Questions tagged [rules-and-policies]
For questions about creating, changing, clarifying rules or policies for a community or group of communities.
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A Q&A site I moderate is full of highly simple questions, and very low / slow community participation in moderation. Options?
A +10-year-old site that I moderate is full of "too simple questions". Blame whatever you like, groupthink, low community participation on moderating the site, blame me, etc.
I think that ...
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What should be done for the safety of the community when a member is suspected of their behavior?
WARNING: This question will mention cases such as self-harm.
I am building the setup of the community I have been planning to put together for a year now: It's called "Hear Me Rant". The ...
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Should disability be a mitigating factor or aggravating factor for code of conduct violation consequences?
This question was suggested in an aside in the question Is it more difficult for autistic people to adhere to a code of conduct (in written communication)? .
As the OP of the above question mentioned, ...
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Advantages and disadvantages of using rank advancement for selecting moderators
I am part of an online non-Stack Exchange community. For the past two years, it has been ruled as a "benevolent dictatorship" by the founder with nearly all issues handled personally by her, ...
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What are some uncommon, but useful, rules for public forums?
So there are many rules that come to mind when establishing codes of conduct or user policies for forums - no spamming, hacking, etc. I'm wondering if anyone has any experience with perhaps less ...
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Is it more difficult for autistic people to adhere to a code of conduct (in written communication)?
As a moderator on Stack Exchange, users suspended for rudeness have repeatedly argued along the lines of the following:
I am autistic and therefore I am unable to recognise when something I write is ...
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Discord guild consequences for member below minimum age
What are the practical consequences of having users below the minimum age (as defined by the TOS) for a discord guild?
I'd especially appreciate personal experience.
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Do I need any license if I want to contribute in open source?
I wrote a code(in Java), and I want to publish that to coders community.
Yes, I want to contribute to the community but wait, what if someone copies my code and puts their license with my code and ...
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Controlling who's speaking on a voice conference
It looks like we have a problem related to controlling the pace of our voice discussions. Here's some background:
We're a hackerspace: a creative organization where one's status in the community is (...
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How to change a policy that's has always been this way but needs to be changed now?
I'm a member in a local community which is associated with multiple associations above it (think of it like statewide, nationwide and so on). There are a lot of layers to the community. However, the ...
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Several communities on one platform. How can moderators adjust the behaviour of a new user from a different community who has just joined my site?
We have a network of 100+ Q&A sites. A user active elsewhere on the network joins a new community and starts posting non-friendly answers and comments. A moderator contacts the user. The user ...
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How to manage rules and regulations of an activist group?
Background: I am part of a small activist group (10-15 members) that both works on ongoing projects but still is actively developing a long term strategy. The latter means the organizational structure ...
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Would reporting a violating comment beneficial if it has a rule reminder?
In the subreddit Change My View, a person give a response why my view wouldn't work. I give a response to them, and this is how it goes:
- Yeah, this only supports everything I said before
- can ...
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What are the advantages/disadvantages to requiring users to be logged in to post ads?
I develop an online classified advertising web/mobile service. Right now users don't have to be logged in to place an ad. It is enough to use a valid email address. Having an account has other ...
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Decision by consensus vs deciding by yourself as the leader of a group
I lead a small group of makers and builders (~5-10 ppl), who are very busy people. If you have to decide on a policy, you could
take a vote on a policy decision, and go with the majority?
take a ...
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How bad it is to enforce rules "just because", while refusing to even substantiate them?
A relatively popular site, likely to defer trolls (which are likely to flock to this site because of its thematics), enforces a rule that one must be registered there for a week minimum to be able to ...
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What are the advantages and disadvantages of "no unbans" policy combined with trigger-happy admins, if any?
I have noticed that while most communities that I have seen allow you to appeal your ban sooner or later and are not that quick on banning people, there are some that do not allow any unban appeals ...
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How do I ensure that new users read the rules?
dEvery community has its rules. Even deep-net chans do. Sometimes these rules are short, some times they are long, long walls of text. This question is inspired by online role-playing communities ...
