users even if they are n00bs, the whole community will align on the staff and prominent posters' viewable culture.

User interface is key. Make it easy for users to drill down the material they're looking for using categories and subgroups. Search is the most important thing for a torrent site, so make sure it is prominently positioned, works well, and is predictable and consistent. Otherwise, negative results are a reflection on the material tracked. Also, I can't stress the importance of a good site design. Mediocrity won't get you very far when attempting to gain users and material early on.

As mentioned before, ratio tracking helps to mentally encourage users to give back to the community. Distinguish uploaders and otherwise exceptional members in the community or figure out a way to give them a warm fuzzy feeling. Make this visible wherever users interact.

The overlying theme is culture. Define a culture you find appealing and align your entire site around it. Culture exudes itself in every aspect of your site from the site rules to each forum post, so take some time to think about what you want to display. A little psychology and management will go a long way.

Tough Calls and Conflicts of Interest

Okay, I figure I may as well finish the week off with a subject that's something of a continuation from yesterday's discussion of black-and-white dealings with members. As "nowhere" said on Monday, this is the sort of thing all staff should already know, although in my experience this is not always the case. Anyway, sometimes things aren't so clear, even for the more levelheaded staffers out there.

If an argument occurs between two established members, it can be a difficult call to make. The best choice with heated discussions is to lock or delete the thread in question. If the thread is locked, include a simple post saying something like "this discussion is getting out of hand". Don't take sides. Usually, this is all it will take. It's the topic's fault, not the members'. If necessary, send each involved party a cautionary message. Don't get into a "who started it" game, or allow the members to pull you into one. Depending on the circumstances, you could caution one member against baiting others and another against rising to the bait. Warnings are rarely necessary where otherwise-upstanding members are concerned, since they have a stake in the community and should understand that they should behave accordingly. However, repeat offenders should be officially sanctioned no matter their status.

That's still something of a no-brainer. Here's the bigger point, and the one where I slipped up as I'll tell you in a minute: don't get involved. Even if the subject of discussion is concerning the site, do your best to remain impartial. If it's a topic of some concern to you, step back and ask another staff member to deal with it. Similarly, don't use the locking method I described above to foreclose debate. Unless a subject is clearly inciting a polarized and heated debate (as in the example I gave on Monday of the "What do you think about homosexuals?" thread on Facebook), it should be allowed to run its course unless it gets out of hand. Just because you may not like the way the discussion is going doesn't give you any right to bring your extra powers to bear.

Sometimes, you just want to leap into the fray. Hey, a good argument can be fun, so long as it remains civil. However, if you're going to join up, leave your badge at the door, and make it clear to the members that you are doing so. If necessary, message a fellow staff member asking them to keep an eye on the thread and moderate any or all participants if necessary, even you. If you bring your powers into a discussion, your relationship with members will change forever. It can't be undone.

This is the point where I bring in my own painful example, where I became involved in a discussion and a user ended up leaving the site for good as a result of my behavior. During a political debate, I brought up my rather polarized views against Israel's foreign policy. The other user responded with equally-polarized view in support, and we fell into discussing the country's enemies. Eventually, I felt that the other had become quite offensive, both to the Islamic religion and Arabs themselves. I issued a summary ban. I realized almost immediately that this was an overreaction, so I scaled it back to a warning. Here's the worst part: I then asked one of my fellow moderators to send a message explaining the reasons behind the warning that I had issued. I didn't want it to look like I had become emotionally involved in the discussion, and didn't believe that I had. In retrospect, that was certainly the case. The other member reacted in an understandable fashion towards myself and my middleman: he sent us both indignant messages, deleted all his torrents, then his own account. I had, in the end, effectively banned him from the site.

The biggest lesson to take away from this example is that there's a right and a wrong way to involve other staff members. Asking another to do the work I didn't feel comfortable doing myself should have sent up red flags that what I was doing was not a good idea. Part of the problem is that I don't think he had quite internalized The Moderator's Bible that I posted on Monday, and didn't feel comfortable enough to say no to me. That's another reason that mods need to be relaxed and comfortable in their roles, since they may need to call you out when you behave improperly yourself. Hey, we're all human. Well, we are under a layer of internet, anyway.

