Moderating on-line groups: advice, please?

[sarahmichigan]

I've moderated a few on-line groups, including a yahoo group and some low-traffic LJ communities. I'm writing an article about how to be a good moderator for an on-line group, and I have ideas, but I'd like feedback from my friends list. I know I have at least half a dozen people on my FL who have experience in this realm.

Some ideas I'm already working with:

-Have clear membership and posting rules.

-It's OK to have loose rules of moderation or strict ones, but just be clear about spelling out what they are.

-Enforce the rules evenly, no favoritism.

-Have a thick skin. It's likely you'll be criticized.

-It can be nice for moderators to introduce themselves, and tell a little about themselves.

-Have a clear policy about flame wars and how to report if you're being attacked or abused by another group member.
-Decide if you want to take a interventionist approach or a more hands-on approach and be ready to explain yourself and why you've chosen that approach.

-Consider finding a co-moderator or back-up moderator in case you want to take a vacation or get sick.

-Make clear, obvious announcements when there are changes, including changes in rules or changes in who is moderating/how to contact moderators.

Do you think I'm wrong on any particular point? What would you add?

Comments

[scien.livejournal.com]

I learn from the best.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006036.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008856.html

[scien.livejournal.com]

I would add:

'It's OK to have loose rules of moderation or strict ones'
...depending entirely on the subject matter, membership, and what type of dialogue you want to foster (questions and answers? fun chatting? academic debate? heated discussions?). It is best to think about that in advance so that you can choose not only the rules but the venue and software that most suit your purpose.

'-Enforce the rules evenly, no favoritism.'
Disagree. You don't want to take it to extremes of whimsy of course, but someone who has proven a valuable member in general can be given more leniency than someone who has just wandered in from the highway, if only because you can be fairly sure of having a constructive dialogue with them. And someone who is clearly only there to be a prat does not require you to go through the whole official warnings-delay-temporary ban procedure you've set up for members you assume are just making mistakes of one kind or another. Trust your intuition on whether to come down on something like a ton of bricks or to give second chances - if you're feeling too angry/invested to make the right decision then talk to someone whose judgment you trust, or just go for a walk to gain some perspective.

I think the most important advice I would give a hopeful would-be moderator who wants to create an online group is to do their research and their thinking before jumping in to set something up. Take a look at what other conversations are happening about the subject, and where. If you don't already participate, start, and learn from your experiences. What kind of thing are you trying to do, and how does it compare? how large, what tone, to what end? Are you hoping to make money (note this is difficult bordering on the impossible), to share expertise, to learn? What tools will help you to achieve this? Choose carefully, the software powering your group will utterly shape the kind of conversations that happen. What will you be offering visitors that's different to the other venues? how will potential new members find you? what's going to keep them coming back?

[bernmarx.livejournal.com]

For me, I think the most important issues are:

-- Avoid obvious cronyism, but try to find a balance between being consistent in applying rules and considering a person's prior contributions to the group. This comes up on the polyamory group from time to time; if a person we mods have never seen post before posts something off-topic, we're likely to very quickly challenge the post, but if someone who's a regular contributor does so, we're more polite in the challenge.

-- Be clear about when you're making a comment as a moderator and when you're making a comment as a fellow member of a community. One of the best reasons for having multiple moderators in a community is so when a conversation between you-as-member and a fellow member goes south, you can ask the other moderator for a (hopefully) more objective ruling. It's a blatant abuse of power for a moderator who has gotten tired of a flamewar they've been engaging in to suddenly declare that they're a mod and start banning people.

-- If you have multiple moderators, make sure that the user base knows that different mods will have different levels of tolerance and interpretations of the rules. Because the internet is quick-moving, there isn't time for mods to have a counsel meeting for every controversy: Most of the time, mods have to act quickly.

-- Also, moderators make mistakes; be humble about that. Don't get pissy if you've made a mistake and have been called on it. Do what you can to correct it, including possibly swallowing your pride and unbanning someone who didn't deserve it.

-- To your last point, some communities do well with moderator announcements, and others don't. A lot of this is tied to moderator style, but some is tied to community expectations. Some individual members want to know that Harry the Troll has been banned from the Forest of Good Fuzzies and will never come back; other members don't like having the Forest littered even with bummer announcements like that. When I recently made a post interpreting the rules in polyamory, one of the other mods criticized me (privately) for being paternalistic. I would say, though, in general, that it's not worthwhile to make public announcements in rules changes. People who care will catch on and ask you about it; people who don't care will appreciate the lack of clutter.

