Running a forum isn’t as hard as you think. It pretty much runs itself. People act like you need to keep an eye on it 24/7 incase something happens. Like if someone comes and posts a thread called “NIGGER NIGGER NIGGER” – it needs to be removed within 10 minutes or the forum police shut your forum down. No, that doesn’t happen, it just stays in the forum, people get excited and post in it – have a laugh, then eventually it gets deleted. No biggy.

Bullying is an issue with forums I guess. Especially forums like ours where the majority of the users are under 20. My usual stance with bullying is NMFP. If you don’t want to be bullied on a forum then close the browser. Easy. If you make yourself a victim instead of accepting a bit of craic you make it a million times worse.

But every now and then it gets under my skin. On our forums we have a secret forum called the Gold Member Forum which contains some members that have been around for a long time. They feel like they own the forum.

In the GMF they’re real assholes. And like typical bullies they go with the herd – if one guy is being an asshole to someone then they all have to be an asshole to him. This mentality annoys me. Recently they were assholes to this one guy over and over until it became a problem. I don’t want to own a forum where that is accepted. I warned them about it, handed out bans. They’re assholes to him over Steam instead – declaring that we can’t ban them because it didn’t happen on the forums. Because apparently we’re the police and we don’t have jurisdiction to punish them for things that happen on Steam, we can’t use logic it isn’t fair on them. It all came to a head when I heard that they were invading his Facebook account and annoying his mom.

So, what’s the solution? Ban the assholes? No, I don’t know much about it to know who the main assholes are, I’d have to justify who I was banning. Ban the victim? Would be rewarding the assholes behaviour, wouldn’t stop it, not fair on the victim. Do nothing? It’ll get worse and worse over time.

My solution is to add the victim as a moderator in the GMF and give him permission to do what he wants. Then just sit back and laugh as the assholes go crazy like it’s the end of the world.

Running a forum is as easy as you make it.