Troll Control

Anyone who has spent any length of time in an online community knows about trolls: insecure teenagers looking for recognition by eliciting a reaction from community members, be it positive ("LMFAO") or negative ("fuck off"). The easiest way to draw a reaction is to incite the contempt of others, so that's exactly what they aim to do. Having this sort of person around is naturally detrimental to the tone and integrity of the community. But what can you do to get rid of them?

The obvious response is to ban them outright. Well, this one has a few problems. First, as negative reactions go, summary bans are pretty close to the top of the list and will incite the troll to offend again, both on your site and on others. Proxies do exist, after all, and trolls know this on account of having been banned from other sites before. As well, this sort of reaction is entirely arbitrary and may make other community members nervous to say things to which you may take offense. In short, they become afraid of you. Some administrators thrive on this, but really, how does that make you any different from the trolls? Just because you hold the banstick doesn't (shouldn't) mean that your own behavior in the community is beyond reproach.

Of course, the best response to a troll is to cut off their food supply. To post responses, as well as conduct overt moderation, will feed their insecurity. Instead, caution your community not to respond. If necessary, delete a few posts - other posts - so it appears that no response has been made. Again, it is a bad idea to moderate posts that are annoying but not rule-breaking. However, you may be able to find more creative alternatives. I once edited the shoutbox code on TorrentFries so that the shouts of a chronic troll would appear only to himself and me. He left of his own accord soon after. (I'm pretty sure the troll was male. To the best of my knowledge, I've never encountered a female troll.)

On larger sites, this sort of time-intensive personal response is not practical. Instead, liberally delete affected posts, or entire threads where they have become infested with the troll/response cycle. However, do not hand out warnings or even directly acknowledge the deletion and underlying reasons until rules are directly broken. "No trolling" isn't a good rule, since it is very arbitrary in definition and to acknowledge this status makes the troll feel successful as this is their goal.

However, true rule-breaking will likely happen within a few days, and you should respond swiftly at this point. By waiting until rules are broken before responding, you make it clear to the troll that they will not be dealt with in any special manner. Since they want to feel special, this will leave them unfulfilled and allow you to respond without making the situation worse.

It is possible that the troll will attempt to contact you or another staff member directly. Respond to their messages politely, formally, and cooly. Answer any questions directly and as succinctly as possible, or provide a concrete reason why responding to a particular question is not an option (privileged information and so forth). Do not make any other comments, particularly regarding the character or behavior of the troll.

Never ban a troll without sufficient cause, although you can certainly make the rules a little less tolerant where the undesirables are concerned. You cannot allow them to feel like a part of the community or they will get the idea that the staff and the staff alone hate them, leading them to return via proxy "for the sake of the community". To the contrary, if you do your job right, they will leave of their own accord after a few days and a ban will not be necessary. I have never had a troll that lasted more than 4 days.

If you stray from this path, particularly by arbitrarily banning the troll or rising to their bait, your site may end up with a poltergeist to call its own, and they will become extremely difficult to shift. One way or another, best of luck in dealing with these little shits.

The Moderator's Bible

I'm going to rewind a bit today and expound a little on a subject I touched on last Thursday, namely, the task of trying to get my moderators to loosen up and maybe understand their role a little better. This entry is perhaps something of a cop-out, but it's going to consist entirely of a message that is permanently stickied in the staff lounge. Hopefully it'll be of use to somebody.

Disclaimer: Take what I say at face value here - I'm being serious and saying everything straight up and no sarcasm involved. This is where I need that serious smiley.

IMO, this is a general thread that should be stickied across all community sites, like those "How to Upload a Torrent" threads often are. There's nothing specifically directed at any of you or all of you as a group, but everything that should be taken to heart for all mods everywhere - as the subject line indicates, a "Moderator's Bible".

The following is an example of what happens from time to time in a forum. You've all read the exchange and know who is involved, but I've genericized the names anyway since it really doesn't matter who is involved - we're all culpable at some point, staff or no. This is more to point out that in a community the term "moderator" doesn't mean "a person who wields shiny buttons". It means "a person who moderates". Think of a moderator in a debate. They have the ability to cut off somebody's microphone, but the job description is to keep the debate moderate and on track (well, in this site's case abandon all hope on that last point).

