I just wanted to mention that the “Managing Online Forums” Example Forums have launched. What are they? Well, I had the idea to put up some forums that displayed just a few of the concepts that I discuss in the book, like a staff forums set up, various guidelines, a system of documentation for violations and more. Sometimes, it’s easier to consider something if you can see it in front of you. So, I hope that some find it useful. :)

This is something I’ve noticed before, but it just happened on one of my sites in the last day or so, so I thought I write a post about it. Basically, we had a member sign up and mention a major television manufacturer in a post, in relation to college sports and what he was going to watch it on. Now, the topics seemed decent enough as the brand was just a small mention in the overall topic, which was related to college sports.

The first time I see it, it seems OK. I mean, afterall, he mentions his TV (and the company who made it) once… that’s fine. But, then he does it again. The second time I see it, where he mentions the same brand (something like the second time in six posts), I make a note of it in the staff forums and decide just to keep an eye on it because it looks like he’s trying to throw this brand into posts. Then he did it again, right after that, with a link to the television manufacturer’s website, this time! Nice try. Enough is enough.

If the company wasn’t paying him (not necessarily to “spam forums” but to “market their product online” and “bring brand awareness”), he was doing it on his own account. Which I really don’t see being the case. I mean, yes, people do that, but the way he was mentioning them and interjecting them into otherwise OK topics, in a sort of covert way – it just doesn’t seem to me to be the type of thing that someone does on their own, to make the company look bad or to promote their products, like a devious spammer, on their own time.

I’m not really surprised by this practice – it’s just that I expect it from smaller companies or individuals who don’t realize what they are doing or don’t care. This company has nationwide television campaigns talking about their widescreens and all that goodness. But, nonetheless, some guy comes and spams my forums in a decidedly clever way, trying to trick us into thinking it’s not spam.

I’m a community administrator, but I’m also a content creator. Everyone who posts on forums is a content creator, as well. I am also a writer. I maintain a number of blogs, I’ve written a ton of articles and I have a book out soon. I want others to respect my ownership of my content and my member’s ownership of their content, so I do whatever I can to show them the same level of respect.

The best examples of this are when people are a bit too overzealous with their quoting of articles or they use your forums as a means to distribute audio or video clips (through a free file host, most likely). You don’t want your forums to be a cesspool of piracy.

When it comes to quoting from sources, I abide by what I have found to be generally acceptable online quoting practice. That means that I quote no more than one fifth or one sixth of the work and I link directly to the source of the work. If it is a small article – three paragraphs, let’s say – then it’s OK to quote one paragraph. If the article is only one line or one short paragraph, then it’s OK to quote the whole thing. But, in both cases, you must have a direct link to the source.

Quote much more or don’t feature a link directly to the source (no matter how little you quote) and it’s simply not cool. That includes saying “From SiteName” without the actual link to SiteName. It’s not unusual on forums (frequency varies by subject) for members to simply copy and paste an entire article into a thread. Often times, it is very easy to pick this out. When you have a member who rarely can string a sentence together and then all of a sudden, they put together a quality piece of journalism… well, something is up! Take a line from the article and Google it to see where else it pops up. You’ll likely have your answer there.

Similarly, it’s pretty easy to tell that someone is distributing an illegal audio or video clip. No, Madonna, Diddy, Snoop Dogg and Britney Spears did not give crazypirate72bf7s permission to distribute their work and nor did their labels. No, Will Smith’s new movie did not green light a marketing campaign where hotgurl108 could make the movie available to everyone for free.

If ever in doubt, we remove their post and mention that, if we are mistaken, please provide us a way to verify this fact and we’ll be glad to add the post back. Once in a while, that may happen, but most of the time, it doesn’t and it’s better to play it safe here, in order to properly respect the rights of others.

