photo credit: elbragon

I have this member on KarateForums.com, who has been with us since 2005. That year, he pushed against our guidelines so persistently and badly that I banned him. He didn’t like our guidelines, he didn’t like that we didn’t let him treat people in a certain way. After I banned him, he emailed me and asked me to give him another chance, pledging to do better.

I very rarely unban anyone. I don’t treat bans like a game, I don’t have temporary bans. We’re flexible, we’re reasonable, we try to work with you. When you have been banned, that means you’ve demonstrated a lack of caring and it’s time to go. But in a very small percentage of cases – a fraction of a percent – I will unban someone if they take responsibility and express a genuine desire to participate in good faith and do better. I felt that this member’s message to me was genuine and I unbanned them.

photo credit: torbakhopper

Is that message spam? Two people can give a different answer about the very same message, depending on various factors. But one factor that doesn’t really matter is whether or not the message was delivered by a bot or through some automated process.

This logic doesn’t pass muster and a simple exercise exposes this. Let’s say that I use a bot to post a message on your community, send you a message on Twitter or send you an email, and you decide that message is spam. If I were to manually send you the exact same message, would you magically decide it wasn’t spam?

“Can’t touch me, the community loves me.”

– Ryan Leslie, Carnival of Venice

Back when I wrote Managing Online Forums, one of the people I reached out to for advance praise in late 2007 was Ryan Leslie.

This wasn’t some blanket spam request. I asked around 17 specific people and of that 17, 14 provided praise. I had reasons for contacting these individuals. At least as far back as 2006, I had been following Ryan’s work and was impressed by him, his background and his entrepreneurial spirit. He’s a uniquely smart, talented guy and I felt that he was on the way to even greater heights. When he agreed to read the book and then provide a blurb for me, I was honored.

photo credit: SurfaceWarriors

I was talking to Jennifer Sable Lopez, Director of Community at Moz, yesterday and I was reminded of a trend of articles that I’ve noticed, about community management. Essentially, they could all be titled:

I’m a Marketer, Who Has Never Worked as a Community Manager: Here is What a Community Manager Is and Does

Because that’s what they are. I’ll see an article talking about what a community manager is and what they should do and I’ll read it and will feel like most of it is poor advice or an inaccurate representation of the role. Then I’ll look at who wrote it and I’ll pull up their LinkedIn profile and, sure enough, they’ve almost never worked in community and they are usually a marketer of some kind. In motivation, if not in job title.

photo credit: VikramDeep

You don’t want to mess around with forum owners. And when I say mess around, I mean that you don’t want to anger them by doing something disrespectful or by trying to take advantage of their community.

If there is one thing that forum owners and managers don’t like, it is when someone tries to spam their community. Or scrape the community content. Or otherwise try to abuse their members or what they’ve built. You should assume spam is you referencing a work or organization that you are associated with.

If it is not abundantly clear that it is OK for you to do something, then you should never do so without asking a staff member. And yet, so many do. But that isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that people who want to be taken seriously do it. That’s the crazy part. I find that most people who do it fall into three categories:

photo credit: weegeebored

Usually I write articles for people who manage online communities. However, this is an article for people who don’t. People who enjoy online communities and social spaces. Please feel free to share this article with them, as it will help them to see how things work behind the scenes.

When people are afforded with the opportunity to contribute something online – they are given an area where they can share their thoughts, they are able to participate in discussions with other people, etc. – it is inevitable that some people will abuse this opportunity. They will do things that violate the policies of that community or are otherwise bad or inappropriate.

photo credit: timlewisnm

The other day, I was looking at the Twitter stream of an acquaintance of mine and I clicked on the username of someone he was talking to. I opened that person’s website and I found myself thinking, “that sounds familiar.”

It took me a while to place it, but then I realized that the person was a spammer. Or, at least, they had spammed my community previously. They had joined in 2007 and posted a few spammy messages, even going so far as to encourage people to click ads on his site or commit click fraud, as it is commonly called. I removed the messages and banned the account.

photo credit: Reeda

I have managed KarateForums.com since it was launched on May 21, 2001. I’m not a martial artist, and I’ve always been very open about that, but the site was my idea, I’ve been running it for more than 12 years and I’m very proud of it.

Something funny happens occasionally with new members. Because I’m not a martial artist, they appear to think I am dumb. For example, I recently had a member who chose not to believe a veteran member’s description of their experience in the arts. Which is cool and not uncommon. They asked some questions, which is also fine.

But when they didn’t get the answers they wanted, they grew rude and disrespectful and even started to become a roadblock on the thread, preventing the discussion from progressing in line with its actual purpose.

photo credit: aerodesign.pl

Yesterday, I was on Tech Talk with Craig Peterson, and we discussed online communities and how to approach them as a business (audio).

One of the areas that we touched on was the concern that forums and structured online communities might be more susceptible to people who don’t comment in good faith and simply want to cause harm or destruction for their own amusement or motives. Some would call these people trolls, though I’d say that label doesn’t always fit the bill.

photo credit: See-ming Lee 李思明 SML

“This post is bad. Why haven’t you removed it yet?” When you have a member who asks you something along those lines, this is the article you can point them to.

If you post something on an online community and it does not appear right away, because a moderator must first approve it, that is called pre-moderation. However, if the community has moderators and what you post appears right away without needing approval, the community employs post-moderation.

Most online communities rely on post-moderation. An abysmally small number of communities rely solely on pre-moderation and, when they do, it is usually for a very specific reason – the need to control the incoming content to an extreme level. Some communities practice a little bit of pre-moderation (like only applying it to new members, until they prove themselves), but most of their content is subject to post-moderation.