It is generally accepted that there are 3 categories of users within online communities: 

1. The 1%—Extremely active users who contribute the vast majority of content, answers, and activity. 
2. The 9%—All other casual or occasional contributors. 
3. The 90%—The ‘lurkers’ who only consume content (or don’t log in at all) and never contribute directly. 

And while we’ve made the positive case for a fourth group called active lurkers, we’ve found this ratio to be broadly correct across internal and external, large and small communities. In this article we’re going to examine what these categories of users actually mean in terms of impact, as well as how to optimise the ratio for maximum participation, value generation, and growth. 

On the surface, having a closed online community might seem the obvious route. You get to vet and filter new members and don’t have to deal with trolls and Karens slamming your content every day. However, there are serious risks associated with growth and sustainability of closed groups, so we encourage you to weigh up the pros and cons before making your decision. 

If you want to provide the best possible website experience for your users in a world of fluctuating technology, you always need to be one step ahead of it. Things in web development and its environment change so fast, it seems like modern technology of today can easily become obsolete next year, or even next month. And that is normal, we have learned to live with it, so we should update our software when necessary. There is still one area where software update can actually cause anxiety, even to the most experienced website administrators, and that is the server migration. Technically it’d be also hardware migration, but I’ll discuss the software aspect of it. Because there are so many moving parts and steps that you need to take during the process, server migration is often seen as something hard to comprehend, and you’ll often see people actually being unwilling, practically scared to do it.

Like most business ventures, the answer to generating profit from your community doesn’t lie in some lazy hack. It’s easy to start spamming your community with ads, merch, and membership fees…but it needs to be handled professionally. Do it wrong, and you might not have a community left to monetize.

We all know that good customer service is more important than ever. When it’s really good, it can also be a very effective sales and marketing tool. On the other hand, customer service is a hard, serious, and responsible job.