My plan is to post something once a week.  If I can do twelve of those then I’ll split this off from my personal blog and create a sub-domain and blog for itself.  That’s three months of content.  Let’s see how that goes.

Still, the subject here is herding cats.

Who are these cats?  The members of your community, specifically a particular set of those members.  Sure, there are a number of different kinds of people who visit any given community but there’s a bunch who are, for various reasons, interested in your community and have a wish to be active and involved but somehow seem to stall at anything that requires anything more than button clicking effort.

I’ll relate this to the community I currently manage, TheHavenNet, aka THN.  THN is a community centred around games and, to a lesser extent, gaming technology.  Really, though, they’re interested in playing games with and against each other.  The average age of the full board population is around 21-22 years, with a minimum of around 13 and a maximum around 50.  That puts many in the school or student demographic.  A number of the rest work in IT.  Broad generalisations, but that’s a fair start.

So, given that these people want to play games, how do you get them to play a game that you’re interested in?  Looked at a different way, you want to organise an event around a particular topic, so how do you get people to come to that event?  Particularly, how do you do that exclusively online?

I’ll talk this one from the perspective of a forum community; THN uses vBulletin but this could equally apply to any other bulletin board platform I’ve used (phpBB, UBB, YaBB, Discus, etc).

First thought goes to email.  Easy to put together a list of email addresses and fire out a quick announcement.  Unfortunately, people’s email communication channel is full.  With the quantity of spam floating around the ‘net thesedays, broadcast emails, to my mind, estrange more people than they attract.  They spark the thought “did I ask for this?” and when the internal answer comes back no then the email is clearly spam.  Who wants to be spammed with an announcement about everything going on?  Pretty soon they tune that out and, if they’re tech savvy, your email is piped straight to /dev/null without passing go.  Thus effort expended for small gains and probably net loss.

Exact same problem for private messages.  Overuse that channel and it becomes analogous to email, and it won’t take long for your well meant “hey, there’s a cool thing going on” to drive a user to disable those announcements.

You’re not forcing this information on your members.  And what right do you have to do that anyway?  They’re visiting ’cause they like the place.  Make it so they don’t like it so much and they can just as easily head for the door because, ultimately, the door is just one click away.

So, you’ve got these members.  They’re like cats.  They want to play when they want to play.  They want to sleep when they want to sleep.  Tell them to do something and you’ll see their behind waving at you as they disappear out the catflap.  But fail to provide food for them and they’ll be out that same catflap.  Feels like you can’t win, sometimes.

What other options are available to you?  First, you need to stay in context.  Forum users come to read posts; after all, that’s all a forum is really there to provide.  It’s a context they accept by visiting the forum at all.  Thus forum posts are acceptable to them as a means of communication.  Post away!

But what to post?  And how?  And how often?  How do you get these indolent cats motivated to not just play a game but to play a game you want them to play?

The trick is in two parts.

First, enthuse, cajole, remind, badger, enthuse some more, but never ever demand.  The petulant “you guys never play my games” or “where were you all” posts receive apologies at best and ridicule at worst, with a sort of embarrassed and unhelpful silence somewhere in between.  Keep your language positive and avoid dwelling on past failures.  Avoid “shame no one turned up last week” as an opening to your event.  Try something more like “looking forward to trying this again” or, better, “feel quite excited about this”.  Enthuse.  Enthuse even if you’re feeling peeved that you tried this last week and it didn’t come off.

Second, persist.  If your first event gets three people and you needed eight then find something good to do with the three who turned up.  Don’t sweat it.  But thank them for turning up and arrange the exact same thing for next week.  Or next fortnight.  Or month.  The timing depends on the activity and the amount of effort required to get into it.  But do it again.  Maybe you get less next time.  Don’t sweat it, no matter how irritating it is that you turned up to be by yourself for a half hour.  You’ve been stood up but remember that, online, people are inherently more flighty than they’d be face-to-face.  Arrange it again.

I’m of the opinion that it can take six to eight instances of an event occurring before it penetrates the consciousness of a community and becomes something that people will drift into doing almost without thinking about it.  It’s almost as if their world view shifts to recognise this event as a thing that they can get involved in and that, given it’s been around for a bit, it might be worth trying out.

Enthuse.  Persist.

I’ve seen evidence of this a few times over, now.  A particular success has been in getting THNers (as we call THN members) involved in the i-series LAN events here in the UK.  It has taken around six visits by THN members for the wider crowd at THN to “wake up” and realise that they too could go along and that this isn’t somehow too hard.  From a crowd of 4-6 attending every other event, the i37 event will be attended by 15 THNers.  Why?  I assert this is because it has passed the persistence threshold while maintaining a suitable level of enthusiasm before and after each event.  People see that a small number of fellow members had fun, and then had fun again, and again… it’s as though the fun becomes safe and they can partake.

There’s more to be said on herding cats but I’ll leave that for another week.

For the moment, all those can wait.  Got a particular thing I want to share this evening and, for a novel turn, I’m going to post it publicly.

