photo credit: Horia Varlan

It’s important to be proactive on matters of content theft and copyright infringement. A large part of this is text quoted from other sources. With some exceptions (public domain works, works by the Federal Government, works released under alternative licenses to copyright, and more), you can’t allow your members to post entire text articles that they did not author or hold no rights to, source or no source.

But, that doesn’t mean that they can’t quote some portions that are properly attributed. Fair use is an exception to copyright that, among many other things and without getting too legally technical, allows you to quote excerpts of someone else’s work with proper attribution. Fair use isn’t a law as much as it is a defense.

photo credit: Wigstruck

Derek Jeter, the shortstop of the New York Yankees, recently capped off an incredibly successful year when he was named as the 2009 Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year. Tom Verducci, a writer for the magazine, wrote an impressive profile of Jeter and there was one portion that jumped out at me because of how it applied as a general principle of life, including what one should look for when selecting a moderator for their online community.

The section describes Jeter’s five dislikes, which are mostly things that can easily be related back to teammates he may have and what he wants out of them. Let’s break them down.

1. Individuals who don’t care about winning.

If a member is your staff is showing up just to show up because it’s habit or routine, wants to be on staff because it is a status symbol or something like that, they just don’t have the passion you need. The reason you’re here is to do well. If you take pride in your work, you care about what you’re doing and you want to win. People who care about your community, want it to do well and want it to be the best it can be are people you want on your team.

photo credit:
Caveman 92223 — On the Road Again!

Recently, on the e-mint discussion list, a member was asking for some suggestions for a list of 10 ways to kill your online community, with some humor. Taking approximately 10-15 minutes, I came up with a quick, fun, spur of the moment list and I thought I’d share it with you!

1. Don’t have any guidelines! We’re all adults – and cursing is fun! Weeeeeeeeee…

2. Since we’re all adults, it’s not like you actually need to visit your site much. A few times a month should be good.

3. Create an open group that anyone can join called “Moderators” and let anyone who wants to join in and move, edit or delete whatever they want. They’re here to help!

4. As the administrator, when you post, try to set the worst example possible. Since humans all strive to be better than one another, this will force your members to be awesome!

photo credit: love･janine

I recently took some time away. Literally three weeks without logging into my forums. And guess what? They were still there when I got back!

Regardless of what you do, what your profession is, what your hobbies are; sometimes, we can get wrapped up a little too much where we think something needs us every single day and cannot live without us. “I can’t leave – what might happen?!”

This is one of the reasons you want to have moderators or staff members of some kind because a smart staff member is golden at these times. If you don’t have one, it’s likely that your community is fairly small and might be OK without you for a while. Or, if you’d like, you could ask a trusted friend to watch the place for you. Just like you’d ask for someone to check in on your pets and make sure they are taken care of while you are away, you can do the same thing for your online community.

What did I come back to? Well, yes, hundreds and hundreds of new posts, public and in the staff forums, private messages and e-mails. But, beyond that, were my communities in ruin? Were all of the posts spam? Had numerous members left? No, no and no. Things were fine. Things were functioning. They could do without me for a while.

In a way, that’s good community management. If you have to be at your community at all times for it to work well, you should really go do something else because you are going to end up sapping all the joy out of this job (or hobby).

As a community manager or administrator, the situations we have to deal with are as varied as life itself. For all talk about the online and offline worlds being different, at the end of the day, they have more in common than they do dissimilar. Unfortunately, this is not just the fun, easy parts of life, but also the difficult, challenging ones.

Though it may not be one of the more enjoyable parts of our job, it’s smart and important to ponder what circumstances we may face, even if we haven’t yet faced them. This leads me to what I’d like to talk about today: suicide on our online community, and how we can most effectively help and protect everyone involved. This isn’t about suicide in general, why people think about it, the repercussions of it or anything of that nature – this is strictly about how we should approach it on our communities.

When we think about suicide on an online community or social space, the two recent examples that will probably jump to your head are Abraham K. Biggs’ suicide on Justin.TV and the suicide of Megan Meier, apparently driven by messages exchanged through MySpace.

Before I jump into this subject, I want to be clear that I believe that we are all responsible for our actions as individuals. I don’t think it’s fair to blame Justin.TV, MySpace or any community or social site for the actions of an individual in this sort of case. The nature of communication itself dictates otherwise.

So, I was taking a look at Hunch, a site created by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, that claims to be a “decision-making tool that gets smarter the more you use it.” Out of curiosity, I punched in the word “forums” to see what would come up. The first result was “Should I become a forum moderator?”

I answered every question thinking of myself as the worst moderator candidate possible and I got “86% (No): You should probably think longer.” And then I answered it in the way that an ideal moderator might. The result? “95% (Yes): Yes, you should definitely consider becoming a Mod.” If you try to do this, please let me know what you get in the comments.

I think the quiz (and it’s creator) deserves credit for creating a generally accurate portrayal of some of the things that go into being a good forum moderator.

Over at ProBlogger, Darren Rowse was kind enough to allow me to provide a guest post that I titled “Enhance and Grow Your Online Community Through Appreciation.” In the post, I discuss how simple acts of appreciation can have noteworthy impact on the growth of your community. Here’s the closing excerpt:

Appreciation is a powerful thing. It can open doors, start relationships, give people happiness, bring people back and give them confidence. In the interest of cultivating community, please consider how not just appreciating people – but making sure they know you appreciate them – can enhance your community.

Please let me know what you think about the post.

