I just did a guest spot over at the FreeForums.org blog. It’s titled, “It’s Important to be Visible on Your Forum”.

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.

As Managing Online Forums is now beginning to make it into the hands of readers, it’s time to launch the downloadable templates section of the book website.

Appendix B of Managing Online Forums features blank, general templates for your user guidelines, staff member guidelines and contact templates. In order to make it easier for people to use them, we’ve made available a downloadable archive of the templates in .txt format.

The user guidelines detail the types of behavior and participation that you allow or don’t on your forums. The staff member guidelines describe the responsibilities of the staff members on your community and how they should accomplish them. The contact templates are premade, ready to send messages for you to use when a member of your community has to be contacted in regard to a violation of your user guidelines. This helps to ensure consistent communication from staff member to staff member.

Ideally, you will want to come up with your own and, perhaps, use these as a basis. That said, you are welcome to use them as they are on your community. I hope that they prove to be useful.

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.

Martin Reed talked today about adding value to your community through articles, being responsive to your members and by developing your community’s personality. It’s a good article. I wanted to take one sentence from the final of those three ideas and expand on it in my own way. He writes:

Just make sure you pick the right personality from the start as it can be extremely difficult to change the character of your community once a personality has been established.

And he’s dead on. Every community has a certain type of personality. This personality is developed over time by allowing it to shine on your site. Your community guidelines are really a personality statement all and of themselves. For example, my guidelines say things like… we don’t allow vulgarities, we require that all members treat each other with respect and that people should have fun.

So, our personality is one that is family and/or work friendly, treats others with respect and has fun. Your guidelines (and subsequent enforcement) help you to become who you want to be – what you created the community to be. Sure, a community is filled with different people and that’s a good thing, in general, but there tend to be common traits that your best community members exemplify.

“Best” here is relative – when I say it, I mean the community members that most fit within the personality that you had in mind when you started your site. The “best” members are the ones that you’ll consider for your staff. Set the example for people by demonstrating the personality yourself and by promoting people to your staff who naturally handle themselves similarly.

Lack of guidelines and/or of consistent enforcement can lead to you waking up one day and realizing that your community has become someone that you don’t care for.

And, then, if you want to fight to get it back to where it needs to be, it’ll be difficult, as Mr. Reed noted. Creating, developing and maintaining the environment (the personality) of your community can be time consuming, but it’s a good part of what community management is all about.

When you are in a position where you must moderate a community (whether as an administrator or a moderator), you really have to be a bit of an online daredevil in that you can’t “play it safe” with links, content, etc. You have to actually see the bad stuff so that you can remove it.

You can’t say “well, that looks like porn spam” or “I think this link is suspicious, better not click it!” You actually have to be the one to look at it and click it so that you can make a proper decision as to its appropriateness on your community or safety to your members.

For this reason, it’s important that everyone in this role (and, really, anyone who uses the internet) have some sort of good antivirus/spyware protection. Beyond just protecting you, often times, it can also be relied upon to alert you as to questionable content on a page or link that you are reviewing. You can then remove it, protecting your members from it.