Here, things are admittedly a little different. In a debate setting, everyone in the debate is seriously devoted to the debate, even if they get sidetracked or passionate or whatever and need to be brought to order. On most sites, there are retards and spammers and all sorts of undesirables, so the heavy hand of the law needs to be used more often. But never forget that everything you do needs to stem from the basic need to keep the entire site as a whole on track and civil, to moderate the site as a whole, not just its parts.

So, without further ado, here's the excerpt:

Bystander:

Ah, another one of my flock, I'm studying engineering ;D

Combatant 1:

Which Engineering discipline? If its Civil then YOU are one of my flock, I like my coffee with milk and 2 sugars please ::)

Combatant 2:

Hey, hey, take it easy on the nice lady... You don't want us pressing any buttons, do you? :P

If it wasn't for that sarcastic smiley at the end, you would have made my day. ;)

The stage is set... nothing would have come of it since Combatants 1 & 2 are both mature, upstanding members of the community.

Concerned Person:

and YOU, Combatant 2, would appear to be correct that Combatant 1 was sheparding Bystander.

When a third party enters the game and takes sides, the sarcastic, joking air evaporates. Next, Combatant 2 attempts to explain his position, setting the stage for potential further conflicts:

Combatant 2:

Thus my comment about being nice to the lady. Sorry Combatant 1, but I won't have that, be it joking or not.

At this point, the mod steps in with a innocuous attempt to calm things down with a straightforward comment:

Moderator:

:-\ Is it just me or do I sense a sniff whiff of drama forming here?

Combatant 1 tries to explain his position. It's pretty effective, although this wouldn't always be the case.

Combatant 1:

I was implying that if she is a Civil Engineer, then I have a few years on her and if she came to work at my company she would be the general dogs body, degree or not she would still get stitched up with making the tea/coffee or doing the bacon butty run. :)

Moderator completely diffuses the situation with a straight-up remark, followed by a comment to hijack the thread in a whole new exciting direction. :D

Moderator:

Yeah, I figured as much. Usually just a matter of __ took __ the wrong way, so __ says __, and things just go downhill from there.

Now that we've got all that sexual tension out in the open ;) we can move on.

Sorry again for my choice of examples here, but this sort of thing is so rare around here that I kind of had to take what I could get. It's not a good example nor a neutral one, but it'll have to do. Around [popular site that I used to moderate], these things happen every day, partly because of the number of posts, but also because the community isn't as tight-knit and most people don't know each other that well. In fact, what happens over there is a thousand times worse, and with dozens of members taking four or five sides, some of them just saying that another side is idiotic for no reason at all. You can understand how quickly something like this could get out of hand if one user can't tell when another is being honest, sarcastic, ironic, mocking or even deceitful.

In this case it would've resolved itself without intervention, but I intervened (moderated) just to be sure. What made me think of writing this was a discussion thread I saw on Facebook asking for users' views on homosexuals. This is an obvious but somehow more insidious form of trolling, in my opinion. The thread will get hundreds of posts in an hour, but they will become increasingly heated, and in most communities the general opinion will result in the press of numbers attacking those of the minority opinion, and the minority posting nonstop making the same points over and over in an attempt to save face. Unless you are willing to watch every post, I would suggest you lock it immediately with a neutral comment like "this is an important discussion that should not be conducted here for the integrity of the community". This isn't the lazy way out; in fact, it's the safest way.

This isn't something that I'm telling you because I think you're performing badly as moderators. If anything, I want to make your more confident and aware of what your role is. You delete the porn spam, yes, and split the off-topic threads if you have a lot of time on your hands, but the rest of what you do has to stem from your own sense of keeping things level, in good faith and without any sort of bad feelings. The rules are guidelines both for members and for yourselves, but never feel you cannot overstep the limits of the rules or permit things not specifically allowed there as governed by your own judgement. There is no constitution here, and unlike in the real world, the intent of the law reigns supreme over the letter of the law. Above all, it is your role in keeping the site running smoothly and keeping its members in good harmony that you must adhere to.

So, if you've read this whole essay, kudos to you, and I hope it helps you out in some small manner. I, clearly, have a long attention span at the moment. And that's really all I have to say on the matter.

First person to reply to this thread with "I'm sorry" gets shot.

