Friday Protip: Use a Trash Forum

by Sanya Weathers

The key to success in the community field is to not bother having dignity. Dignity gets in the way of so many things – bonding with your players, getting crucial information to the dev team, getting a press event going when everyone is shy and sober… but I digress.

My point is that you cannot possibly know all the tricks even after ten years in the trenches, and you need to be open to learning new things.

I have just had my eyes opened to the wonders of the Trash Forum and how easy it makes life for your moderators. This subforum is in the admin-only section. If a troll goes insane after your moderators have gone off duty (and bonus protip, if you have more than 3K active posters and 10K lurkers, you should have a moderator looking in around the clock), the resulting cleanup can take hours. It’s not just the troll that has to be sanitized, it’s all the people who rose to the bait. You don’t want that if you’re paying your mods by the hour. In addition to the amount of time it will take, deleting the posts removes the record of how badly someone lost their mind, and you’ll need that record if you decide banning is your only remaining option.

So make a trash forum. With a few clicks and a flourish of the “move” button, all the offending posts vanish, and yet they remain as your paper trail in the event that you need to close an account. No fuss, no muss, and more time spent reading the posts of real customers.

It’s so obvious I missed it for ten years. Never be too proud to learn new things!