Managing Online Forums – One Sitting Book Review

Sometimes I get my hands on books that I know are good for certain audiences even if I’m not the right audience. In light of this, I’m initiating this blog’s first One Sitting Book Review for books that I don’t need to read all the way through but I’ll skim and offer a quick review.

The book of the day here is Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards by Patrick O’Keefe.

O’Keefe covers a ton of ground in the book’s nearly 300 pages, including: evaluating forum technology, monitoring and censoring posts, staffing, monetization, and a few other topics. Some of the book’s more technical, some more about business decisions, and others more focused on the content, but forum managers tend to wear a lot of hats so most of this should be useful to most such managers.

I’ve never managed a real online forum (outside of some listservs for alumni groups and events), so I haven’t had to deal with most of the challenges in this book, and I’m not the target audience, but for anyone who has a forum or is thinking of starting one, this seems like a great resource to keep handy and thumb through regularly.

See ManagingOnlineForums.com for more info.