The idea of managing your own anonymous community has some appeal for people who think a rowdy group of strangers are their friends, but it's actually a bad investment¹⁾ with many downsides. This article will primarily serve as a list of things to ponder, from a former board owner.

• Don't give yourself an identity. There's just something cathartic about the community naming you, rather than you naming yourself. If you're forced to adopt a name, be generic or thematic.
  • Don't be too flashy. If the community emphasizes anonymity, you are not supposed to stand out in the first place! Even if you're not trying to, you'll always come off as flashy with the name on.
  • You will need thick skin. Anonymity can bring out the worst in people, so don't take these things too personally. This is another reason why you should avoid any 'self insert' names.
• If you want a large community, you need other moderators. If you have no connections, this will be tough. You don't want to be the only moderator going insane by patrolling your own creation.
• You need a place for staff communications. There will inevitably be some IRC channel, a private board,²⁾ a Skype group, a Discord guild,³⁾ and so forth. I will expand on this in Part 4.

• Don't expect to be the next big thing. You're trying to catch lightning in a bottle, but you simply can't force popularity through sabotage, spam, paid drones, etc. Bot activity, however…
• Don't start with a plethora of boards. You will spread your community thin, newcomers will get lost because you've given them too many options, and most of your boards will look dead anyways.
• Start off small and build upwards from there. The community is stronger when it's consolidated, plus you would have to gauge your community for their approval anyways.
• Don't stay on a single board for too long. Sadly, consolidating activity does have a downside where community subversion is easier⁴⁾ and idiots rarely flock to the lesser used boards.

• Establish rules and enforce them. Nobody likes them, but you will need to have solid rules if you ever think your community will get big, and there needs to be some level of enforcement.
  • Having zero moderation is an idealist concept. This allows malicious actors and morons to flood the place, drowning out and ironically deterring people trying to have a genuine discussion.
  • Determine a protocol for those proxies, VPNs, and Tor exit nodes. There are a lot of weird pests with too much spare time who ruin the fun. Most outright ban, some temporarily disable.
  • Ban evasions are a pain to enforce. Special pests might try to manipulate the discussion in order to make you look trigger happy, so consider showing that a proxy, VPN, or Tor was used.
  • Are you frustrated yet? It begins to dawn on you that solutions do exist (e.g. registration system,⁵⁾ email verification,⁶⁾ paywall, etc.), but you'd have to accept that anonymity sucks, doesn't it?
• Going behind the scenes ruins the mystique. Once you see who posts what, the overall mystique behind anonymous communities vanishes as “it was user-facing anonymity all along!” 😱
  • Avoid leaking post histories. Unless it's huge and scandalous or weird, this should *only* be a last resort (unless requested) as it just decreases trust and won't be this magical 'fuck off' spell.
  • Taking notes on users is fine. Some boards lets you attach notes to IPs and post histories for a reason. If you're using one that doesn't, consider a word-replacing extension.⁷⁾
  • You don't need to be in moderator mode all the time! Some moderators will tip their hand in their posts and replies may feel too personal.⁸⁾ Admittedly, they're fun to bully from the other end.
• Keep an eye on the old and the new. While the fresh blood livens things up, don't fully discount the possibility that ulterior motives could be in play when malicious actors subjugates the old.

• There will be a meta chatroom. Appearances are deceptive. Above the surface-level discussions, there might be a secret chatroom you've never heard of, so try to be ahead of the curve.
  • Benefits of an official chatroom. While it draws attention away, it also gives meta a proper place to go, shows you how to conduct yourself, and warfare becomes hilariously more transparent.
• Splinter communities and dissent? Shit happens. You just have to play your cards right. If you're lucky, nobody cares and won't budge. If you're unlucky, welcome to the numbers game.⁹⁾
  • Reunification isn't always the best option. In the heat of the moment, you may feel inclined to find a way to patch things up. However, just like real life, reunification isn't always the best option.
• Alliance? Coalition? Federation? Confederation? Webring? If you can afford to blow money on an independent website, you might be interested in these. Obviously, I never got here.
• Never clean house for a loyal triumvirate. If your community is considerably sizable, this royal fuck up can leave your moderators overloaded. Some examples include late 55chan and Bunkerchan.

1. Transfer leadership. The rational, yet boring option. You will probably have to sort out a ton of things behind the scenes to avoid getting bit in the ass for something you want out of your control.
2. Shut it down and announce a successor. A development where you manually guide or redirect the community to a specific refuge. Hopefully, you didn't burn too many bridges, right?
3. Shut it down and don't announce a successor. You announce the shutdown, but instead, you let the community decide where they go. You can't really back out after some time has passed!
   1. Do nothing. Will they scramble or congregate? Will it just die? Will some random teenager attempt to revive it in a few years or decades? Will you make a comeback? Who knows!
   2. Make the community-chosen successor official. What are you, a politician? This would please a number of people, but why go through the effort of sticking around to do this?
   3. Announce an unexpected successor at the last possible minute, despite the reality that the community had already picked its successor. Late 55chan was a huge mess.
4. Don't care and just nuke it all. The fun option! There was never any form of culture or life here, so slap on a robots.txt file to kill the Wayback Archive.¹⁰⁾ Effectively, this is a spicier Option 3a.
5. Allow it to get knocked offline and never pick it back up. After the website gets hacked, raided, or wiped, you could bring it back, restore a backup, or just let it unceremoniously die.

　　　　　　　　 　 　 (⌒;,ノ;
　　　　∧,,∧ 　　 :('　;ｿ.　　I just want
　　　 .( ´･ω･)　＜二：彡　to grill for
　　　　( つ旦O　〔￣￣〕 　God's sake.
　　　　と＿)_) 　　|_━_|
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