Internet Forum Moderation... for dummies.

October 18, 2007 3:58 PM

I'm about to become a forum moderator. Help.

I need help. I work for a company with a website. They want to introduce forums to the site, and it will become my job to moderate those forums. This site already draws a considerable amount of traffic, and I'm afraid of what I'll have to deal with when this feature gets introduced.

I'm looking for guides, suggestions about what kind of rules to set up at the beginning, techniques, how to manage this job and be successful. I have no experience.

Help me, MeFi.

posted by eleyna to computers & internet (23 comments total)

The simplest advice I could offer would be to travel around to as many other forums as you can find, especially ones that would be similar to the one you will be implementing. See what you like, don't like and generally get a feel for what you want to do with it.
posted by wile e at 4:01 PM on October 18, 2007

Oh, poor, poor baby. Email me with details (what industry, what's the target audience, what volume of traffic) and I'll give you some tips. There is actually a professional organization for folks like you in video games, but we can certainly pull together some tips from our experience - to a degree, all forums are alike.
posted by restless_nomad at 4:10 PM on October 18, 2007

The new Boing Boing moderator Teresa Nielsen Hayden has this article: http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml?articleID=199600005
titled How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community. I've heard good things about it.

Sorry no linkage. I SWEAR that I will soon figure out why I cannot cut and paste to form fields in Firefox anymore.
posted by thebrokedown at 4:38 PM on October 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

I moderate the forums on my site, and I would say that my #1 piece of advice is to establish expectations / ground rules / tone ahead of time. During the signup process, in the forum descriptions, everywhere that people see *before* they post something stupid/offensive/off-topic/whatever. There's no need to be mean about it of course -- just be sure to be clear.
posted by YoungAmerican at 4:39 PM on October 18, 2007

The only rule that should be hard and fast is "being an asshole is not allowed."

Then enforce it, patiently, wisely, and, if necessary, ruthlessly.

("Complaining about [company you work for]" does not breach the above rule, which hopefully your bosses understand.)

Basically in the early days you want to try and create a sensible set of community standards, and then make them stick for long enough that they become "the way things are done around here." It sounds like your main challenge might be getting lots of new posters all at once before a sense of community has a chance to develop - your best bet is to be a model user yourself, replying to threads with useful information, listening to people, praising good replies and taking the time to thank people, messaging people that are getting too close to the Asshole Line with polite requests to chill out a little... all that sort of thing.

Apart from that, encourage all the users to message you with ideas and requests for how they'd like to see the forum operate, and take them very much into account. Later on, you'll probably want to delegate some authority to trusted members of the community to take the load off a bit.

Essentially, you have to start out by being the most obsessive user of the forum, until there are other equally obsessive users happy to help you out. It will be very time consuming to start with... if you or your bosses are under the impression that you can do your daily moderation in a few minutes while your morning coffee is brewing, this is a massive underestimation - unless all you're expected to do is check nobody's posted a picture of their gender-specifics.

Having said all this, it isn't always appropriate to be 100% hands-on. Members of the community will have their own perspective on what character the forums should have, and you need to allow leeway for this to take place organically. It's not your job to aggressively lock every mildly derailed conversation or intervene whenever a thread drifts offtopic or administer smackdowns for minor breaches of etiquette.

Hope that helps. If you have more specific questions then you can drop me an email (which is on my blog, which is linked to from my Mefi proile.) Good luck, eleyna!
posted by so_necessary at 4:46 PM on October 18, 2007

A few things off the top of my head:

-Make sure that you can't post to the forum without having registered with a valid email address. This sounds incredibly basic, but it weeds out a lot of problem people (who are either too lazy or too protective of their emails to register).

-IF you can verify each person registering from an internal database (if the message board is only for clients, say), you may want to enable moderator approval for all new accounts. If the contributors know that you can trace their posts to them personally from their usernames, it tends to make people self-moderate a lot more than if they are anonymous.

-Plan out your user groups and forum privileges ahead of time, designating levels of access. That way, you can have certain forum sections open for guests to read only, for example, but not to post, while other sections might be for registered users only.

-Enable the cursing filters, add any words you can think of (and continue adding to it for a while), then make a strict rule that going around the filters will be grounds for immediate deletion of posts. This is appropriate for one board I moderate, and also sounds appropriate for a work-related forum.

-Enable a flagging system for bad/disruptive posts and/or users, kind of like the flags here on Meta. That way, you can get the users' help to quickly find posts that shouldn't be there.

-Being the admin of a forum can be a big job. If you get consistent contributors that you trust, consider getting permission for them to be moderators - of the forum section where they contribute most often, say. If you find the right people to help you, that can be a great relief.

Good luck!
posted by gemmy at 4:57 PM on October 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

What's it like walking around in your own creation?

Like being God, only worse. I don't get to visit any nuns.

—The Psychology of Cyberspace, "On Being a God"

Also, if you think what you have to say, or the correction you want to make, important enough to break one of the rules, think again. The last twenty or thirty times someone thought this, they were wrong.

