Some Community Tips for 2007 | fortuitous

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1. Take emotion out of decisions

It goes without saying that if you want to run a successful community, you have to be extremely patient with people and give them second chances and the benefit of the doubt. It's also vital to the health of the community that you don't make rash decisions or even rational decisions that can appear as if you were acting on impulse. For communities run by just one person, this can be a challenge.

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2. Talk like a human, not a robot

If you elect to take your own personal emotions out of major moderation decisions, you of course run the risk of going too far. No one wants to follow a community run by a passionless robot.

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3. Give people something they can be proud of

If I had to give a reason why most newspaper blogs are filled with cranky screeds posted anonymously, I'd have to say having a generic blank comment form is key. Most every community that I contribute to offers a comprehensive user profile/history page, letting members customize to their hearts content and allow their profile to reflect their personality.

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4. Bring users in during community decisions

If the Digg HD-DVD encryption key fiasco taught us anything, it's that you can't make rash top-down decisions and expect your community to be okay with it. For MetaFilter, I run an entire forum devoted to discussing the site itself. I float new ideas and new UI enhancements there and anyone else can start a thread about some aspect of the site. When I have to make a tough decision, I mention it in a new thread and get the members' reactions and often tailor the final result based on their feedback.

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5. Moderation is a full-time job

Don't underestimate the amount of work it takes to maintain, moderate, and keep tabs on a community. Often a single person can create, develop, and launch a new community site in just a couple months, and spend the better part of most days fixing bugs and creating new features. Once a community becomes a bustling place filled with thousands of users — if a single person is still running the community — chances are they don't have any time for writing code anymore.

If you've got an existing site/service that you're planning to add a community or social component to, don't expect someone with a full workload to simply take it on and spend a few minutes here and there maintaining it. Your best bet would be devoting someone full-time to the effort.

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6. Metrics spread the work out

While moderation is a full-time job, it helps to make the job as easy as possible because moderators never have enough time to police everything. No one can read every single thing posted in every single place on most community websites. If you've ever used craigslist, you've probably seen those innocuous "flag this post" links sprinkled around the edges of postings. I took a page from Craigslist and implemented a simple user flagging system last year on MetaFilter. It's a basic mechanism that gives the community a policing outlet, but beyond the simple act of empowering users to help you moderate a large site, if you build the right toolset you can save yourself loads of time and stress moderating content.

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7. Guidelines not rules

While it may seem like simple semantics, I personally shy away from trying to run a community based on hard and fast rules, and instead try to steer members into following community norms in looser guideline form. This often works for the majority of members that want a nice, respectful community. Once you start down the path of absolutes and rules you'll quickly end up in two bad places. 1) you'll get the edgecase loving lawyer/engineer types that will argue and interpret rules ad infinitum and break them just to see what happens. These people will drive you crazy. 2) you will find yourself in a situation where you have to make a bad decision you know is unfair, but you have to because it was one of The Rules That Got Broken. Guidelines allow for nuance and though it's hard to do scale nuance in a large community environment, it's another way you can run a site like a human and not a lawyerbot.

I've been at both ends of this issue, as a user and a community creator, both with rules and guidelines, and I prefer the loosey goosey guideline approach. Write up a page of things you'd consider "ways to be a worthwhile member of this community" and "things you probably shouldn't do" and explain the approach when needed, but don't bother trying to come up with a hundred bullet points of things you can and can't do because once you go down the path of even a few rules, you'll soon find yourself at the top of a heap of laws that constantly have to be added to in order to please your most argumentative members, while at the same time having those rules hold you back and force you to bring the hammer down on people that accidentally crossed a line.

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