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Hundreds of Facebook friends.  Thousands of YouTube hits. Millions of dollars from community fundraising. Lively email groups and message boards. A veritable cyber-utopia of intellectual discourse.

A thriving online community, all centered on your cause.

You know you want it.

Or do you?

Many an online community project can be railroaded into the ground with one simple, seemingly innocuous sentence. “How can I stop ‘the bad people’ from?”

“The Bad People? ” Who are the bad people? There are different types of bad people. People who will use profanity. People who mean well, but egregiously write in online short-hand. Then, there’s the scariest people: those who don’t agree with your mission.

There are a series of filters you can use, depending on your application, to stop the profane. There’s even a stupid filter to prevent the low level of discourse online short-hand can create. But there’s only way to keep that third group in line: moderate.

But be careful. Once you decide to go down the path of moderating, you need to make sure you have a plan  and the man-hours to keep it up. Many non-profits just don’t have the resources. But you don’t need to toss that online community out yet.  You just need to prepare.

One of my favorite online communities is right here in Beaconfire’s homeland - Virginia. On The Raising Kaine blog, anyone can start a diary, and anyone can comment. And quite often, the discussion that ensues is more interesting and educational than the original blog post.

Here are a few steps to successful moderation in your online community:

• Don’t start a community without members. A community devoid of members has no tone. No tone means “the bad people” can come in and set the tone themselves. Ask friends of your cause to post some fuel for thought the moment you get started.
• If you must moderate, moderate only the postings of new members of the community, and only their first few posts.  Any more than that, and new members they may feel unwelcome and untrusted.
• Establish clear rules and guidelines for involvement with your community, and stick to them. You never want to appear arbitrary in who you allow to post, and who you don’t.

And lastly, reconsider the “the bad people.” After all, you are an open and progressive group - and your community will be also. On Raising Kaine, the community members keep each other in line. You will find that if you nurture and trust your online community, the members will repay you by supporting you and your mission against any disagreements that appear in your community.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 5:17 pm and is filed under User Generated Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.