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]

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.