Congratulations everyone. We've made it a year!
In that year, we've had over 300 questions and more than double that many answers. We've provided answers to nearly every question on that site. Only a couple unanswered questions remain. People are coming to us with questions and we are providing (I think) high quality answers.
We've been featured multiple times on the hot network questions list. Here are some of our hot questions (as announced in The Town Hall):
- What should we do to reduce the risk of a Reddit-like crisis?
- Are there benefits to allowing anonymous users in an online community?
- Detecting and preventing hostility to women?
- How can I tell if a small specialized community is dying or if the long time-scale of activity is natural?
- How do I participate as a new user in a community?
- How to deal with an online griefer that I know in real life?
- I made an official statement in good faith that turned out to be wrong; should I apologize?
- How to deal with real-life friend or family members who consistently test the rules?
- Is permanent banning worth it?
- How to make users cut down on profanity in a community, where profanity is allowed?
- Why do forums discourage necro-bumping?
- Underage but very valuable user on our site
- Handling user that's offended by a joke about a disability
- Should we edit out offensive content from deleted posts if some can see those posts?
Many of the answers we've provided have been very high quality. I'd like to point out a few that I've considered extremely high quality. I feel the answers we've provided, and these ones in particular, are why Community Building will continue to provide a valuable place for community leaders and members to ask questions.
- https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1118/78
- https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/a/500/78
- Air provides an literature overview of web forums vs mailing list user engagement and retention. This is the result of several days of research, is an excellent summary of the literature and provides several articles to read.
- https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/a/594/78
- Jenny D explains why using "it's just a joke" is the wrong way to solve a complaint from a user about being offended. Practical advice about creating (or updating) community guidelines is dispensed.
- https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/a/653/78
- Monica Cellio offers advice to a moderator on how to de-escalate a situation that they had caused. The advice is generic enough to apply to other situations, but specific enough to be actionable by the user asking the question.
- https://communitybuilding.stackexchange.com/a/1247/78
- gnat provides some advice on how to get users to stick around when they've been lured to the site by the Hot Network questions list.
Over the next year, I'd like to see some more growth (obviously). One way I think we can do that, is by having more questions related to current events. We've had a few of these (for example the recent reddit question, or one about automation in moderation on Stack Exchange). By stepping out of the more theoretical questions ("how can I deal with...") and into something that is concrete, we allow users to ask about a current event (yay! Traffic). Even more importantly, though, we can use these particular questions to show our area of expertise.
I'd like to make this a discussion about what we've done right in the past year. Above I've mentioned several posts that I thought were very high quality. What have you seen on the site that we should strive to emulate in the next year?
Wrapping this up, congratulations again everyone. We've made it a year. Let's keep up the high quality work we've put in and work on getting the word out about our corner of the internet.