It’s annual review time again here at TSO.  I don’t enjoy review time much.  Somehow I always feel at a huge disadvantage.  It’s almost as if I’ve worked so hard that I feel bound to get some sort of reward and acknowledgement and yet I’ve put in so many evenings and weekends that I’m too tired to account for myself properly in review.  I think I don’t do enough preparation, partly in the hope/belief that my work speaks for itself.  I get a good pat on the back but the actual package part of my review frequently disappoints me when I look at the effort I put in to get there.

So, this year, I’m putting in some preparatory work.  Hurrah for me!

I went back into TSO saying that I didn’t want to do software development.  Oh ho ho.  What do I spend at least two thirds of my time doing?  Yep, you guessed.  Thing is, I clearly don’t hate it or I’d have found a way not to be doing it.  In fact, I enjoy the rapid in-out work where I produce a single purpose tool or widget to solve a particular problem.  It’s less stressful than than the thing I do best – which, for the record, is fixing problems that either have near-impossible timescales or everyone else has thrown their hands up in dismay over – but has some similar immediacy qualities to it, particularly in terms of feedback and appreciation.

So, madly, I’m forming a plan where I actually take on doing these small tools full time.  There’s easily enough work to be done in that area and, as far as I can tell, it can pay for itself pretty easily either out of project budgets or out of efficiency improvements through accelerating other consultants.  Besides, my response times are in hours and days, where the Solutions team is more like weeks and months, and I have a very clear understanding of what MooD consultants actually want, both through good requirements discovery and being a passionate MooD modeller myself.

I anticipate some resistance to this, though.  Still, forming this sort of a plan is better than feeling miserable about working yet another weekend and having a strong suspicion that my review will not do anything to say “thank you for all your hard work” in any way that actually matters.  I sense another pat on the back and then to be sent on my way as though that was sufficient.

I don’t doubt that this plan will do little to change the nature of my review but at least it will give me the opportunity to do work in a way that suits me better.  TSO almost seems to expect weekend working, which is fair ridiculous.  At least if it’s my work then I can choose it or not.  In a big way, I have no problem working long or weird hours as long as I care what I’m doing and who I’m doing it for.

It’s like President Bartlett tells Josh Lyman in the West Wing.  I paraphrase but it went something like, “See, I need to be The Man.  But you, you need to be the man behind The Man.”  I’m rather like Josh Lyman; I want to be behind something successful, a prime factor for its success, but ultimately supporting someone I like and trust who can be the frontman for whatever I do.  There are a few people in TSO that I happily stand behind and support.  This sort of a role would allow me to continue doing that for as long as I care to.  And that sounds like pure win to me.

Now, here’s to hoping that I can actually make such a plan come together…

Current Mood: Pensive

(Private) MyBlogEntryTitle

I’ve hacked it to look like this:

MyBlogEntryTitle (Private)

Really simple, really.

The hack is to wp-includes/post-template.php, where I change the get_the_title() function to read:

function get_the_title( $id = 0 ) {
        $post = &get_post($id);

        $title = $post->post_title;

        if ( !is_admin() ) {
                // 2008-08-31, RS, moved Protected and Private text to end of title
                if ( !empty($post->post_password) )
                        $title = sprintf(__('%s (Protected)'), $title);
                else if ( isset($post->post_status) && 'private' == $post->post_status )
                        $title = sprintf(__('%s (Private)'), $title);
        }
        return apply_filters( 'the_title', $title );
}

Yeah, yeah, I know the curly braces should be on their own line but I’m not fixing Wordpress’ code formatting, just its functionality.

Mostly just documenting this so I don’t forget, ’specially as I need to do an upgrade of this blog to 3.6.2.  A little inline documentation goes a long way, though.

So I played around with the code.  It seems that if I commented out the “if there are no moods, add the selected moods” line then it worked fine, which would be okay except if there really are no moods then I couldn’t add any…

It seemed to go something like this (very roughly):

if ($current_moods)
{
    // update moods with new selections, if any, or delete if no selections
}
else
{
    // add selected moods, if any
}

Which is all very well except that if there were current moods it still seemed to run the code after the else, which surely it can’t do?!

I played around trying to fix the logic and it still seemed to be doing both if and else of the if-else statement.  Then I was struck by remembering a similar sort of logical issue way back (in C#, I believe).  Not, mind you, where code runs both if and else, but where a logical problem can sometimes be avoided by reviewing what you want to happen and just doing that.

What I want is for the selection to be set.  If I let it go, it always sets what I select, regardless of whether that’s what was “supposed” to happen or not, even if that means duplicating existing moods.  So, simplify the issue.  Delete all moods, then add the selections.  No checks whether this or that exists.  No comparing arrays.  Just delete all, then add all.

Works just fine.

This solution credited to Steve, who gave me the piece of understanding (in that code, way back) that meant I could find a solution even if I couldn’t solve the problem (in the time I was prepared to give this).

Current Mood: Amused

All in order, now.  I’m off to bed, really this time.

Current Mood: Tired

I’ve also purged a lot of the modifications, just reinstalling those I really need or that will help me.

Total time, around four hours, including some farting around bug-fixing the theme I’m using.

Current Mood: Busy