Unfortunately, not all administrators see it this way. For example, at Bad Boy Blog, we do a lot of original reporting. So, we get ripped off a fair amount. There is a community that I know of where the same freaking guy posts our articles up without any link. The owner of the community is just pleased as can be to allow it and receive the benefits from it until I report it, at which case he takes care of it. That’s not being proactive, that’s being reactive and covering your butt when the content creator comes knocking at your door. That’s frustrating and not how it should be. One day, I’m going to get fed up and just start filing DMCA notices instead of contacting the administrator.

You should want these reports to come to you. I try to always, always first content the forums staff because, being an administrator, I want people to come to me, first. Me and my staff will take care of any copyright complaint that appears legitimate. We don’t want people using our community to illegally infringe upon the work of others. So, make sure it’s in your guidelines and make sure that you have contact links on your site where people can contact you without having to register. Deal with violations and ban repeat violators.

Make your forums public so that search engines spider them and content creators can find where your members are using their content. If you have a legitimate reason for having a private forum (staff forums), that’s cool, but don’t do it as some sort of backhanded way to keep people from finding the illegal activities that your members are perpetuating.

At the end of the day, treat people like you want to be treated. Do you want someone ripping all of the posts your members made and putting them on their forums? So, then why would you let your members rip other people off? It doesn’t make any sense. Well run, professional communities respect the rights of others because they want people to respect theirs.

On March 11 at 11:00 AM on the Adobe Day Stage at the Austin Convention Center, I did a book reading for “Managing Online Forums”, as part of South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive. Back in February, I had asked for your feedback in deciding what I would do a presentation about. I ended up with “Creating a Positive Environment on Your Forums”. I recapped the conference after I returned.

My friend Chris had agreed to take my camcorder and record the presentation, so that I could have it and, hopefully, upload it online. He did a good job and I’m glad that I was able to get it on tape.

It represents an interesting moment for me in that it was my first time ever speaking on stage. Really, it as my first time ever speaking to an assembled group of people that I didn’t know. So, I was a little nervous. But, I prepared and did the best that I could – once I got going, I knew what I had to say and my focus was really on getting the words out, speaking slowly, breathing and looking people in the eyes. I’m happy with how it went and I appreciate the support that I received from the crowd. It was a friendly crowd and that made it easier.

The footage is now available online and can be seen below (through Yahoo! Video) and also on YouTube (parts 1 and 2) in the ManagingCommunities.com channels on each (Yahoo! Video and YouTube channels). I am hoping to post more community management related videos in the future, so please subscribe if you have any interest.

I am going to include the slides I used for the presentation below the videos, as long as the point in time where the slide was supposed to be triggered, so that you can follow along with the slide sequence, as well. Thanks to Jake and everyone who gave me slide related advice.

Thank you for checking it out and please feel free to share any comments you might have, in the comments.

I head over to the phpBBHacks.com Support Forums today and I have a private message report from a member telling me that there is spam everywhere. Yay! So, I take a look and … sure enough, there was a lot of spam. 273 messages, to be precise. All in the same forum. The person wasn’t spamming any link, website or organization – they were just spamming saying they were spamming. An annoying disruption, but no big deal, really, management wise. That’s why my good friend Jeremy wrote Post Remover. A couple clicks and we’re good. All posts removed. User marked as troll, IP banned. All set.

Most activities that violate my user guidelines also tend to violate most ISP’s AUPs (Acceptable Use Policy). Even so, you should be a bit choosy when it comes to what you report people to their ISP (Internet Service Provider) for. You don’t want to waste your time or the ISP’s time. You want to make sure that the person has demonstrated a serious intent to harm or disrupt your community. Most users I ban, I never report to their ISP because once they are banned, they don’t come back and that’s that. And I don’t have any vendetta against anyone – I just want them off my site. So, if they accept the ban and move on, we most likely won’t have any issues.

However, if I have a user who evades bans and tries to come back over and over again, then he’s disrupting my community and wasting my time and the time of my staff. So, I’ll report that person to their ISP. If someone comes and makes 273 spam posts, that is a serious disruption of my community (pushing new threads 10 pages down) and I’ll report that person to his ISP, as well. Mass private message spam is another thing that I will report people for. I’ll report people for any persistent activities that disrupt or harm the community, whether that’s the mass posting of junk messages, inappropriate links or pornography. That doesn’t usually happen to a point where I feel like I need to report them, so it is fairly rare.

