If you're a business, you try to make enough money to cover costs, and then extra to pay you and your employees for your work.
For Movie Forums...that isn't gonna happen. It's tough to make money from website ads, even tougher for forums, and it would be impossible to raise enough money to cover the time spent running the site, even ignoring the tens of thousands of hours that have gone into it already.
The goal here is more modest: to merely cover the costs of leasing and maintaining the server. If we raise a little more, great, but pretty much all the time spent on it is effectively donated. You may be wondering: just what does that actually involve, day-to-day?
Some of the work is obvious: new features or changes are hard to miss. But most of the time spent on the site is, effectively, invisible. Little things you'd never notice unless someone stopped doing them. If new features are like remodeling a room, most of the work I do is on the roof, fixing gutters and patching shingles.
The regular work of running Movie Forums mostly slots in two categories: emergencies, and routine tasks. Emergencies are simple enough: the site is down! Spammers are running wild! The server load's spiking and pages are taking too long to load! Stuff that there's usually no warning for.
In terms of hours each year, emergencies are a small percentage of the total, but they feel like a lot more because they're urgent. I have to drop what I'm doing and try to fix them immediately. Running a place like Movie Forums means being on call 100% of every day.
But most of the work is routine, and it mostly slots into three categories:
Spam
This is the biggest time sink, not because spam takes long to deal with, but because it's constant. We use old software (for lots of reasons I'll probably write about down the line), and while this has advantages, it does leave us susceptible to some rudimentary attacks. I've customized our protection system in lots of ways, and for the most part it works well. My favorite is empowering people to remove spam and ban spammers without me based on a user trust scoring system.
Some of it's just caution: we have many spammers (and/or spambots) who successfully sign up each day, but only a fraction of them manage to post any spam. But when I see something suspicious, 90% of the time I'll still click through, trace the IP address, and look for telltale warning signs, and ban them preemptively just in case. This happens every single day, usually multiple times a day. It happened several times while I was writing this.Review Approvals
Our Reviews area is made up entirely of user reviews. People write reviews and if they check a box, it goes into a queue for myself or Sedai to peruse and approve. I've built tools to streamline this process, but it still runs on human review. We have over 18,000 reviews tagged, and every single one of those was viewed and approved by an actual person. It is not done en masse, indiscriminately, or with any kind of automated system. No AI, nothing. And these days, the only two mods are Sedai and I, so we do all of them. We've each personally approved thousands of reviews.Moderation
We're lucky in that most of the people who hang around have bought into the culture we're trying to create, and avoid politics or incendiary topics. But a few straddle that line, and others simply get riled up or provoked now and then. We're all human. It's impossible to avoid completely.
When this happens, tough decisions need to be made. People, friends even, sometimes have to be warned. Posts have to be edited or removed. Sometimes we have to make difficult calls about which to remove and which to leave up. And this is all assuming we've seen it in the first place! It's a popular misconception that, if something's up on the forum and not removed quickly, we must have seen it and approve of it, but this isn't the case. As mentioned, there are only two moderators at the moment, and there are far too many posts for us to read (or even skim) them all.
Moderation, like the emergencies mentioned above, does not usually take up a large number of hours, but it takes up as much brain space and emotional energy as the other two, because most interactions are extremely delicate.
People have left the site suddenly in response to moderation actions that were clearly necessary and defined in advance. It's just the nature of running a forum. And, spoiler alert, no matter how much thought or consideration goes into something, they won't all be handled perfectly.
I haven't actually logged the time I spent on the site in a normal day. Truth be told, I almost don't want to know. But it's a constant presence, it's my homepage on every computer, and I check it and reflexively scan for spam or issues many times a day.
That's the day-to-day, but there's annual events like the Oscar chat, the associated picks pool, adding and updating official lists, and helping produce multiple countdowns per year. Those are infrequent, but there's enough of them that there's something like that either happening or approaching most of the time.
I'll write more about the countdown preparation process, which I don't think I've explained in any real detail publicly before, in a future post.