[wtricks]

Oh, that brings up some nice memorries

BAck then when I was a nice girl and a beginner in forum administration I had some problems with some members. I tried to keep them happy, but failed since they had diferent opinions. I feared I'd lose them. Well, lost them anyway and one started a vendetta on my forums in other projects. He callled my site many "nice" names and tried to give me a bad reputation. Well, needless to say that he also started a competing forum only to fail after 1 year. My forums are still on and going strong.

CONCLUSION: no one is irreplaceable. As an admin I need to keep my members happy and try to provide them with what they need. That doesn't mean I owe them something at all. it just means I run a nice community and I want them to feel good. If they're not feeling nice they can always go and leave me alone.

i have some long time members that have been together with me from where we were on a free hosted subdomain till we got to our own VB license. They've stood by me through all the hard times (host changes, domain move, new scripts installing and so on), always ready to point out an error, congratulate me for my work and updates, give ideas to grow more. As you can imagine I am greateful to them for all this support. Still, this means we're friends as long as they abide by the rules. As soon as I feel like one member is detrimental to my community, I wil inactivate the account.

There are members who think they can have more than anyone else because of their tenure. It's in the end a matter of diplomacy to keep the pleased and also keep them on their feet. I have managed this by getting them involved in the site and making them realise they are important and that we also need those "forum newbs" to keep the community growing. They criticism is always met with attention from my part, but i never promised acting on this. I fo take the ideas and CHOSE myself if they're viable or not. They feel important because they know I do listen to them, but they also know that I have the final decision.