Early stage moderation tips
You need to be a model user yourself, replying to threads with useful information, listening to your members, praising good replies and taking the time to thank members, and most importantly messaging members that are becoming problematic.
Encourage all your members to message you with ideas and requests for how they’d like to see the forum operate. Eventually you will want to delegate some authority to trusted members of the community to take the load off.
Be careful! Members of the community will have their own perspective on what character the forums should have, and you need to allow leeway for this to take place organically. It’s not your job to aggressively lock every mildly derailed conversation or intervene whenever a thread drifts off topic or administer smackdowns for minor breaches of etiquette.
Getting started
All forums are different and every member is unique and therefore nothing is written in stone. This is what makes community management challenging and fun! As you begin to plant the seed for your community the rules and guidelines will manifest organically.
Here are a few tips for early stage moderation.
- Rules and guidelines – Establish expectations, rules & guidelines, set the tone ahead of time. Make these rules and guidelines visible to all new and current members, post on the main page above your discussions where everyone can see it ‘before’ they start a discussion. There’s no need to be mean about it of course, just be sure to be clear.
- Don’t track post counts – This discourages meaningless posts meant only to inflate numbers.
- Create examples – Seed your community with examples of good discussions. Set the tone and spark engagement by starting relevant discussions.
- Create an area for chit-chat – Anything in other discussions that is off-topic can be moved there. This gives people a sandbox to play (which inevitably users will) and reinforces the boundaries. A great place to start would be the ‘Activity Wall’.
- Prevent trolling – Trolling is trying to get a rise out of someone. Forcing them to respond to you, either through wise-crackery, posting incorrect information, asking blatantly stupid questions, or other foolishness .Watch out for members who post this kind of content within your community. The easiest way to put a stop to this is to ban these members!
- Email notifications and spam – Make sure you have all Vanilla spam guards in place. Email notifications are a great way to prevent unwanted members from spamming your community and helps determine whether a new applicant is human or not.
- Enable a flagging system – Make sure to flag negative and disruptive posts and/or users.
- Segmenting your community members – Reach out to active members and promote them, try to get them more engaged in running the community. Get there opinion on issues and seek advice for moderation and content creation. As your community grows these members can become your most important assets.
Remember one thing “the community belongs to the community!”
Good luck!
