When it comes to running a community website, there are many things that you won’t know before stepping into it. Ask someone who is already managing a community website about their experience and they will tell you how hard it is to protect it from spammers and weed out the bad members. Spammers are increasingly using bots to automate the whole process and wreak havoc on your site. Also, there are malicious users who blend in like normal users which can be tricky.
Although you can’t stop them entirely from trying, you can put some measures in place to protect your website and its members.
Now, here are some of the common issues that are faced by community administrators and moderators around the web –
Spamming
Like we said earlier, spammers are nowadays using advanced tools for spamming community websites and forums. All they just need to feed the bot is some data that matches their desired parameters and it automatically scans for websites, creates accounts, and publishes the unwanted content.
This can be time-consuming and stressful for the site owners – to be constantly on the lookout for spammers and block them in their tracks.
One way to combat this would be by using a spam control plugin, especially on the user registration page. We would recommend you to add Google reCaptcha on the user registration page and social login or Jetpack SSO on the login page. Also, you can take it one step further by safeguarding your site members using rtMedia Activity URL Preview. This way, even if the spammers manage to publish spammy links on your website, the members will know what the link is about before clicking on them.
Managing rogue members
Another common issue with most community websites is rogue members. This list comprises people who don’t join with good intent or members who go rogue due to some reason. They don’t usually follow the community rules and perform actions that go against them.
This needs manual intervention in most cases. So, you need to constantly keep an eye out for them. You can offload a part of this work to your site members using rtMedia Moderation. They can report the content and take it down automatically after it reaches a certain number of reports.
If that’s not enough and you’re not able to control it, you can make your site exclusive to paid members using rtMedia Membership.
Web hosting costs
As your site begins to grow in popularity, more people will be joining and adding to the list of concurrent users and user-generated content on your site. You will need more resources like storage space and bandwidth to keep your site running apart from the basic processor memory and power.
If you don’t upgrade on time, your server will take a hit and affect the user experience on your site. Your site might just come crashing down.
To delay this from happening, you can optimize BuddyPress and offloading your media files to Amazon S3 using rtAmazon S3.
Monetization
Another problem that many community site owners face is – they don’t how to properly monetize their site. If you started a community website with the idea of monetizing it later, you should be aware that not all niches are profitable.
So, it’s always better if you pick a profitable niche beforehand. If you have passed that stage, you should remember to choose a proper monetization method suitable for your niche. For example, if you are managing a community of food bloggers, you should try brand partnerships and paid ad placements instead of selling courses or displaying ads from ad networks (AdSense, Media.net, etc).
So, these were the points we wanted you to know before jumping into building a community website.
We hope you found the above points useful. And, if you feel that we have missed out on something, do let us know in the comments section below.
P.S.
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