Take a fresh look at your site's posting rules

When was the last time you took a look at the rules you ask readers who post to your website to follow?

Social media evolves without pause. From politicians editing their Wikipedia entries to bloggers creating “sock puppets” [scroll down linked page for definition] to intimidate online foes, Web users are finding ways to manipulate social media that application designers may not have intended or foreseen.

If you last modified your content-submission rules 10 years ago, they might not address all the conflicts that could arise today on your discussion board or in your comments sections. I’d like to offer a few suggestions for rules that you might want to consider adding to your interactive website.

First, I’d like to credit Damon Kiesow, managing editor for online at The Telegraph in Nashua, N.H., for raising this issue. Earlier this month, he posted to The Poynter Institute’s online-news e-mail discussion list his staff’s discovery that a local elected official was posting anonymously about other election contests and candidates on the paper’s discussion boards. In addition, the official had created at least three other user accounts and was using them as sock puppets in the forums.

Kiesow asked for guidance, sparking dozens of responses from other online journalism pros. Several warned against allowing anonymous posting on discussion forums (ground that is well-plowed for long-time OJR readers), but a few noted that the paper could be exposing itself to charges of hypocrisy, if not legal sanction, if it chose to “out” the official, due to the paper’s published website privacy policy.

Kiesow eventually deleted 14 posts from the three accounts, and explained the move to readers in a forum thread on the Telegraph’s website. However, the paper did not reveal the identity of the official.

The incident should remind all of us to be proactive about discouraging reader abuses, both through communicating with our readers up-front, as well as implementing back-end technical strategies.

I’ve long believed that websites which accept content from users, from comments to discussion boards to wikis, ought to tell those users, in the plainest possible language, the rules that the site expects those readers to follow when they post. (The eye-glazing, mind-numbing legalese of a site’s terms of service or privacy policy isn’t enough.)

If you want readers to use their real names, not to post copyrighted content and to be nice to one another, tell them. On OJR, we ask our readers to click to and abide by our guidelines for writers whenever they submit content to the site. Based on the Telegraph’s experience, I’ve added a few elements to those guidelines, so that we make explicit to OJR readers some of the actions that the Telegraph found that we do not want to see on OJR.

In addition, I’d like to propose a few other elements that I believe are worth considering for a site’s posting rules, but that often are not included.

No impersonation

Insist that readers be who they are, and not attempt to pass themselves off as someone else. If you site allows pseudonymous posting, insist that readers use a consistent handle or account name, and take whatever technical steps you can to keep people from posting under others’ names.

Don’t allow readers to mislead others about their identity, either. Warn readers against omitting information from their profiles or posts that would lead other readers to believe that they are someone other than who they are. Elected officials shouldn’t be allowed to pretend that they are not when posting to a discussion about local politics, to use the Telegraph’s example.

No unlinked multiple accounts

This is the “no sock puppets” rule. On many websites, you should simply prohibit readers from having more than one account. However, if there are valid reasons for allowing certain readers to control multiple accounts (a parent who has one account for himself and others for his kids, for example), they should be linked in such a way that the reader can’t easily turn them into sock puppets, making that individual appear like a crowd.

No offline harassment

Many forum rules prohibit readers from attacking one another within the forum by using profanity, hate speech or other threats. But I’d ask you to consider a prohibition against off-line harassment as well. Here’s what I’ve added to OJR’s guidelines: “We also will not tolerate members who use any means, including offline communication and messages to third parties, to intimidate or harass fellow members over their posting on OJR.”

On another website I’ve managed, we banned members for calling other posters to berate them for their forum messages. No, people should not expect that the words they publish online will not have consequences. But when other posters move past respectful disagreement into harassment, a website should retain the authority to toss those offenders, no matter where that harassment occurs.

Explicit rules for commercial solicitations

Strong communities have a knack for developing into economies. Just take a look at some of the markets that have developed within multiplayer role-playing games online.

In many cases, readers selling and buying with other readers is a good thing. That creates great opportunities for publishers to make money through advertising, sales commissions and lead generation. But one or two bad deals can be enough to poison an entire community. And a growing ad-to-content ratio will likely drive away readers, too.

