Techniques For Community Moderation:
What do we continue to say to the same questions being asked in forums- When do you close the discussion?
-forum posts lock at 30 days
-an art to when you need to respond and who you need to respond to
-value to allowing people to vent
-if your voice is getting lost in the cacophony give links to what you already said
-people will hang themselves with their own rope, will impact their own reputation in the forum
-provide venting areas
-timeouts, probation periods
-anytime you feel like you need to be defensive, or argue
-when you are starting to pull people’s arguments apart
Admin posts look different, should be shown differently on the blog
email is BROKEN. Even legit bulk email gets trapped!
Handling Hackers/Spammers:
Be able to band wildcard emails
-capture referring url on acct creation
-hackers ban password hash
-if there is a pwd protected community that is sending people over watch the ip sign up, url sign up
-if you determine someone is a griefer, make their comments visible to only themsleves
Communities Gone Wild!
Heather (flickr)
Aug 2005 Flickr announced that any flickr acct would be associated with the Yahoo ID
Jan 2007 Old School memebers were going to have to associate their Flickr ID with Yahoo ID
When introducing a change that affects how your members use the community
8 week timeline (MAX!)
1)anncounce what the change would be
2) 4-6 weekes : Let people sit on the idea and decide if it’s something they want to do
3)Execution: make change
Resolution: Mini FAQ linking into points of when a question has already been answered
Resoultion: offered refunds on pro accounts (came out of Heather’s own acct) 33 people took her up on the offer
Best Strategy of communicating change : Flickr blog
Any time there is a launch of new feature, announce on flickr blog and then link to Help form
Groups had discussions and admins were linking into the main forum topic discussion
Never communicated direcly via email to memebers
Did put messaging on certain pages of Flickr (service message)
After the date that it happened the user would land on a page that would discuss the change
Home page alert- can dismiss it
Derek presents Metafilter:
site where ther is low or no cost, do not delete an acct > CREATES SUPER VILLAN, come back more powerful and pissed
user warned, acct deleted, user went on an anti-metafilter rampage, spread their voice around metafilter communities
Do everything you can to diminish the power of a bad user without turning them into a supervillan
probation periods keeping acct but taking away the microphone
-boot them from a specific area take away the rattle there
-problem user got database errors deters problematic user
-cookies dark arts?
-create a new acct but you can’t post for a week (really effective way so that people get acculturated)
Adam Lasnik (Google)
pulled the plug on his entire forum to prevent the snowball of pre-teen girl needing boyfriend discussion
-stoping the thread, stopping search results
let it coool down, try to steer conversations
Derek (Fray)
No robots text, listed every posting area on the site, stories index, no comments indexed -> gave up some traffic
(Yahoo! Video)
yahoo Video video awards
posted it on the blog
influx of people that were not in the community (used Democracy plugin)
couldn’t stop the plug in, not way to show the results
wasn’t meant to run 10 polls on Wordpress-, led to scathing article in blogs
Don’t take it personally when you get called out
QA everything
Heather (flickr)"Talk like a pirate day!"-
-blocked users when they go nuclear
Heather (flickr) Invasion:
Aug 2005 a woman took a pic of a man masturbating
-posted in on CL
invasion of men’s rights advocates (flooded flickr, tried inappropriately on flickr)
famous raw food chef-response from him led to her taking the pic did once he was reported to the police
Habo Hotel -
banned
ip ban
unload shockwave, reload it
13-18 year old demo
company claims it gets their numbers up, but doesn’t help the community at all, invasion is still going on
Derek presents JPG -> Suicide Girls
Suicidegirls had a community of girls that wanted to be suicide girls
inendated with softcore low res porn
-led to acct deletion
changed submission info
Mario (Current.com)
users want to get the same story from slightly different sources
comparing posts to older posts and which one gets raised/promoted
know that the community gets the message and will communicate it for you, providing messaging for people
having a notable commenter in the comments make it know, step in -don’t step in
CULTIVATING MEMBER MODERATORS/AMBASSADORS
TAKE AWAYS!
before bringing down the hammer on deletion, try and bring super villains into the fold
own your mishaps - self admission
Control doesn’t scale
Manage to your guidelines
Don’t feed the trolls
Stay on top of who your users are
quickly consistent, don’t let something fester CONSISTANCY
Can’t manage a community by being their best friends (don’t be friends with the band)
Transparency
If you have the tool, use private messaging, TAKE IT OFFLINE
Let people save face
Learning when to let go
be more creative
manage to your guidelines
maintain your integrity
make sure your feedback is visible
No sacred cows, just because they’re old school that doesn’t mean that you can’t ban them
be a part of the community
Create standard responses, messaging, FORM emails etc
Communicate to them at their level
Good trouble(upset because they love community) and bad trouble (anti-social destructive behavior)
Don’t assume you know all of your audience
Don’t set expectations
Don’t over-react to feedback-the vocal minority
Documentation, a must have
Something that you’re legally can’t say, don’t be afraid to say that
Buddy check on descisions
