Rules are made to be broken....

Patrick · Administrator

Hey all,

Thanks everyone who is posting and replying. Smile

There is a lot of room in the middle between two extremes of having no semblance of structure at all and extremely "heavy handed" management of a community. Heavy handed being in the eye of the beholder, of course.

If you remove any posts at all ever, you have guidelines. So, guidelines aren't really the question to me. The question is whether or not they are posted in public for everyone to see or if they are only in your own mind/on your computer/in a private area.

It's difficult to remove any posts at all if you don't have some form of public guidelines to point to in relation to what is or isn't OK. Even if that document is ever changing (it should be a living document and should be adjusted as issues present themselves), if you don't have something, it just feels like you are removing posts for whatever reason you want or for reasons that only you are aware of.

Personally, I would say that this would be more likely to present the "I'm the owner and you do as I say" kind of attitude. Guidelines don't really affect that as you can have that attitude without guidelines. This leads to resentment, just as much or more so than having guidelines posted in public would.

At least, when you have them posted publicly, everyone is aware of the same guidelines and understands what is expected of them.

Guidelines should rarely be hard and fast rules, but instead should provide general guiding principles that provide some direction for members and allow for staff members to exercise some level of consistent discretion.

I definitely agree that each situation should be looked at and dealt with individually. That's what I advocate and what I do. But, without guidelines or vision, you have no consistency. You have moderators and administrators who simply remove what they think is inappropriate. You have, essentially, too many cooks. You have as many sets of guidelines as you have staff members, and none of them are posted in public.

Guidelines don't make every situation the same - they give you something to measure every situation against. There is an important difference there. I believe that consistency is important.

There is also something to be said for being honest and upfront about expectations. For example, if you launch a community without any guidelines (though having no guidelines is a guideline in itself) and you let it develop... it would seem weird to decide to spring guidelines on them once it's established. That is fundamentally changing the community and while it can be done, I don't see any reason to purposefully hurt yourself by deciding ahead of time that you will only have guidelines when you reach a certain point. Some might consider that purposefully deceptive.

Having guidelines doesn't mean every move that a member makes is being scrutinized or corrected. Anymore than not having guidelines means that.

It's important to listen to members and to encourage feedback, but allowing members to decide what guidelines you have, what limits they have, etc. and to deal with them is, more or less, a destructive course that will be based around popularity, who yells the loudest and can get the most people to vote for what they want. I always recommend against politicizing your online community because politics turn people against one another and that will include your members. Politics are a nasty business. You want to do what you can to keep them off of your site.

A general guideline like "All posts must remain withing the realms of human decency." or "We're all adults here." translates into "Do anything you think is appropriate." The problem is that everyone will read that wildly differently because there is no specificity at all. Specific guidelines are general in nature and not hard and fast, like I said, but if you provide some detail, you help everyone to better understand what is and isn't expected. It goes a long way.

I would also say that everyone should be aware of what their audience is and what works for them. No two communities are alike and they all require different approaches and guidelines. For example, I run a martial arts community that aims to be friendly, respectful and generally family friendly. If you wish to use profanity or tell people that their martial art "sucks," that's cool - but we're not the community for you. We're not going to change for you and we're not going to let you do whatever you want. Know whoever your audience is and pursue it with vigor.

Otherwise, you find yourself in a continuous loop chasing after whoever you can keep at the moment.

Ryan · VIP

I disagree with rules being meant to be broken. Their existence is to create order. However, to know what order is, we must have disorder. It's like peace, how would we be able to appreciate true peace, if we didn't have war?

Rules shouldn't be broken, they weren't designed to be broken and they exist for enforcement purposes. It's all circumstantial.

The standard state highway speed limit for New York is 55 miles per hour, the interstates around here are 65. Which means, technically, if you go beyond that speed you are able to ticketed and suffer the appropriate consequences.

Now, let's say there's absolutely no traffic in sight, you can't see cars, people, houses, neighborhoods, and it's clear as day. It's dry, sunny, and ideal driving conditions. You just happen to be going 80 and happened to get clocked by the ONE patrolmen on the road at the time. Should you necessarily be ticketed, yelled at, arrested? No. It was circumstantial. There was no reason for you to believe you were causing any harm, and fact is, you weren't. Does it make it right? No. But it doesn't mean it was wrong.

