When administrating becomes more stressful than fun

Over the past few weeks, it feels like our site has taken over my life. I work full-time, and then morning & night I'm administrating.

I love the technical side of things (experimenting and adding new features), but the management side is so draining. We have an amazing team of people, but there is still neverending drama and trolling. I've tried to take 4 weekends off in a row, and each one of those weekends, my phone blew up with emergency situations.

What do you do when the site is becoming more stressful than fun for you?

I guess we never planned for the forum to grow the way it did, and now we're paying the price. The thing is, I know the other admins & mods can handle this site on their own - but the perfectionist in me always wants to be there to help resolve an issue. I also know they are all very stressed out too, and I don't want anyone feeling like they must quit.

Thanks!

 

Is it the same group of people who cause most of the drama? If so, give them a final warning, then get rid.

Don't believe anyone who says that constant drama at forums is a good thing; it isn't.

... and get a cheap pay-as-you-go phone for your mods to call - then switch it off on a weekend!!

 

That pay-as-you-go phone idea is fantastic, thank you!!

And unfortunately almost all of the drama comes from external sources, and we do ban them. But typically we see multiple ones each day. I've worked with many forums in the past, and although this is by far the most active, the content of our site attracts an unusual amount of drama & trolling.

 

Does it usually start straight away when a new member joins? If so, consider setting up an entry-level usergroup who's posts are reviewed by your moderator team before going "live". You can pre-filter a lot of the rubbish right there.

 

Everyone gets burned out. I live, eat, breathe, sleep and shit sports but when some of the members make me think twice about logging in to my own site someone has to go and it isn't me. Rotate your staff on and off consider making fundamental changes to your site policy that make your enjoyment of the site the priority.

 

Caught some unpleasant posts on my forum this way. May annoy some people, but really I login often enough to have new posts accepted within 24 hours at most.

The only issue is when the promotion doesn't work...

Anyhow, yeah, @Peace - keep the peace Do what I do with the restrictions, and if the people are all coming from certain places, ban the place.

Admining should be fun

 

Thank you very much everyone! You've given me a lot of really helpful tips, I always enjoy this forum I also like the idea of rotating out staff, so no one gets burned out. I wonder if we could write a mod that auto-bans each admin for a week, on a schedule, and then unbans them. Because even when we take "breaks", everyone always keeps popping back on! (myself included)

 

That sounds like a good idea! But dangerous as well... What if it breaks and you stay banned...

What forum software do you use?

 

Hahaha then maybe that would be a blessing in disguise I use vBulletin, and I'm sure anything could be undone through phpMyAdmin

 

Check vBulletin.org for a mod written by Joe (BirdOPrey5) that allows banning between certain hours.

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=298126

I don't know that banning staff would be my first option though. I think giving them the option of being off without having to explain or justify it is enough.

 

This is exactly why I take weekends off and spend it with my daughter or my girlfriend. Everyone needs a break sometimes.

 

What's the topic of your forum? I'm curious to know what kind of topic can become such a troll magnet. PM me if you don't want to say it in public.

 

No problem @petertdavis - it's relationship abuse recovery. So, a lot of very hurt people - combined with a lot of trolls who seek enjoyment from upsetting them. An exhausting mix after a while.

 

This is our website, if you want more specifics. It deals with Cluster B type personality disorders, so we attract unusually unpleasant people by default. Like my mom said, "Well, you didn't make a website about gardening..."

http://www.psychopathfree.com/

 

lol, I like the way your mom thinks! On the other hand, sites like yours do provide a valuable service to people. Kudos for doing it.

 

Good work. A very hard subject to deal with, thanks for helping.

 

Thank you guys so much! That means a lot to me. Very glad I found this website

 

I joined a forum the other day and during the registration I saw something that I thought was very clever. They had a field in the registration form that asked "Why do you want to join this forum, please answer in 1 or 2 lines". All registrations were moderated and the forum staff looked at that field to get an idea as to whether would be a worthwhile member of the community.

Perhaps that would work for you @Peace. New members would need manual approval and you would not need to approve them until you return from your time off. That way, when you are starting your time off you would know that your forum is much less likely to be abused.

 

Everyone's a bit different when it comes to burning out, dealing with stress, work schedules, etc. So with that said, what works for one admin may not work for another (On a psychological level, not on a hands on skill level). If we removed psychology from all admins than we could probably all achieve the same goals with same exact skill sets. However, it's not so easy to do once you toss in an individuals psychological make-up into the mix. With you administrating a community that deals in one of many psychological related topics I'm sure you can follow where I'm headed with this reply.

