Forum Administration

There are many problems that may crop up in your forum after a point of time. Members may be facing difficulty in registration, your forum policy has changed but you have not updated in the automatic email sent on new registration, the validation email is not sent out e.t.c My Suggestion is to register a new dummy account say after 500 registration in the forum and test run the whole process of registration acting as a New Member.

The way I do?

I had my own catch all email address. When I register a new account, I simply use a dummy email ID with the same domain name as that of mine. I go through the whole process of registration as a new member. As the email is a catch-all email, thus it get delivered to me at my main email account. I validate the new account and log on to the forum to see my level of permission.

The benefit this process will give is:

1. Many a host has bulk email limitation policy. For example Host Gator only allows 200 emails per hour and if you send more than 200 emails per hour, your account get suspended. If you do not have the right script to phase out the email sending, chances are that many of the emails will bounce back. You might never know if the emails were delivered to your members. If you have a dummy account on every 500 members, you will also get the email of the newsletter/bulk email which is sent. Thus you can make sure that your bulk email is working fine.
2. Many scripts are available which sends out email to users like birthday auto-greeter. If you have dummy accounts you would know if they are working fine or not.
3. It is also good to have dummy account because it helps you fight PM/Email Spams and scams. On one of my forum, a member would register and send 1000’s of PM leaving the Administrator and Moderators. If you do not have a vigilant members or they do not know about reporting it, you might end up spammed out.
4. A dummy account also help you in trouble shooting especially with user group permissions.
5. Indirectly you can use the power of dummy accounts to emphasize some aspects on your forum. For example you wanted to have opinion on important topic at forum, but somehow it escapes the view of members of your community. Bumping the post as an administrator is a bad thing. Also writing a new letter just to evoke response is a overheating of your newsletter/bulk email posting. You can ofcourse ask your moderators to post their views, but the easiest wand friendly way is to use the dummy account to do the same. Say after a day of non activity at your thread, you post it from a dummy account, the threads get bumped and chances are that others might also start participating. It is similar to bumping a topic on members voting a topic. Though it has a risk, this utility of dummy account should be used with caution.