—Rules of the Harlan Ellison Webderland Art Deco Dining Pavilion

All the things you shouldn't have to explain to anyone, but you have to anyway, are summarized in the wordreference.com guidelines.

Here, Joel Spolsky explains the social goals of the technical decisions in his forum design. Well worth a read.

Chicken Nation used to have fora with a wonderful sticky topic right up top entitled "Rules of the Fora -- READ THIS FIRST, YOU LITTLE BASTARDS". The top post began, 'Okay, listen. I hate internet forums and so do you, unless you're some kind of an idiot. But these forums -- fora, rather -- are going to be different. Oh how different they are going to be.'

It went on to explain that the fora, run on phpBB, did not and would not have signatures, graphical emoticons, polls, personal messages, avatar hosting, or a General Discussion area. It did have a bias against crass or stupid animated GIF avatars and a ten-minute waiting period between posts. It then listed the rules proper: Don't whine about the rules, don't whine about rulebreakers, don't worry that you'll break some obscure rule as long as you're not being a complete moron. Write properly, i.e., understandably. Write well, i.e., not boringly. Be nice, or if not, be funny, and be prepared to be abused yourself: 'There will always be someone funnier, smarter, and crueler than you.' 'Don't ask questions that Google can answer.' Don't spam, troll, use subculture slang excessively or sincerely, pad your post-count, et cetera. Don't start a new thread if an old one will do. Don't think you have any rights unless you are the administrator.

It then explains the grievance process: If someone has really, really broken the rules, and you can't sort it yourself, you must post direct links to the misdeeds in the thread titled 'Summon Korg-Baa the Destroyer'. Korg-Baa 'will not return whence he came until he has tasted squeaky user-flesh': Either the accused or the accuser will be banned, without appeal, after each post in the thread.

The rules thread concludes with a great rule/rant about using something that at least looks like a real name: How can you have a serious conversation with someone named sexi_boi84?

Those fora have since gone offline, and the Wayback Machine didn't archive that page, but I have a copy. E-mail me if you want full text: com DOT gmail AT velyky DOT volodymyr, only the other way 'round.

On preview: Theresa Nielsen Hayden is a brilliant moderator. I'm headed right over there (linkage) to read whatever she has to say.
posted by eritain at 4:59 PM on October 18, 2007

thebrokedown, that is not Theresa Nielsen Hayden.
posted by eritain at 5:01 PM on October 18, 2007

Oh, also Sanya Weathers has a few (hilarious, profane) things to say about community management in general. Well worth reading.
posted by restless_nomad at 5:41 PM on October 18, 2007

Certainly every forum is different. It as some general guidelines I've seen forums work best when:

- There is no tracking of post count (discourages meaningless posts meant only to inflate numbers)

- Turn off images and avatars (at least initially if not permanently).

- In the first few weeks flood the area with examples of good discussion. Discourage the not so good, banninate the bad.

- Look for exemplarary users that you can outsource the moderating to. Three users can certainly lighten the load for you and if you choose users respected by the community you will find this goes even better.

- Create one area for chit-chat. Anything in other boards that is off-topic can be moved there. This gives people a sandbox to play (which inevitable users will) and reinforces the boundaries of the other boards.

- Captcha for new registrations. Nip spam in the butt so iy doesn't poison the discussion.

- the ability for users to get notifications of some sort and "subscribe" to posts will encourage discussion.

- A good searching feature will cut down on multiple repeat discussions or questions.
posted by genial at 6:02 PM on October 18, 2007

I could talk about this for hours on end, since it's what I do for a living. I'm not entirely sure where to even start, so let me start with questions:

What does your current website do?
What's your user demographic?
What's your target user demographic if you're not so fond of the one you have now?
What's the goal of the forum for you?
What would be the goal of using the forum for the users?

One of the key breakdowns in how you tend to build and moderate forums is whether you want to build a community of shared interest or a topic specific forum. In the former, you're bringing together people who happen to be interested in, say, curling, and then let them talk about whatever they want to. They'll mostly talk about curling, but they'll also talk about other things first the Olympics, then the personal lives of the players, then the personal lives of the forum members, then how much Dubya sucks (every forum gets on to that eventually, it's a rule). In the latter, you try and keep things more or less related directly to the topic at hand. This is an analog spectrum not a digital state, but where you want to fall on that spectrum will have a big impact on what kind of rules you'll need and how tightly you're going to want to enforce them.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:07 PM on October 18, 2007

Sanya Weathers I'd be careful with. Her work on BB includes disabling comments on some of Cory's recent rants.
posted by damn dirty ape at 6:31 PM on October 18, 2007

All of the above.

I think that the 2 main components are "clear guidelines" and "flag system":
you can't be ubiquitous but your members are everywhere; they will flag any rule breaking but only if the rules are clear.