Using myself as an example, below are just a small fraction of things I deal with as an admin of a fairly large community that may be considered stressful:

1. Reports of members suspected of Fraud or theft
2. Members Trolling other members
3. Account investigations
4. Death Threats from members that got caught breaking the rules and disciplined
5. DDOS attack threats from members that got caught breaking the rules and disciplined
6. Mediation between 2 upset members helping them find a resolution
7. Actual dos and ddos attacks
8. Daily spam bots
9. Daily spam by actual people
10. Tech / site bug trouble shooting
11. Assisting in all forums moderation
12. Member / Customer support
13. Multiple duplicate account attempts
14. Falsified documents in the marketplace
15. Members caught red handed with evidence proving their guilt that they broke the rules blatantly and they still keep declaring their innocence and threaten legal action
16. + All other daily community work needed on-site and off-site (The list is long)

When you combine all the things needed in a community together, it paints a vivid picture of attack vectors towards a persons psyche. I would like to be able to put your mind at ease and tell you that your skin gets thicker over time and turns into an armor while your empathy becomes numb. Eventually resulting in your stress levels going down as your psychological structure adapts to the relentless daily workload.

In part, that's true, however it's not that easy for everyone. Some people aren't wired the same way psychologically and unable to establish such a mental defense mechanism. On the same token, some people that do establish it, can't seem to turn it off, which then starts to effect other parts of their life outside of work.

Again, what works for me may not work for others, however I've found the following to help a lot:

1. A new Hobby to dedicate 1 hour per day to that makes you happy and gives your psyche a break from thinking about work.
2. Schedule 1 or 2 days off a week to unwind (and actually take them)
3. Start a new contest / game / or other fun project in your online community to participate in
4. Tape a picture of a light switch to your monitor and every time you power up or power down, picture yourself flipping the switch up or down. (This should help you control your disengagement on a psychological level)
5. When you start to feel stressed, take 2 steps back, 10 deep breaths, focus, think about a happy time in your life, then approach the situation with a smile and clear head.
6. Conduct a staff review and make adjustments / cut-backs / additions / etc. where needed to insure your communities backbone is operating like a well oiled machine when you're taking time off.

The above are just the ones off the top of my head, There's many more things that can be done to help, however at the risk of writing a book I'll stop here. :p ...

Not sure if any of that helps or not, but figured I would toss some ideas your way.

Eric Lyon

 

Stress.

I know I am probably going to get hit on this by someone.... I might even be told I am crazy. So here goes.

Stress to your psyche is what you make it. By that I mean, long term mental stress is caused by how we respond to external conditions aimed at our psyche. And if you can understand that your response to those conditions is actually controllable (it is what makes us human), then you can control what is stressful to you. It is your choice, to be stressed or not.

In other words, at some point, you had thought having a forum would be mostly fun to do. You may have considered some negative things happening, like the long list of points for possible stress Eric pointed out. (great list btw!). But now you are getting more and more work and stress, because the things in that long list are happening more and more on your forum, which was supposed to be mostly fun. Right?

What if you had started out with your forum expecting only such activity as in Eric's list to happen? You actually wanted it to happen. You think that stuff is fun to work on. Would it then be stressful?

The things Eric point out WILL happen. They are unavoidable. Yes, you can and should work with some of the great suggestions mentioned in this thread to lower the amount of unnecessary work. But, as long as you consider running into these forum admin "issues" as bad and conditions which cause you stress, you will always be stressed by them. And actually, you'll get even more stressed, when those things happen again later, because the hard work you put in to add the means to avoid them it isn't completely working. That is frustrating, right?

Change your point of view about the negative stuff. Make it fun and a challenge to alleviate your community of the negative activity. Remember the reasons why you are running a community. See it as positive as possible, because you are doing a good job keeping your community happy and enjoyable place to be. Be thankful for the opportunities to possibly make other people happy, by also doing some of the "dirty work". If you get there, then the negative stuff isn't a problem or stressful anymore. It is all actually fun!

And yes, it is much easier to say, than it is to do.

If you are interested in learning more about what it means to control your response (and thus stress), read up on Victor Frankl and Logotherapy.

Scott

Edit - Eric, add to your list.

1. Software upgrades due to security leaks
2. Technical issues with the server or hosting
3. Bugs in the software you use
4. Wanting to get things done and finding the path to getting them done hard to find (or a high learning curve).