Don’t wait for trouble. If you anticipate a problem, make explicit to readers where and when they can hawk stuff and services, or look for work or people to hire.

Consequences

Finally, make explicit the potential consequences to readers if they violate any of your site’s rules. Check to ensure that your site’s formal privacy policy and terms of service do not conflict with your new rules, enlisting the help of a lawyer or company legal team to make changes, if necessary.

If there is one characteristic which distinguishes lively, informative discussion communities from others, it is leadership. Show your leadership by taking a fresh look at the rules governing your site, then work with your community to make changes your community needs to prevent situations might hurt the community or its members.

About Robert Niles

Robert Niles is the former editor of OJR, and no longer associated with the site. You may find him now at http://www.sensibletalk.com.

Comments

  1. Robert,

    Clay Shirky wrote about the dynamics of online forums a few years back in his very important and spot-on essay, “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy”:

    http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

    Lots of us who’ve been online and in forums for a long time have seen these things happen–perhaps not to the extreme degree as the public official with the multiple identities, but these things truly aren’t mysteries, surprises or anything new to anyone who’s been in forums, newsgroups, etc. for awhile. (it’s just a surprise when someone who’s in a position of power–such as an elected official or a highly regarded journalist–does something like this.)

    and it’s not necessarily a back-end or software issue. It’s a people issue. People do stuff for reasons lots of us can’t really fathom–possibly because we’re not in their shoes.

    Still, I sure do wish that newspapers would do themselves and their communities a great service by not just tweaking and posting where visible their community rules, but also by hiring or consulting with seasoned forum moderators. There’s no reason for papers to be flailing around trying to re-invent the wheel when there’s plenty of people who already know how to build and maintain all kinds of wheels.

  2. I’ll have more to say on this topic in my column tomorrow but I find it a bit frustrating that, well, we’re publishing quite a bit of what I consider pretty good free advice to journalists here on OJR, but, frankly, you don’t see many journalists hopping on the site to ask for help or engage in a discussion on these issues.

    I suspect that is because we, as an industry, have developed a collective reticence to exposing our shortcomings in public. Why give the press critics out there ammunition by posting a comment that reveals your, or your organization’s, discomfort with community building?

    So we talk only to other news industry professionals at conferences (e.g. ONA), or send private messages to those in the industry who seem to be in the know. (And I do get plenty of those.)

    Talking to other old-media folks doesn’t bring much fresh knowledge into the industry, however. And one-to-one, private conversations, even with smart, well-experienced folk, often do not move the learning process as swiftly as a robust, open debate with multiple, well-articulated points of view can.

    So… it is 2007 and most news organizations *still* lag solo bloggers and discussion forum leaders in building engaged and loyal discussion communities.

    Discussions work because someone is not afraid to stand in front of the community and say “I need help.” Too many journalists have too much ego to do that. Which drives me nuts, since the very essence of good reporting is *asking for help*: for information, for perspective, for comment and for advice.

    And since we, collectively, have such a hard time *participating* in public discussion communities, we end up doing such a lousy job of running them.

    As I tell other journalism educators – a students – one cannot learn to report news if one does not first follow it. One can’t write books who doesn’t first read them. One can’t make a good movies if you don’t watch many first. And one can’t run a decent discussion community if you haven’t spent a great deal of time participating in them.

    How many journalists do that?

    We don’t need to spent big bucks hiring experienced discussion leaders as consultants (though, as a discussion leader, that’d be nice….) We do need to get on their freakin’ boards and start *doing* this stuff.

  3. Well, rather than coming up with absolutes, back in April I came up with Comment Management Responsibility, a Creative Commons-like system for setting up a series of value choices. In theory, a web publication/communicate could uses these as a the basis for an RFP for community management software, and then can set the settings according to their policy.

    Unlike my other work, I pitched the heck out of this series. Tim O’Reilly praised my efforts, but it was buried in his comment stream, and overall I was 3 for 19. And it went nowhere.

    This comment you quoted from Yelvington is fitting here: “Print journalists suck at promotion.” (tell that to Tom Friedman). No, it’s just that there’s a limited attention span. And if journalists suck at promotion, bloggers are too willing to be suckers at it, and not really dedicate time to the important underlying issues.