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1. Understand you are not a God. You are subject to being wrong, you are subject to making mistakes, you are subject to disagreements. This also means give respect to your members, since you are not above them and they are not below you. Yes, you do have the power to manage the community, but that does not make you in any way a better person than your members.

2. Admit when you're wrong. When one gives constructive criticism, admit that you were wrong and try to improve instead of throwing a huge fit.

3. Don't lash out at your users. It's tough being an admin, yeah, I get that, but that doesn't mean you should take out your anger on innocent users. Go play another game, go outside, do anything but take your anger out on users who are only trying to use what you chose to make or maintain.

4. Inform your users! Unless there's a user base out there who doesn't like to know what's going on, TELL YOUR USERS WHAT IS UP WITH THE SITE! If you're PLANNING important changes, such as selling the site, drastically changing some dynamics of how the site works, or a major downtime, tell your users what is up and WHY. Don't catch them by surprise and go, "BY THE WAY WE SOLD THE SITE TO THIS GUY WHO IS IN IT FOR MONEY!" Don't suddenly remove a feature that a lot of people like and go, "Okay gaiz, this feature is gone forever and there's nothing you can do about it!"

5. Get opinions from your users and actually take them into account. I am fully aware that your site/game is yours, and you can do whatever you damn well please with it. However, this is how to not be an a*****e, and if you do whatever the ******** you want without regards to the community, you will probably be seen as an a*****e and people will leave because they like feeling valued. Believe it or not, operating a community should mean you act with the community's interests in mind.

6. Be fair. A big problem in communities is mod/admin bias. Obviously, you trust your friends more than strangers, so it's more likely for you to assign modship to friends. But, whatever you do, please don't stick your friends in mod positions JUST BECAUSE they are your friends. Along the same note, don't always side with your friends just because they're your friends. Trust me, people can definitely tell when you're being unfair. This ALSO goes for things like political discussions; if you're on one side, don't be overly critical of people with different views while letting people with similar views to yours get away with breaking the rules. That is, don't ban someone for saying "right wing wacko" while everyone on your side is saying "dumbocrats".

7. Don't unnecessarily alienate a group of people. This is really quite simple, yet I see it so often. Unless you're posting about people intentionally trying to do bad (such as a group of scammers, hackers, or spammers), is there really a use for it? An example would be posting about how horrible the Sims are and saying that anyone who plays it is immature and doesn't know what a good game is. Was there really a reason to alienate all the members of the community who just so happened to play the Sims? It will only offend people and make them feel unwelcome in your community even though their choice of games has nothing to do with the community in the slightest.

8. Lighten up, damn. I see so many forum-nazis and game-nazis, and all they really do is serve to make the user population scared to participate in the forum unless they're friends with the mods/admin. Is it really worth it to text scream and single out a person because their one post deviated slightly from the original topic, yet was related to the discussion at the time? Here's a tip: discussions evolve, they don't always stay right on the very first topic at hand.

9. Don't do things "because you can". While it might be fun to ******** around with people and play with your powers, there's a point where it becomes too much. I've seen admins who change someone's username and take the old one for themselves because they wanted it and they had the power to do so. It's a ******** up move that only an a*****e would make, and from what I saw, it caused a lot of strife in the community.

10. Do it because you care about it, not because you want money. Nothing screams a*****e more than running a site for no reason other than to suck money out of everyone's pockets. Unless you're also incredibly nice, you're probably going to come off as an a*****e if every other post is "MONEY MONEY MONEY $$ PLS"

11. Do not make a secret forum to s**t talk and back-stab the members. Every time I've been to a forum with a secret s**t room, the people talking s**t were outed and everything that was said came out. Those communities suffered a huge loss from people feeling betrayed, and no, they never got back on their feet.

12. Only punish your users for abusing known rules or obvious glitches. It's just a downright a*****e move to punish users who didn't even know they were doing anything wrong because nothing was ever written in the rules about it. It makes you seem like a rule-nazi (see rule 8) who does things because you can (see rule 9). Plus, it alienates a group of users (see rule 7) by pitting the group who didn't break the rules against the group who did. This often applies to games, where there's a glitch that is glitched in a way that seems like it's part of the game.

An a*****e admin would respond by making an announcement punishing all players (either all players who used it or all players in general, and yes it has happened) and scolding the users for "cheating". The people who didn't realize it was a cheat are now bombarded with insults and have gained a considerable amount of in-game enemies who honestly believe that the "accidental cheaters" were purposely cheating.

Tips:
- If you are a younger person, avoid starting a community unless you know you're mature enough to handle it. Trust me, your age shows.

- If you're a very opinionated admin, make a mule account for debate threads. This goes along with don't alienate a group of people, because if a user is being put down by the admin him/herself they will usually feel like they are unwelcome to the site because of their opinion. It's not fun going to a place where the admin hates you.

- Should you not be able to handle the community without coming across as a huge a*****e, try getting a community manager. The people talk to the manager, the manager talks to you, you talk to the manager, and the manager talks to the people. It's less stressful for both the community and you if someone can be the middle man and avoid nasty encounters.