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Originally Posted by MichelleC
That's quite a list! I never realized just how much work goes into running a site like this. Definite kudos to you 
Makes me wonder if I'm getting in over my head... LOL! |
Michelle - Here are a few things to think about that can reduce the amount of work involved with maintaining a community:
I have a very comprehensive list of all the maintenance tasks anyone does for the site, and I go through it top to bottom twice a week. If you can schedule yourself a day or two a week to do that, you shouldn't have too much trouble staying above water. It's MUCH less work when you can get through it all regularly instead of letting it pile up. If you start a regular maintenance routine now while you're starting to build content, you will probably never have a whole lot of maintenance to do all at once. And don't be afraid to tweak your list -- my list is always changing as I find new things that we should be checking and haven't been or that there are things I can relegate to checking once a month, etc.
The important thing to keeping your site family-friendly and safe for users is to make sure that you're on top of _all_ the content submitted by anyone. For instance, some of the things I do that aren't in Keith's list above are checking all the ads that are modified (you wouldn't believe some of the things people have put in modified ads after the original ad had been approved), all the new story comments, guestbook posts, journals, recipes, and pretty much anything else that has a submission form. You can do that by skimming or just reading the first line or two usually, to tell if it's spam or not; you don't need to read all the content deeply. Also, I find it faster to read the new content directly in the database -- if you're comfortable with phpMyAdmin or whatever interface your web host uses, that might be a good option to speed your maintenance up. I also post in guestbooks of members who haven't logged in for a long time to get them to come back and cull the member list when I come across people who haven't logged in for years and don't respond to emails. That's not something you'll need to worry about for awhile but it might be a good idea to think about how you'll handle that when it does come up.
It _is_ a lot of work when traffic gets heavy, but you'll find maintenance for your site much less time-consuming if you can divide your list up a little. For instance, I only do certain things on Mondays and other things on Thursdays, rather than doing everthing every day. Some things I have on the list as "first Monday of the month". You'll want to watch your site for its trends when deciding when to do your maintenance. For example, Sunday and Wednesday evenings seem to be the spammers' favorite nights here, so I do my heavy maintenance on Monday and Thursday mornings. While your site has low traffic, most of your maintenance can probably be done once a month.
You're always welcome to PM me if you have any questions on logistics or security or just need some feedback on what you're doing on your site. Before I was working on theBubbler I maintained a couple other high-traffic community sites, and I figure all that experience isn't worth anything at all if you're not willing to share it