Recruiting Staff

Okay, I don't generally intend to follow the order of my subject list in yesterday's post, but since this is the first subject that came to mind, I'll hit it first and go from there. Maybe I'll end up following that order anyway, but not by any grand plan.

I was a moderator on a major site for a while, until I left due in no small part to a personality conflict with the administrator. What I took away from the experience (aside from a bunch of friends among fellow mods) was a shopping list of what not to do as an admin. Specifically, I decided to be open with my mods, democratizing the relationship as much as is practical. I'm not all-knowing, and I certainly don't feel comfortable with my word being taken as gospel. It took a while to convince them to relax, but I think it was a good move and it seems to have worked well.

As mentioned in the title, the point I want to make is specifically related to how to tell when members are ready to be promoted. Your mother probably told you something about strangers on the internet, and it's true, albeit with a lot less paranoia in the equation. You never do know who someone you're talking to online really is, but honestly, I don't care. If someone is reliable online, I don't care if they're a pedophile or serial killer in real life. I'm going to be dealing with their online persona exclusively, so the fact that I can rely on them online is all that's important from a staff perspective.

When I say recruiting your friends is a good idea, I want you to understand exactly what I'm talking about. These people need to be first and foremost the community's friends, but you're going to be working with them on a daily basis. The staff needs to be a strong team, and when there are conflicts, there's a problem. Besides, if you're doing your job right, you have nothing but friends in the community, and not the sort that come with being a figure of authority.

What I don't mean is that you should have your friends from real life or elsewhere on the internet join up and be promoted almost immediately. In this case, it doesn't matter how long you have known them or how much you trust them. The community in general has to trust them as much as you do, and they have to be committed to the community. That's not to say your personal trust isn't a great asset, but it can't be the primary factor. I did make that mistake once, allowing an online friend to join up and be promoted after some token site activity. As of this posting, he hasn't been seen on TorrentFries in over a year. He didn't do anything reprehensible, just disappeared one day. Just because someone is trustworthy doesn't mean they're committed to the site.

The other point I want to make is regarding timing. Moderating a site can be a big job, requires some serious team effort, and has its lulls and periods of frantic activity. I see no sense in hiring "enough" mods while leaving others on your waiting list in case you need them. People have lives, and it's nice for your mods to know they're free to take off whenever they need to without crippling the site in their absence. Hell, I could do that if necessary, since my mods had all the power needed to ensure that the site kept going on a day-to-day basis. These days, the only thing none of my fellow staff members have access to is the money, but that's a story for another time.

A side benefit of this duplication is that any of the little day-to-day issues that need dealing with such as trolling, spamming for porn sites, general rule violations and so forth can be dealt with very quickly. Even with "enough" staff members, not everyone is going to be online all the time. The more people that have the power to deal with this sort of thing, the more likely it'll be that someone will be able to deal with this sort of offense immediately.

Okay, one last thing. This shouldn't even need saying, but: if someone asks to be promoted, for fuck's sake don't do it. If it becomes apparent that they want or expect the position, a big black mark goes down beside their name. This sort of power-hungry person is going to be unreliable at best. The best staffers are the ones that will be baffled to sign on and find that they now have a ton of extra buttons on the site.

That's enough for today. Tune in tomorrow for... uh, something else. I'll work it out later.

Retrospective 5: Money

Continuing from where we left off on Friday's post: as a result of the move to a dedicated server, our monthly costs went from $5 (or $0, depending how you do the math) to roughly $80. That's a huge jump for a small site. I made a news post pleading for donations. EasySpeedy required 3 months' worth of hosting payments in advance, plus a €60 setup fee, when paying with PayPal. As a result, we had to raise €240 up front, or $360 US. The community came through. In two days we'd raised $250 and had enough with our previous donations to make the move.

However, going to the member base with hand outstretched is very poor form, and something I like to avoid at all costs. By the way, when you see a host do a donation drive, don't forget that there are a lot of generous people out there and the host may be making more money than you think. I heard secondhand of a site where things slowed down and the administrator announced they needed a new server and started a donation drive. A few weeks later, the site sped up again, "we're on our new server", and the admin walked away with a cool $10,000. Don't let that prevent you from being charitable, especially to a small site—please don't—but that's something to bear in mind.

