Not long after Dogster launched a lot of people suggested forums be added. In fact still to this day the top 10 referring sites to Dogster and Catster are not blogs or portals or search engines, but web forums. I had never personally overseen an online forum but I knew enough to know that if implemented poorly they are ridden with pitfalls that can lead to painful experiences for both user and administrator. I knew I had a real nice community where no one ever had an offensive experience and part of that was due to the fact Dogster and Catster are at heart sharing sites, not networking.

So this spring my partners and I decided we could trust the users and that they deserved the option. So we read every online history and anecdote we could about running good forums. We sat front and center on panels on the topic and asked questions of everyone we knew. We also got the advice and support of our advisor Ron Meiner a longtime community guru, who was able to see our implementation plans and tweak them simply but effectively based upon his years of oversight.

Unfortunately we couldn’t even consider using one of the many excellent open source software options as none of them could possibly provide the 100% virtual dog park experience we want to ensure in everything we offer so we chose to built them ourselves. We needed the forums to be 100% integrated into the site and to look as fun as everything else. We needed single login and to automatically use the pet’s photo as their avatar image. And to ensure the virtual dog park goals each forum posting offers links to that pet’s full page, diary, as well as links to message them, leave a treat, family postings, or invite them to be pals.

Writing the specification easily took as long as the actual coding, but with something as sensitive as this that makes complete sense. This would after all be the first time very happy users would have the chance to communicate back and forth, figuratively we were letting all these backyard pets play in the same pen for the first time, and we all know what that could mean.

The forums on Dogster and Catster have been live for just under a month and there are already 7,500 postings by over 1,200 different pets. Hundreds are added a day. Communication has been friendly and positive and when touchy topics pop up nice pets step in right away and calm the bristling hairs faster and more sincerely than we can. It’s really been nothing but wonderful to witness.

When you have time, here’s a superb example of a self-righting response to a very sensitive topic and here’s one where an accuser gets a strong community bark of explanation. It’s entries like these that will help us find our peacemakers who we’ll invite to be volunteers. (Another Ron suggestion.)

So far one of the key’s to our success has been that the member’s pet is their avatar so you are not disagreeing with ‘DrkWizrd666′ with no other profile, you’re writing to Sparky who’s pictures and extensive bio are a click away. To keep each pet unique, Ron gave us the brilliant idea of letting users give their pet’s little taglines like “Life’s a Ball … fetch it!” Since our members love their pet’s main page, they realize that if they go mad-dog on the forums, their entire profile will be removed from the site, so they can’t simply create a new profile and get back on without a bunch of hassle as well as losing all their Pup Pal connections, diary entries, etc. So they have to play by the rules or risk being banished from the site altogether.

Since going live, John, Steven, Ron and I have been all over the forums. We coded in extensive admin features so we can submit special entries, add regular entries, place our entries wherever needed, close or pause a topic if it’s overheated, and let user’s notify if they see any problems. Yet we really prepared for the worst and built tools to put bad dogs on multi-day posting timeouts, delete foul entries, block members from the forums altogether, remove the vowels from user postings that obey the rules but are repetitively try to game the system, keep track of users that have annoyed users and even keeping track of users that complain too often.

People come to Dogster and Catster because the sites are safe, warm and never offensive. It’s always a risk letting a bunch of cats and dogs crowd into one room, but so far, these kitties and doggies are doing just fine and having a ball. They like that we chime in whenever asked, but not unless needed so even when we don’t make our presence known, they know we are just on the other side of the server. 7,500 entries by 1,200 pets is tiny compared to how this will grow and I’m sure we’ll lose plenty of sleep separating prolonged dog fights and helping others lick their wounds, but so far it definitely feels like the months of preparation and weeks of custom coding are definitely going to pay off.