However, when that time does come, I look up the user’s IP address and then I do a search for it on DomainTools to see who owns it. I then visit their website and contact them via their abuse contact. Most ISPs have an abuse contact designated. But, if they don’t, I’ll just use their general support contact. I simply introduce myself and explain what the issue is. In the case above, the ISP had a very limited contact form (1,000 characters), so I wrote something like:

Hello,

My name is Patrick O’Keefe and I own the iFroggy Network, an internet network of websites that includes phpBBHacks.com.

This morning, between 4:39 PM ET and 5:59 PM ET, a user posted 273 spam messages on our support forums (located at http://www.phpbbhacks.com/forums). These messages were all titled “spam” with the message “I am a spammer.” This represented a violation of our user guidelines, a serious disruption of our community and a violation of your AUP.

I wanted to report this so that the appropriate action could be taken. I would be happy to send you further documentation upon request, including the posts themselves, the IP information on those posts, our raw access logs and more.

I appreciate your time and assistance. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Sincerely,

Patrick O’Keefe
iFroggy Network

When you are contacting these ISPs, it’s important to remember to be calm and reasonable and to stick to facts. Don’t take your anger out on them. I generally like to attach proof with the e-mail, but the contact form for this ISP didn’t really allow for it. But, even so, always offer it to them and make sure you have it on hand to offer before you do so. I would like to believe that most ISPs want to “take out the trash”, so to speak, but to do so, they may need your help and cooperation. So, be polite, treat them with respect and give them the information that they need.

Sometimes, no action will be taken. But, sometimes, action will be taken. I remember this user who had PM spammed one of my sites. I reported him and I found him, a while later, complaining on his website about how I had reported him to his ISP and how they had suspended him (he also mentioned how I was wrong, immature, whatever). So, it does work with people. But, pick your battles and only do it when someone is truly worth it, as you don’t want to waste your time or anyone else’s.

Months ago, there was a member on one of my sites who posted about a topic that… well, let’s say that most people who read it probably thought that he was either out of his mind or a total liar. And yet, it was something where you couldn’t be 100% sure. And, in reading his posts, he wasn’t really violating our guidelines. He’s not being rude, disrespectful, condescending… he doesn’t appear to be purposely misleading people (that we can readily see, though it wouldn’t be totally unfair to guess it) and, really, the post appears to be fine.

So, we leave the post but, of course, the thread requires moderation because of the replies that come to it. Even though the guy posted something that was decidedly odd, that doesn’t give anyone license to have at the guy – our guidelines still apply. Some people like to take it upon themselves to “save” the world from odd theories by screaming liar or fraud at anyone who posts one, but that just doesn’t fly. We want people to discuss the topic and we want them to question the member. That’s what it’s all about. However, it has to be done respectfully and it absolutely can be. The topic has required moderator attention because of the people who don’t understand this or simply have a moment of weakness. But, it’s pretty simple:

Acceptable: What’s your source for this story? I find it hard to believe.
Unacceptable: OMG. YOU ARE A LIAR!!!!!

Acceptable: This isn’t right. When I used to live in Perfectland, my friend Jerry said that the Moon is only green on May 27 during a leap year.
Unacceptable: FFFFFFRRRRAAAAAAUUUUUDDDDD!!1!!

Acceptable: The facts are fact, fact and fact. I have facts and I am stating those facts, respectfully.
Unacceptable: Everyone knows that you are making this up.

In moments like these, it feels like you’re defending the crazy people, but really, you’re just defending the integrity of your guidelines. Everyone needs to understand that, despite this one person’s perhaps crackpot theory, there is something more important here – the community itself. There is no need to personally beat anyone down in order to prove a point or to “protect” anyone. You can have a rational discussion, ask people to cite their sources and prove their theories and, if they can’t, then that speaks for itself and the topic dies because Mr. Topic Starter is unable to back anything up and everyone sees it.