We’re following up on Mariano and other members’ concerns about the inactive communities problem by acting today and changing the rules in this respect on the website.
It’s not the first time we receive this request to intervene and close inactive communities. We always refused up until now because the people who ask us to do it don’t realize how upset the administrators whose communities will be closed are going to be, and don’t have to answer the angry emails that might generate. It’s not our philosophy to directly intervene and tell members what to do because we don’t want to turn into the “right way of using the website” police. However, despite increasing greatly the cost of creating communities, the quantity of communities keeps growing and growing faster than the global active member count does. As a result, the experience is diluted for everyone and only a handful of communities receive healthy activity. Sadly, that’s why we have to intervene.
Having many inactive communities is damaging to the experience on the website and part of the problem is that an administrator who is in charge of only one inactive community doesn’t feel responsible for the situation. Individually administrating an inactive community is not a cause of problems, it’s the fact that many people let their communities go inactive that results in the activity dilution crisis we’re seeing. Creating a community and then just waiting for people to magically flock to it isn’t the way to go, yet it seems to be the belief of many people who create one.
The new safeguards we’re putting in place today will act as a natural selection of communities. It’s a new challenge for community creators, now just opening one won’t be enough, taking care of it and making sure that enough people use it will be the responsibility that comes with it.
How does the new safeguard against inactive communities work?
If a community is under a particular threshold of active members count (see below), it will be required for the administrator to either merge the community with another active one or to spend 2000 points in order to “save” the community for another month. If none of those is done by the administrator, a month after the first warning is issued the community is automatically deleted. Having to pay 2000 points should be a wake-up call which tells the administrator that something should be done about the under-activity of the community. In the situation where the administrator manages to turn things around and find enough active members, it will be the only time the 2000 points have to be spent to save the community. If not, then maybe receiving that warning (and having to spend points) more than once is a sign that the concept of the community was just not good enough to survive on its own.
The thresholds for a community to be considered inactive are:
- no threshold if the community is administrated by a premium member
- no threshold if the community is less than a month old
- 15 active members minimum if the community is between one and two months old
- 30 active members minimum if the community is between two and three months old
- 50 active members minimum if the community is more than three months old
Now, like any limit or cost we put there are going to be people arguing that it’s too high and others who believe it’s not high enough. We chose the limit of 50 active members because by looking at what’s happening currently, the great majority of communities with less than 50 active members were seeing 5 or less entries per competition. That’s doesn’t appear as a healthy amount of entries to us. Then we decided to ramp up that limit according to the community’s age, since it’s obvious that a community can’t instantly have active members. Surely, if most administrators don’t spend the points there are going to be many communities disappearing, but since there’s always the option to merge with an existing one, there doesn’t need to be any past competitions or entries lost in the process.
The definition of “active member” in the context of a community is someone who has voted, commented or entered a competition at least once in the last 30 days. The active member count for communities is recalculated every Sunday and that’s when the alerts regarding inactivity will be issued. You can see the active members count for your communities on the “Your communities” page.