Look at MeFi guidelines, they cover more than etiquette: topics, pertinence, presentation.
Good rules are not a list of interdiction: they define a positive contribution to the community.
posted by bru at 7:56 PM on October 18, 2007

I asked a similar question (kinda): Political Philosophy of Moderation.

What reading there did was give me a better grounding for persuading other people to let me use my judgment (well, it gave me more than that, but that was the most practical thing).
posted by klangklangston at 8:27 PM on October 18, 2007

I moderate a relatively small forum. In cases of smaller communities with similar interests, forums are super easy. If you don't infantilize the forum members with overzealous locking/deleting, the forum becomes pretty much self-moderating. Aside from the basic regulatory presence you represent just by being there, you're primarily there to delete spam and double posts. If something's roughly in the grey area, I just let it slide unless there's real complaints. Nothing kills a forum dead-er than a moderator on a power trip.

Generally, be absolutely crystal-clear up front about what's OK and what's not -- set extremely clear and explicit rules and then enforce them to about 75%.

Set very clear rules here:
HELPFUL______|______GOATSE

And enforce them relentlessly as if the line were actually here:
HELPFUL________|____GOATSE

If posts on the forum I moderate are over the line -- and you'll know clearly when one is -- it's flat-out deleted on the spot without explanation or second thought. I have no use for warnings, or thread-locking, or temporary bans. Asshole posts from decent posters are deleted, and asshole posters are perma-banned.

Good luck!
posted by churl at 9:26 PM on October 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

Unless these forums are going to be used for political discussion, I would write into the rules that any discussion of sex, politics or religion is off-limits. Those three topics can make even a rational community into a bunch of jerks.
posted by maxwelton at 9:55 PM on October 18, 2007

Clay Shirky's A group is its own worst enemy is required reading.
posted by seanyboy at 12:03 AM on October 19, 2007

The other option is to take a "less is more" approach in terms of Big Brothering your posters. Personally, I like the MeFi approach. I'm sure I signed up for some elaborate user agreement I didn't actually read when I registered here, but it's all nicely summed up just above the Post button as far as I'm concerned:

Ask MetaFilter is as useful as you make it. Please limit comments to answers or help in finding an answer. Wisecracks don't help people find answers. Thanks.

I previously ran a forum with several thousand users and we actually only had one "no go" area. (It was a women's sexuality website, which I declared to be pro-choice; I just wasn't willing to entertain anti-choice rhetoric on my dine. Other than that, it was all good.) Frank and open discussions are one of the nice things about the interpipes.

Specifically, I would discourage you from turning on all the bells and whistles your forum software allows. I would not enable word filtering (which is very babysitterish and quite irritating if you come from Scunthorpe, for example); I would not approve posts before publication. Lay out simple, adult guidelines and expect people will respect them. Have a plan for what to do if an asshat appears.
posted by DarlingBri at 12:35 AM on October 19, 2007

Damn Dirty Ape, you're conflating TNH with Sanya. Two different people, one uses more profanity than the other.
posted by restless_nomad at 9:35 AM on October 19, 2007

What does your current website do?

The shortest answer is "online classifieds." The slightly longer answer is: We are the online mirror of a weekly classifieds publication that runs, in print, in a few states in the U.S. So we have content that comes directly from the publication (restaurants, miscellaneous for sale, garage sales, real estate, careers, etc.) as well as "internet only" ads (that didn't run in print).

What's your user demographic?

I think the easiest way to put it would be "Buyers & Sellers." Since we don't have any forum content at all right now, I don't really know what "type of people" we have using our site.

What's the goal of the forum for you?

The goal for me, personally, would be to let our users come online and talk about great deals, garage sales, bargains, cars, real estate, or anything else they want, without being completely overrun by spammers, scammers, and jerks.


Thanks so much for all the great answers so far. I'm currently reading all the links from all the posts above.
posted by eleyna at 11:30 AM on October 19, 2007

Have a look at all the different community platforms eBay provides to its members. There are a lot of great ideas.
Community Discussion Boards have been working for a long time.
Neighbourhoods are new but seem interesting.
posted by bru at 2:55 PM on October 19, 2007

Heavy-handedness is bad, and too many rules invites people to tattle on others and makes your job much harder. Expect people to generally be adults, everyone occasionally is guilty of posting while drunk, but you want to make sure their post doesn't derail the whole thread, so unless it's really, really, out of line, deleting it usually causes more of a derail than letting it slide. A warning can sometimes work. I think the boingboing method of removing the vowels from the comments or parts of comments the moderator doesn't like is just kind weird, but then again, that's boingboing.

Having a "post your n00b questions here" thread is a good idea as is an off-topic thread.

You could always charge a one-time $5 membership fee...
posted by Mr. Gunn at 5:22 PM on October 19, 2007

Now that I've seen your response, you should explicitly state where for sale offers are allowed and where, if anywhere, referral links are permitted.
posted by Mr. Gunn at 5:25 PM on October 19, 2007