best practices for supporting online user communities?

mere — Fri, 08 May 2009 01:34:44 -0800

Does anyone have any information about best practices & strategies for online community support and community development? I'm in the final running for a Community Support job at a small niche social networking site, and I'm trying to do some research about the best way to manage the various tasks of the role.

The job involves managing the email support queue, handling issues with the forums & moderation thereof, development of help documentation, and general usability stuff.

I have experience with most aspects of this position, but I want to read up on any information I can find about managing user support & forum moderation of online communities.

The site has a very diverse group of about 125,000 active members--overall it's a friendly, helpful, close-knit (heh) community of users, but as you can imagine with a group that large, all sorts of issues come up.

There are lots of virtual communities on the internet (Hi, MetaFilter!) and there are people out there who work in community support. (Hi, MeFi staff!) Has anyone written about their experiences in type of work? I'm having a hard time finding information about it.

Is there any etiquette to hotlinking images from third parties?

PrinceValium — Thu, 01 Jan 2004 15:52:50 -0800

This comment got me thinking: is there a standard etiquette for displaying inline images from third-party servers on either private blogs or community sites like MeFi? Is it always appropriate, never appropriate, or only appropriate depending on the source and the server from which the image originates?

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best practices for supporting online user communities?

Is there any etiquette to hotlinking images from third parties?