Editor's Choice

A Tale of Two Fan Sites

These underhanded tactics worked. Tim's site suffered so greatly that he was forced to call a truce with another former rival fan site and combine forums. Yet Tim never played in to Chad's game, and despite a free-falling member count, the site lived on. Surely this wasn't the behavior of a money-grubbing tyrant, as some of us staff members were led to believe.

What happened next was pure poetic justice. After months of tension, the community for Chad's new site was growing at a healthy rate. Yet members were getting restless waiting for the videogame music Mecca they'd been promised.

Around this time, an ambitious new member entered the scene and became the catalyst for the next catastrophe. Let's call him "Ian." He was incredibly helpful, always volunteering to run events and offering suggestions for the site. But he was also very unyielding in how to execute his ideas and adamant about running events according to his own designs. Behind the scenes, Ian was also doing a lot of the design work for the website, which couldn't have made Chad happier. Discussions quickly began about putting Ian in a high-ranking staff position.

Fearing Ian's "my way or the highway" attitude would lead to a repeat of the power struggle that brought down Tim's site, many of us advised Chad against hiring him. But Chad wouldn't hear it. Ian took a staff position, and the next morning Chad's own forum administrator posted his letter of resignation, encouraging other members to follow suit. After a brutal fallout with Chad, I haven't been back to the site since.

What lessons can we glean from these two doomed operations? It seems after all of this that no matter how you manage a fan site, it's doomed to an inevitable disaster. If it relies too heavily on the contributions of its members, the site's ability to function becomes inextricably tied to a core group of users. Yet if everything remains in the hands of a select group of staff, decisions that lack significant community input can be potentially devastating. Perhaps a fan site's biggest problem is that it can quickly evolve beyond the scope of plain fandom and into the realm of a tightly knit community more concerned with its own internecine conflicts than the creation of new content related to their passion.

The solution to this dilemma lies outside the site itself; the site has to reach out to people beyond its own limited community. Create contests that invite new members, make friends with other similar fan sites and focus more on site updates than forum updates. Making sure a site constantly attracts new users will prevent any group of regulars or anyone community member from feeling too invested, and content will always feel fresh because new people will always bring new ideas. It may not be possible to stop the bickering and infighting that goes hand in hand with a close-knit group of passionate people, but it's important to know where these feuds belong: as a sideshow, not the main event.

Dan Squire is currently studying marketing, and wonders if there's a fan site for fans of fan site fans.