If you’ve planned the community thoroughly, deploying it should not be difficult. The technology provided by Joomla extensions makes for a simple plug-in implementation. However, you should also consider the management responsibilities, including legal liability and the grooming of appropriate moderators.

Legal Liabilities
Be sure to read basic information on free speech guarantees and limits. You can find a great deal of information about this topic at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Web site (www.eff.org). EFF also has information relating to the defamation and libel aspects of online content. For the online copyright liability act, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCILLA.

In regard to legal liabilities a site Web master might incur by allowing community interaction in the

United States, this is a very gray area of the law at the moment. Two court cases (Cubby Inc. v. CompuServe, Inc. and Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.) came to different conclusions on the liability of a host of traffic. But most large sites have taken the rulings to indicate that if the site is actively monitored, then there is more legal risk than if the site acts strictly as a distributor of other people’s content — good or bad.

To clarify the situation further, the U.S. Congress enacted Section 230 when it created the 1996 Communications Decency Act. The act provides immunity from liability when the questionable content comes from an outside source. The key provision of the act reads as follows:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

You can read more about Section 230 on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_ of_the_Communications_Decency_Act) or the excellent Legal Notes summary of this and other Internet-related liability issues.

Grooming Moderators
Virtual communities are a great deal of work, and it won’t be long before you would like some help on the endeavor. Communities thrive on volunteer moderators who have already shown a commitment to the Web site. Choosing moderators often takes no more effort than examining the user log. Would-be moderators will be on the site a great deal of time and will generally freely dispense information and help.

Why would someone want to volunteer his or her time with little or no pay? There are a few reasons, the simplest and most prominent one being a passion for the field that is the focus of the site. Most people feel an intrinsic need to contribute, even if it is a small amount of time to a virtual community.

Another reason someone will volunteer for a moderator position is small power. This is a most difficult problem to guard against as a site Web master. Generally, the moderator who abuses this power will do so in a way that the victim has little recourse or chance to be heard. Banning a user from the site limits the available options to describe abuses. It is a good idea to provide a direct administrator email address that is only sent to you. That way, complaints can’t be filtered to show only the best messages.

Also, take complaints from users with a grain of salt. I have seen a user post on a children’s forum the most foul message that included sexual references and a great deal of profanity. When banned from the site, the user complained loudly and often that he was the victim and his free speech rights had been violated. Therefore, with complaints that come over the transom, be sure to review each one; but approach each one logically and dispassionately.

Maintaining  a  Community
Directing a community is like driving a car with a dozen people squashed into the passenger seat — and each has a hand on the wheel. Communities zig this way and that, burst with magnificent growth and then stagnate, and are always vulnerable to another community with more relevant information or a better user interface.

Here are a few tips for keeping your sanity and generating steady growth of visitors and contributors:

❑       Have site policies clearly posted — You can’t blame a users for violating a site rule if they don’t know what the rules are. Prominently place your site policies so that if there is ever a question, the visitor can examine them easily. In a forum environment, this generally means entering the policy as an article itself on the system, and then making it “sticky” so that it will always appear first in the message list.

❑       Ensure that your site is clean — Like graffiti in a neighborhood, the longer spam is posted or flour- ishes on your site, the more that space will feel abandoned or unused. A Web master who is asleep at the wheel of a virtual community will soon hit a tree.

❑       Don’t launch the site until foundational content is in place — The old saying “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” is no more true than when you launch a virtual community. With the amount of money commercial ventures are spending on their Web sites, a site must appear professional if it is to gain widespread acceptance. When people visit and find an empty shell of a site, they are unlikely to return, and are likely to avoid it when they come across a link. From the very first day that the site goes online, there should be enough content and (hopefully) activity to ensure that each visitor will return.

Building an effective virtual community is one of the most difficult (yet one of the most rewarding) activities in Web deployment. Since an effective virtual community requires the contributions of many Web visitors, maintaining the community can require a great deal of effort as well. Fortunately, the tools available for adoption using the Joomla system can ease both the initial deployment and the time spent in administration of the site.

The more successful your Joomla site, the more important it will be to have your site fine-tuned for maximum traffic. Many users of a virtual community can be lost if the host Web site is slow or unresponsive.