Questions About Running Comms

[chomiji]

A friend of theloomofmoira's is investigating methods for creating a board/community, and Mia had some questions on her friend's behalf about running/modding comms on LJ:

 

• Can anyone start a group?
   
• Are they easy to admin?
   
• Can you make them private (where a person could petition for membership, which would be approved or denied depending on the vote of the group)? [I already answered this as far as privacy in general, but I dunno about voting.]
   
• A board can't quite be organized the same as [a conventional message board], right? I mean, basically the format is most recent posts are at the top, and there aren't any subcategories one can sort them into... is that right?

So please, those of you who have set up and run comms, give us your wisdom!

Comments

[hikari-mibu.livejournal.com]

I can answer a few questions for you.
Yes, anyone can start a group/comm but take on responsibility as administrator.

and as far as I know they can be made private where posts that are not f-locked can be seen but to see f-locked posts and to be able to post to the community the person must click on 'Join' or etc, then the administrator must then decide to reject or accept their membership.

[magicnoire.livejournal.com]

Can anyone start a group?

Yes.

Are they easy to admin?

Depends on how complicated the community will be. I'm of the belief that modding a community is only ever as difficult as the admin makes it out to be.

Can you make them private (where a person could petition for membership, which would be approved or denied depending on the vote of the group)? [I already answered this as far as privacy in general, but I dunno about voting.]

Yes. I mean, you can locked the voting posts to members, post a poll, and then depending on the poll, the mods can approve/deny the membership of the applicants.

A board can't quite be organized the same as [a conventional message board], right? I mean, basically the format is most recent posts are at the top, and there aren't any subcategories one can sort them into... is that right?

That is correct. This is the main drawback of LJ comms. You have tags, of course, but it indeed sorts from recent to past.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

fandom_grammar has a voting process for mods that works pretty well, though it's a lot of work for the administrators. IIRC, you can have two levels of modding for a comm, though, regular mods and administrators, so that can help share the load.

Organizing through tags is pretty easy, but conversations do tend to die out as things go on. You can use HTML to put posts up at the top, like we did with livelongnmarry, but that's something of a pain.

[theloomofmoira.livejournal.com]

a million thanks, choji :)