-- An important rule, and one that's very hard to enforce, is that discussions of rules should be taken up with the moderator(s) privately, especially complaints about other members, as opposed to publicly on the list. Rules-lawyering should be actively discouraged; in most communities, there are several people who take it upon themselves to enforce the rules when they have no authority to do so. The degree of lenience for those is of course up to the moderator, but too much of it can kill a community.

-- Be open to the possibility that people will join your community with different expectations than you had, and will act from those expectations. That doesn't mean you have to change your community to match those, but I've seen several prolonged arguments break out because a moderator wasn't able to see the disconnect at all: They knew what their community was all about, and so what the heck is wrong with these other people? As an example from polyamory, we state that our community is meant to be a friendly place for people to ask advice; several people took that to mean that it was a safe space, which it is not. Once that was resolved, we lost some members, but it took longer to resolve than it could have if we'd spent more time trying to interpret where the other people were coming from.

-- Unless the community is a personal power trip (and these exist), one significant role of the moderator is to listen. Also, it's important to know group size thresholds: A community with 10 active members is going to have a different, more intimate spirit than one with 100 active members. And the percent of active-to-lurker will vary dramatically from group to group, sometimes not tied to topic (although usually tied to size: the larger the group, the larger the percentage of people who never post).

That's all that comes to mind right now. :)

[scien.livejournal.com]

Well said. A few things I'd pick up on:

I would say, though, in general, that it's not worthwhile to make public announcements in rules changes. People who care will catch on and ask you about it; people who don't care will appreciate the lack of clutter.
This is another one of those times where the software used makes a big difference. I can see you're thinking of LJ/usenet type systems here, where new posts are automatically, well, posted to the entire membership. But if you think of a more forum style place (phpbb, invisionfree etc), you would probably put a reply to an already existing sticky post, which people could click through if they were interested. It would generally be considered very bad manners not to do so.

Likewise different places have other different conventions on e.g. on editing other people's posts, which would be entirely horrifying on LJ (where your account is also your journal and your identity, and having someone else edit your posts/comments would not be cool in the slightest) but is completely standard practice when commenting on other people's blogs, or phpbb type systems. It's important to be aware of both the technical limitations and what commenting culture has built up around them.

'If you have multiple moderators, make sure that the user base knows that different mods will have different levels of tolerance and interpretations of the rules'
Absolutely. To me this connects with not being whiny or attempting to be God-like. Interact with your community as a human being and you will get much better results. If you've been called out on a mistake, don't feel you need to justify it or bury your tracks, admit and apologise. You will make mistakes, but people are on the whole forgiving.

It's an interesting balance between wanting to keep everyone happy and be liked by your membership (they are your lifeblood after all, without them you would be nothing), and enforcing your will/aims on the community over some objections (and there will always be objections, but it is your perogative to make changes). How far you can go in either direction will depend on a lot of factors, for example small tight knit groups will tend to resent the mod pulling rank on them, while keeping large groups in order is definitely going to involve just ignoring/overruling other people's opinions on a regular basis.

'An important rule, and one that's very hard to enforce, is that discussions of rules should be taken up with the moderator(s) privately, especially complaints about other members, as opposed to publicly on the list.'
YES and a thousand times yes. People on the internet loooove to talk about this sort of thing, as I am demonstrating right now. But for some reason having someone start a discussion about the actions of the mod on the main list itself always leads to discussions that are more trouble than they're worth. Tedious and dispiriting to most regulars, they also make the place seem full of meta-drama and thus discouraging to newbies. Make people take it to email, or if your community is large enough to require it (or you need the visibility for some reason), make another separate space for it.

'Be open to the possibility that people will join your community with different expectations than you had'
Again, that is spot on.

OK I'm done. Phew.

[purple-marf.livejournal.com]

Just going to post what jumps out from my memory on O-F.

Be consistent. It's rule 1, 2, and 3. If people know what to expect, you'll have to do less moderating. I was very vocal on debate threads, and people knew that I'd delete personal attacks whether they were from someone I tended to agree with, or someone I had no respect for. (at least I like to think that was obvious)

MUST have other moderators, and things will be smoother if you hammer out a pretty similar policy together. It's very difficult for someone to accuse you of abusing your power if you're acting in concert with another mod. Particularly if you appeal to a different set of posters than the other mod(s).

Which brings up another point about mods. Best thing you can do if you have someone who seems very vocal and challenging about the moderation on the board is to make that person a moderator. Keeps em busy, so long as you make a good character assessment about whether or not they'll abuse their power.

[munin218.livejournal.com]

Consistancy, indeed. And a moderator must also be a model poster themselves. How can you be the head honcho and enforce the rules if you arent the best example of how to behave, yourself?