No, it’s not a Q&A, it’s my “managing questions” post at Modsquad.

It’s kind of funny – I let this blog go dark/dim because I felt like I’d said everything I could possibly say on the topic of community. Also, the MMO Underbelly series at MMORPG.com was completely sucking me dry.

But the Obvious Truth well apparently never runs dry. And I’m getting pings (but no jobs for remote employees, grumble crank moan) on how these little posts at Modsquad are really helpful to people doing strategic planning.

Well, yes. That’s why you hire a community director before you get into beta, after all.

Rant on: After ten years, the idea still persists that we’re forum mods – widgets you hire when you have customers and not before. You CAN hire community people that way, but you should call them “moderators.” Or you can hire someone whose job it is to babysit Facebook and Twitter, and that’s a useful job too, but that’s not a community director either. That’s a social media moderator.

Community directors DO strategic planning, tool development, customer research, and contribute to the design process both in terms of product development and marketing. We’re the glue holding the team together.

Today’s post over at ModSquad: Physical World Bonds

This is another dead horse I keep flogging, even though most companies do events in the physical world. My complaint is that the reasons for those events are usually aimed at marketing, aka sales and promotion.

I want to see more events aimed at community, aka retention. The motivation matters.

I did sound kind of formal and nervous in the first one, didn’t I. So I reverted to my actual tone in this one. The seven of you give awesome feedback

It was hard to not go off on a tangent about leaderboards, and how the original Camelot leaderboards were pretty much entirely Scott Jennings going rogue and me going, “Ooh! Ooh! What about this?” and Scott saying please stop touching stuff on my desk.

Also, we crashed the game servers because we were complete effing n00bs.

But we had fun.

That last point about designing/building a back door into the system from the start… there aren’t many things in my career that I’d like to do over, believe it or not, but that point I’d take back in time and scream DO THIS! at myself at three different jobs.