vBulletin Curiosity Questions

[Otis]

My awesome wife has assumed webmaster duties for Minnesota's Donkey and Mule Club. She's braying about adding a message board to the site and I suggested vBulletin.

Working with vBulletin:

How time-intensive do you find site maintenance?

How time-intensive do you find site moderation?

I understand some portions of the above will vary with traffic levels. For those that do not, please make a hoof-print with your answer below.

Thanks!

[bdh]

Maybe some of the mods can come and tell you about what they do but I can tell you it's a lot. We have over 40 mods and admins here http://bibleforums.org/forum/showgroups.php and each and every one has a function and much to do. Granted, this board is a particularly large one, so the work would be less on a smaller board but there is still lots to do.

Site maintenance I do. It's also time consuming. It can range from an hour a week to 18 hours in a day if things go wrong (and over the years, we've had our fair share of that too).

And to anticipate your next question -- yes it is necessary. Absolutely necessary. If there is one thing we have learned from running this community it's that people are attracted and will return if the leadership is

- available
- proactively involved
- quick to respond and clean up the mess left in the wake the inevitable troll attacks that happen on all boards
- people like to know (I think they need to know) there is at least on mod on duty 24/7
- available to arbitrate in member disputes (which is something that will happen on any board because people will disagree)

Hope this helps you wife.

[tango]

My awesome wife has assumed webmaster duties for Minnesota's Donkey and Mule Club. She's braying about adding a message board to the site and I suggested vBulletin.

Working with vBulletin:

How time-intensive do you find site maintenance?

How time-intensive do you find site moderation?

I understand some portions of the above will vary with traffic levels. For those that do not, please make a hoof-print with your answer below.

Thanks!

Site maintenance falls to bdh so his answers give more on that than I ever could.

In terms of moderating the site I guess a lot varies on which sections need moderating. In something like the donkey club you are describing you probably won't have the same potential for having multiple interpretations that a forum like End Times Chat here might have.

In addition to what bdh mentioned, it's not only important that moderators are available to referee any disputes between members but also that they are seen to be impartial.

Another site I used to frequent started to unravel because the administrator went from being entirely impartial to being quite badly biased. A lot of long-standing members were alienated and left, which meant the site lost a lot of its life.

It's also good to make sure things stay current. I gather vBulletin is a commercial piece of software so updates come out regularly - in the case of the other site I mentioned it was entirely proprietary and hasn't been updated in literally years. Not only that, it's been made very clear that they aren't even taking suggestions because nobody plans to implement any of them.