Anyhow, we obviously needed to find a more sustainable way to supplement our income to ensure that we could make our next hosting payment. I hadn't gotten around to looking into advertising up to that point because it often requires credit cards, mailing addresses and other undesirables. The provider that we did end up with was Project Wonderful. They're wonderfully subversive to normal advertising models, which appealed to my rebelliousness. They certainly don't pay as well as other providers might, but it's all right. Instead of scams, spyware and pyramid schemes, we got ads for web comics and independent online clothing stores. Again, a little subversive.

I also implemented a few perks for donors. There's not a lot of incentive to offer without removing features for regular members, so I added the usual formula of donor star, your choice of username color (staff names in italic), and x days of status per dollar donated. It seems to have worked all right, and we did manage to meet our next quarterly payment with a bit to spare.

I have a feeling there was something else I was planning to mention here, but since I'm actually writing this days in advance as a result of my unnecessarily long post attempt on Thursday, I imagine I'll have time for it to come to me. If not, maybe you'll be lucky and I'll remember later on and tell you then.

Retrospective 3: Shared Hosting

Up to now, I've been talking mostly about setup. Now it's time to delve a little more into the day-to-day operation of the early months of the site's life.

As one might expect, things were pretty slow for several months after our January launch. With the low activity on the site, there wasn't a lot to do aside from tinker with features as suggestions filtered in. The more I customized, the more I realized how woefully unequal TorrentTrader was to the task. Unfortunately, I was committed and to change at that point would mean more work still. Instead, I quickly developed a policy of rewriting entire pages as a whole rather than tweaking what was already there.

One of the suggestions was that I add a favicon to the site. The existing logo didn't fit the small size very well, so I set out to make a new one. The product ended up looking pretty good, so I redid the entire site design based on the icon. What I wouldn't give to have that kind of time at my disposal nowadays...

Aside from the constant refinement of features, there's not a lot involved in running a small tracker, no more than what's involved in tweaking any other pet website. Since someone else may be taking care of your server for you, you may not even need to worry about that. The whole experience feels a little like running a lemonade stand on a deserted street, sitting in the sun while the ice in your mother's lemonade pitcher melts. It's just that exciting.

Despite the last few paragraphs of doom and gloom, we did grow slowly thanks to some of the methods I detailed yesterday. In March, a member asked how to donate to the site. Bemused, I opened a PayPal account. The $5 donation felt like a fortune. Since the site was sharing a hosting account with my personal stuff, we were essentially being hosted for free at the time.

Don't worry, all that changes soon enough. More on that tomorrow.

Retrospective 2: Promotion

Promoting any new site is a major issue. Word-of-mouth on the internet is not to be underestimated, but it won't do much for a site with no unique features—see yesterday's entry for a bit of discussion of that one. Even on an unusual site, word-of-mouth won't get things going very fast from the beginning, and you end up in the vicious cycle of having no material, making it difficult to pull in new members to add new material. Some people have ridiculously large collections of material gathered from various sources, such as audiobooks or movies. I know of people whose porn collections are measured in terabytes, but I prefer not to know them personally. Regardless, if you can upload your own collection piece by piece, you may be able to make your tracker appear much larger than it actually is, and use your unique material to pull people in.

Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do by way of promotion in the early days aside from shameless spamming. A point related to my earlier mention of the usefulness of connections: I am active enough on some high-profile communities that I could get away with throwing links into my signature and posting a few spam threads. Don't try this as a new member, and certainly don't try to join communities exclusively for the purpose of posting spam messages. It will only generate ill will towards you and your site. If you don't have a place to do this, it may be a good idea to hold off on your plans until you do. It's important.

Dump sites are great promotional methods. Sites such as MiniNova and Demonoid allow you to upload torrents tracked elsewhere, so configure your new tracker to accept unregistered IP addresses (temporarily if you intend to go private) and upload your torrents to a bunch of dump sites like that. In the torrents' descriptions, include a comment such as "find more great torrents like this at www.example.com". You can even throw a text file inside the torrent to the same effect. You'd be amazed by how well it works.

I'll leave you today with a couple of graphs showing the rate of growth of the site. As you can see, it pretty quickly surpasses the size of an average private tracker, so the processes involved may start to diverge a bit as we progress and as I start to deal with a larger and larger tracker.