So in applying this to community forums, I think it's circumstantial. The rules exists because we need some government. Without it we would eventually have so much disorder we would also have our death. This is the topic that sets the standards for the two major American political parties, how much government do we need?

Now, while driving on the interstate and community forums are different, we can still compare them. I personally think every community must have guidelines in order to establish some concrete foundations. From there on out, it's up the administrators how strictly they are enforced, and the procedures in the process. Smile

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Christof · Posted: 5/30/2010, 12:29 pm Post subject:

I really think that having a list of rules is important for any site, for a number of reasons:

1. If you have staff, moderating the site morphs into moderators randomly telling people to stop doing whatever they think is wrong. If some of your staff want to allow swearing, but the rest don't, then it turns into a tug of war between swearing and not swearing. And it can get worse. Having a set of rules ensures that you and your staff are on the same page about what's allowed and what isn't.
2. Your users know what is allowed and what isn't. Unless they registered just to spam your community, they wont do bad things. Without rules, they don't know what the bad things are. And if they forget the rules, you can remind them and they will remember the rules.
3. When someone registeres on your site, I think that a list of rules is going to scare them a lot less than "Do whatever I say, unless you want to get banned".
4. If someone actually is scared by a list of rules, then they probably don't want to join your community enough for you to want them. You only want dedicated people, and if someone isn't dedicated enough to follow a list of rules, they arn't worth having.
5. If you notice that a lot of people are swearing and you don't want that, How are you going to say that it's wrong. If you wait for people to do it, and then tell them to stop, it will take up a lot of your time. And people arn't going to stop doing it if they don't know that it's wrong. So don't go around thinking that the moment you want people to stop, they will. Because they wont stop until they know that it's wrong. And without a list of rules, telling them that it's wrong is going to be a lot harder.

Bob Hubbard · Posted: 6/2/2010, 7:27 pm Post subject:

MartialTalk's 9 years old this August. We started out with a 10 rule check list....it's still part of the "what you really need to know" part in the beginning. Everything else after that -is- years of clarifications, expansions, posting of internal policy, and the results of arguments with rules lawyers who like to play the "your rules don't say it's not allowed" game. While we have a lot of rules, the core is rather simple: Don't be a jerk, act responsible and professional, and don't give us reason to boot you. Everything else after that, is just longhand. lol!
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fastcars · Posted: 6/4/2010, 3:55 am Post subject:

Christof · Posted: 6/4/2010, 3:02 pm Post subject:

fastcars · Posted: 6/8/2010, 4:45 am Post subject:

I really don't think a jerk needs a rule spelling out to him when he is being a jerk, both he and your members will know that long before your rules have been read, if they get read at all that is. Plus, I wouldn't dream of pulling people up for either swearing or bad spelling. There is a word filter to deal with the first issue and two of our most popular and active users happen to be dyslexic.

Patrick · Administrator

You may not dream of it, but others may. Like myself. I feel the word censor feature of my community software is best used in a Censor Block scenario, not so much as a member of your moderation team. In my experience over the last 10 years, I have found this to be the most effective use of it for my communities.

But, for your community, you may feel that the word censor in and of itself does whatever you'd like to do regarding vulgar language and aren't concerned with circumventions of it, etc. And that's great. Vulgar terms are a personal decision and all communities should decide where they fit it with the audience that the community is aiming for.

When we speak of managing an online community, there is no one way. It all depends.

Thanks,

Patrick
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Christof · Posted: 6/8/2010, 2:04 pm Post subject:

Bob Hubbard · Posted: 6/9/2010, 11:26 am Post subject:

Most sites I've signed up for have the standard "I have read and agree to follow the rules" clause. I feel only a fool agrees to something they haven't read.

Then again, yeah, we do hear "well I haven't read the rules" on occasion.

When relying on a word filter, it's only as good as the list you provide. Some folks will post, see their favorite vulgarity was filtered, and quickly reedit the post to make it appear. To me, that's kinda a "oh, it's not allowed eh? Well, I'll show you" action. In those cases, depending on the nature of things we warn or infract, and escalate as needed. Our main rule is if you're polite with us, we're polite with you. You come in swinging hot n heated, we shut you down fast. Of course, I run martial arts forums, and most of my staff are cops or military (current/ex) so it's a different dynamic than say a car forum run by mechanics, or a pet forum run by dog lovers.

As Mr. O'Keefe said, "When we speak of managing an online community, there is no one way. It all depends."
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