This is a great thread, every new community should follow it! Sorry for bumping and old, there isnt many posts in this board but! An addon to number 3 is search engines cant crawl if you disable guest views!

I would just like to add to this, dont allow name changes. They create confusion, and just are generally a hassle.

1. True, and no one can argue for banning them, as all they do is generally positive.

2. So true. There are scenarios (such as sensitive issues and private forums) where you don't want this, but if you are running a non controversal, normal site, this is something to think about. Never stop guests viewing your forum, and if you don't, also never stop them viewing topics either.

3. Cannot say, but I still know more people on broadband connections than dial up, and the resolution thing is a bit old fashioned.

4. Ditto. You don't know how often I use stats like how many members joined since the forum opened and how long it has been around for to decide when to join. Just one advantage of letting guests view profiles is that you can let them work out how active the forum is from stuff like that. I do wish contact information could be made private but not all of the profile though. Just e-mail and IM information. And yes, the best way to encourage guests is to keep cool features like the arcade to the members only.

5. So true. I do this a lot myself, and on every forum I ever registered to. Failure to do this ends your forum on the same note as that forum with 122 members and only 22 posts... the forum graveyard. And failure to keep involved as an admin leads to either a dead forum or a state of anarchy/civil war. I have seen this happen too often...

6. Agreed.

7. Also agreed. To add to this, partial network banning could also accidentally ban a whole school/workplace/college/library/internet cafe as well, which would ruin access to your forum for those depending on such places.

8. I have no idea about this, because it causes a conflict of theories and ideas in a psychological and philosophical sense.

9. I disagree. True with a small forum, but any large forums do need more than one staff member with this kind of power. Do you really think many of the largest communities online (Offtopic, Gamefaqs, IGN, etc) could be run with one administrator? Some are corporate, but many actually high non paid admins because of need as well.

10. Honestly, I have no idea why a HTML allowed option even exists, because the option unfiltered is website suicide. Makes me think of a certain forum I used to go to which accidentally allowed iframe code and someone inserted shock pictures in topic titles...

11. Also true. I have seen instances of vBulletin 3.0 and 3.5 being run, which is just slightly insecure. I also remember a site once still running vBulletin 2.

12. Sadly this is a very common problem and materialist attitude, as far too many people think that by adding one more thing, doing one more thing or buying one more thing, everything will be perfect and their problems will be over. Far from the case, and why have a clock, it's already on your desktop? And a weather display is useless for non weather related forums. Reminds me of that engineer saying, that 'If something is not broke, it doesn't have enough featurs yet!'

Re having other admins:

I thought this was a bad idea to have more than say 2, but I added 4 more over time, all of which have limited access to the admin CP and I know them personally.
Generally due to the fact that my online access was limited, I added more and that one of the other admins has previous experience too.

I am the only one with full backend access to ftp and the database, so I am safe :)
Plus its nice to know in the config you cannot be deleted.

I totally disagree on the admin numbers thing. I run a forum, of which i'm one of 7 admins.

4 of us have root access to the server to fix problems - one in each timezone (uk,us,aus) and the site owner.

our smods also have limited admin access allowing them to add mods and make changes to the forums that they are responsible for.

It all depends on need. Without this number of admins nothing would get done on the site. Obviously you dont make someone you've just met an admin; most of our admins/smods have been on the site for years and have worked their way up through mod/smod/admin ranks, all new staff members are voted in by admins + smods, so we generally get only the best into staff positions.

The one problem that comes with that is, the person who has server access/owns the hosting or server is generally going to do what they want with the site if they decide to leave or can it.

I had another admin on my site and he literaly was complaining about MY decisions... like if he was the owner!

GOD! If you ever add an admin allways be clear about their place on the administration...

After reading all of the above post, this one stuck out. I'd be interested if you actually did this? This seems like a recipe for disaster especially as your legit members start asking questions of individual fakes. And then keeping the PM mess clear will be a nightmare.

If a forum is interesting it will attract members.

I got very lucky and although I thought the first contact was actually someone trying to sell me some services that I can't afford, I made a phone call and gave someone admin privileges and it has worked exceedingly well. BUT, he owned a vB forum with over 21,000,000 posts, is a programmer, had a real interest in my forum, and gave me a lot of interesting tips that have helped build the forum. I had no idea about administering a forum, banning users, registration problems, etc.

I didn't give ftp access or access to the database and don't plan on doing so. I consider myself lucky as this could have gone south. I now have another moderator and will be adding another in the coming months.

It's quite normal for admins to make about two or three alts... just make sure they vanish into the sunset early on the forum's history. Your mods will probably understand why you made the alts if they ever figure it out.

As for you getting help from this guy, that's a great thing, as the person looks extremely skilled in forum management from the information given.

wow this is still as relevant as it was when i first read it in 2003! classic!