At Blog World & New Media Expo 2008, I was lucky enough to be on a pair of panels, sharing the stage with some great people. My friend Chrispian Burks was kind enough to record the panels for me and, in November, I posted the video from the “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media” panel.

The other panel was called “How to Deal with Trolls, Spammers & Sock Puppets.” Here is the panel description:

You just wrote the greatest blog post you’ve ever written. You researched the subject, spoke with sources, conducted interviews and completed a well thought out, well written article. You hit the post button and your baby is up. Here comes the praise! The first comment you receive? “You’re stupid, you’re ugly and you’re writing sucks.” Whether you call them trolls, haters or griefers, they’re out there, waiting to ruin your day, harm your community and taint your world.

Or maybe the first comment was something like, “Hey, nice article, check out mine!” Just like there are people who’d like to harm you, there are also people who’d like to cheaply benefit from your work and your audience. Spammers can do their own sort of damage.

But, neither of these two groups need harm you, if you know how to deal with them. This panel will give you the knowledge you need to tackle it.

I was invited to join this panel by Rick Calvert, Founder of Blog World Expo & New Media Expo. It also featured John Chow of John Chow dot Com, The Tech Zone and TTZ Media and Jeremy Schoemaker of ShoeMoney and ShoeMoney Media Group.

The panel was a lot of fun and a great experience, being that it was the first panel that I had ever been on. Afterwards, we had a great Q&A. Here’s the entire session:

In addition to Vimeo, the video is also on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8).

CommunityAdmins.com (i.e. the big logo on the top right portion of this page) is a community for people who run communities, but also moderators and users of communities, in general. Anyone interested in online community. But, the focus is certainly on the management aspect.

I thought that I would highlight five recently active, interesting discussions that popped up on the community. If you have any thoughts, please feel free to jump in!

1. Cult Threatends Legal Action Against Forum

An administrator shares the challenges that his or her community is facing, in dealing with a supposed “cult” and it’s threats against negative comments posted on the site.

2. Do You Used Non-Disclosure Agreements for Members of Staff?

In addition to standard staff guidelines, an NDA is also a viable consideration for many administrators.

3. Staff Members Doing Whatever They Want

The thread born out of this post on ManagingCommunities.com has inspired some interesting discussion and real experiences of staff members who have crossed the line.

4. How Much Can You Make with Forums?

Administrators share the ways they generate money and the expectations that you should have when doing so.

5. Private Communities: How Do They Work?

Finally, a discussion on private communities and who they will work for and won’t work for.

If you have any interest in discussing the management of online communities, I would definitely recommend joining us at CommunityAdmins.com.

In January, I wrote about how not to lock topics. Reader Jeremy wrote this comment:

There is a certain online forum for a photo gallery I use where the Moderators are just plain mean. A good portion of the time when someone asks a question the moderator is the second or third person to respond, and it’s with a snippy comment about searching before you post, and not posting questions that have already been asked/answered. They often go on to lock the thread. Often times when searching for information, I’ll come across these threads long before the ones where the original question was answered!

I’ve even seen people ask questions about that gallery on other websites, just because they were afraid to be scolded by these mean moderators.

The moderators never help by providing links, just rude comments. It’s a shame their product is so good, because their attitude is not…

The emphasis is mine here as this is what I’d like to talk about today. There are a lot of support communities out there. I run two communities that would fit in that vein: the phpBBHacks.com Support Forums and PhotoshopForums.com.

But, back before I had them – before I had phpBBHacks.com, specifically – I noted a tactic I saw all too much. The moderators on some support forums, or the support team, would chastise people for asking questions they deemed repetitive or simple. They’d tell the people they should search, they’d lock their topic – they’d be snide and disrespectful. It bothered me so much that I made it a founding principle at phpBBHacks.com for my Support Team. That policy was, simply, if you are on my staff and someone asks you for a solution, you don’t tell them to search – you link them to what they need. Even if the question has been answered a million times. No exceptions. While I am sure there were slip ups, I am always quick to correct them. I am pretty fanatical about this.

When you are on staff at a support forum, chances are that part of your responsibilities are to actually help people – to support them. If you are telling people to search, you aren’t doing that. I don’t count this as teaching a man to fish – rather than giving him a fish. Teaching people how to search is another discussion for another day. What you exist to do is to give people a solution, not to send them off into the never ending search results.

The reason that they are using your forums is because they really don’t want to search. They want an answer, that’s why they are asking a question. Provide them with that answer, if you can. If you don’t know, don’t tell them to search. If it’s a question that has been asked a million times, write a tutorial and link to it each time. People will ask the same question over and over again – that’s natural. Maybe the more important thing to ask yourself is why – why are they asking this question so much? Can you do something to prevent that? Or help it? But, if you can’t, just write a detailed tutorial and whenever someone asks the question, link them to it and encourage them to ask questions if they have any, after reading it.

The same goes to pointing people to an FAQ in a flippant manner. “Did you read the FAQ?” “Why didn’t you read the FAQ?” “Before you posted, you should have read the FAQ.” Don’t send people to long FAQs, send people to what they need. Give them their answer. That’s your task. It’ll make them happier and you’ll be better off. And people will come back.

Do I allow regular members to suggest that people search? Yes… but, it has to be done respectfully and not in a condescending, “you’re a newbie” way. When it comes to a support community, it’s important that both the question answerers and the question askers receive respect.

Questions for the comments: Do you run a support community? If so, how do you instruct your staff to handle repetitive questions?