What we do here....

[keith]

OnYourMark, LLC, the parent company of theBubbler, is a web design, production, programming, hosting and Internet marketing company with digital audio, photo and video capabilities.

Given some PMs with MichelleC, I thought I'd share what we all do here on theBubbler.com, mostly on a daily basis:

- booting 4 or 5 bogus members a day
- booting 4 or 5 or more bogus classifieds a day
- booting spam PMs (Private Messages)
- booting bogus links that have been added
- approving dozens of legitimate classifieds responses a day
- approving several link additions a day
- approving and greeting an average of about 8 new Members a day
- systems administration for the site
- marketing and promoting hundreds of Wisconsin companies via theBubbler
- administering the Forums; help Moderators manage the Forums
- fielding 'Contact Us' queries and providing tech support
- publishing a well-defined email newsletter every week to subscribers
- cajoling Members to use more features
- providing FAQs and video tutorials for Members
- updating events listings, averaging well over 50 a week
- programming a whole new site while maintaining code on the current site
- private messaging dozens of Members and Moderators
- managing dozens of affiliate programs
- cross-promoting over a dozen related Wisconsin sites
- managing banner advertising
- publishing feature articles
- having fun talking with Members in guestbooks and Forums and PMs
- doing search engine optimization and registration and maintenance
- doing competitive intelligence
- scouring logs and stats for traffic information

Well, that's a start.

Couldn't do it without great Members and Moderators either.

We're looking forward to great things with the new TheBubbler.com that we're developing.

Regards,
Keith

[CarolsCritterCare]

Kudos to everyone involved in making the Bubbler a great place to visit!!
Carol

[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!

[pk]

Kudos to everyone involved in making the Bubbler a great place to visit!!

I totally agree! Not only is it a great place to visit..it's an awesome place to visit! lol It's also habit forming! A big thank you everyone behind the scenes for keeping the bubbler bubbling! lol

pk

[keith]

Thanks, Carol, Michelle and Patti!

Couldn't do it all without an extremely talented staff (doesn't hurt to be in teh web business, getting great results for clients - including traffic from theBubbler.com), great Moderators, a fair and increasing number of Members - the kind you like sharing a campfire with - and more than a little bit of luck.

Great to have a real, local, virtual world to hang out in.

Regards,
Keith

[Crys]

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

[MichelleC]

Crys -

Thanks very much for the insight. Right now, I read everything that shows up on my site, but that's pretty easy when it's so low traffic. I imagine it will be a lot harder to keep up with once the site gets busy. Reading in the database isn't very easy with the software I use, but I can see everything added to the site on the tracker page. I think the only exception to that is guestbook entries. I'll have to see if I can find a way to get those in there. I hadn't thought about going back and checking things after they're posted. Good tip, there.

Thanks for the offer of PM help. I could always use feedback, but I don't have specific questions right now. I'm still working on features and the site is really low traffic. I'm sure I'll have question as I go along, though!

Thanks,

Michelle