How to deal with trolls and other negative people in your community?

Eric Chou · 2023-08-04T23:59:55

community MANAGMENT QUESTION: So for a while now, my old project has been getting A lot of people that try to attack me, and my project. Example: ANONOMOUS GUEST: "No honestly, you keep on updating this mod for God knows what reason. It ceased development and you still want to be relevant in a community you hate, attack and despise, but yet you can't leave it or can't move on from it. Dam you just have such a ego that I wonder are you now actually retarded or something. Just move on, at this point this mod should now be reported as spam as you are just updating it now so you can "be seen as relevant" even thou nobody cares about this mod or games you make. Your personality has caused that. I will say this and say it again, move on already." This is the most recent example, which seems to be a reaction to me posting that we will patch soon. Our page is littered with a couple of these similar posts. https://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberium-secrets if you want to read the conversations. I'm a bit torn. We canceled the overall project, as we scoped too big, and released 1/3 of our intended content. WE were adding a new faction to an RTS, and we underestimated everything! The problem is also people come, they claim we are “dead”, and then move on. I get frustrated every time I see these posts, as it feels like it boils down to people pissed as we promised 3 free things, , and they only get one. I also usually feel like I need to defend myself and the work we did. Unfortunately this conflict has driven away some of our former loyal community members. I'm thinking that I should no longer respond to these trolls, as there is nothing I can really do, yet, if I leave these disrespectful comments unanswered for, it will just add up. I know that some of these people take issue with me directly, as in how I've responded to them. I've realized I've gone down to their level a few times, something i should not have done. Does anyone have any advise? I don't want to become one of those people who only take the complements ,and ignore the criticisms, but when most of the criticisms look like the one I quoted,, it's hard to know what to do, and how to take The high road.