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What should we do with a user who is using powers, solely given for technical tasks, to overreach and enforce rules?
We run a MediaWiki, where we have a good, contributing user who agreed to be given temporary powers as an administrator, explicitly with the instructions to only manage the protection and erasure of a ...
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I'm trying to build a support community in the real world - What happens in a support group?
I haven't been to a support group. In my country there isn't a single support group. So I have only read about them online. And the only thing that I've read is that they "provide support" and various ...
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Why do Internet forums tend to prohibit responding to inactive threads?
On most Internet forums, it is frowned upon to ‘bump’, ‘resurrect’, ‘necropost’, etc., that is to post in a thread that has been idle for a reasonably long time. On many forums this is a bannable ...
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Should I remove a user that broke our guidelines in one thread from being able to comment on it anymore?
I am facing the following decision:
1)
We can remove a user that violated our rules in the comment section from commenting further. It would be the easiest way of implementing it. I just see the ...
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How can I prevent the abuse of the reporting feature?
In my community we have an option to report a post breaking our rules and moderators to review them. Now we are having two major problems with this lately:
Users start to report an awful lot of posts ...
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Community funding ideas [closed]
I am new to this so I appreciate your your time and knowledge as i get use to using this forum. I was wondering if anyone has any experience or ideas on how to create a community find in order to ...
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In a loosely managed community, how can I introduce new rules?
I run a local community of programmers and IT professionals, and we're using Slack as the only area for online communications. Lately, I've noticed that people use Slack channels that has been created ...
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What Is The Point of Temporary Bans
I never understood the use case where it would be preferable to "temporarily ban" a user for a stated period of time.
If they've done something bad enough to warrant a ban, I'd think they wouldn't ...
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How to enforce an age limit
The problem I'm dealing with currently is the following: Very young users come in larger numbers to my online community. A lot of them are pretty immature and driving away good solid users that ...
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Deleting Forum Registrations of Users Who Never Log In
I am in the process of cleaning up the user database on a forum.
A small percentage of registrations basically never perform any actions and never come back after registration.
What is the general ...
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How to create an organised association that is project oriented?
A group of youngsters (age average of 20 years) would like to establish an organisation that makes projects into reality. The question would be: What kind of structure would be the best to manage this ...
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Community rules as a barrier to entry
My question: When starting a community should it basically be a free for all and as use reaches or gets near critical mass then implement rules perhaps based on user input?
Background: While setting ...
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Do I keep a troll around so that I can monitor them or ban them and let them spawn alternate accounts?
My community has a problem with a particular user. This user is very good at sitting right on the line of good vs bad user. They find themselves in arguments and flame wars frequently. In the context ...
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How to appeal to a higher power?
I've been reprimanded on my home site. I believe the action is unjustified and believe I have a valid argument for such an appeal. The moderator that reprimanded me does not believe my arguments and ...
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How can I word a user-licensing doc so a user cannot justify deleting all their posts, except 'creative' content?
I am on the verge of relaunching my fandom-centric forum that's been set to read-only since July. Since opening it the first time in 2006, I learned a lot about adminship and being a moderator too.
...
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Dyslexic user participation in the community
My online community has a strict rule that all posts need to use proper spelling and grammar. However, we also have some users who are dyslexic, and for whom this rule poses a barrier to their ...
user319
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How to handle lack of policy consistency between moderators?
Until recently I was related to a team of about 30 moderators on a kind of chat server.
The official rules pretty much only include "Be nice" and "Do not post advertisment links twice per day". There ...
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I made an official statement in good faith that turned out to be wrong; should I apologize?
I have an official role moderating an online community that is open to the public. I exercise my best judgment in interpreting the rules, but:
I don't make the rules, I only enforce them.
I am only ...
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Handling new users who don't read the rules
I moderate a community on a site that allows users to queue YouTube videos and songs while chatting.
Our room has set rules on what videos users are able to play and videos breaking our rules are ...
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How to deal with real-life friend or family members who consistently test the rules? [duplicate]
A forum that I participate in is run by a friend of mine. There are 3 other friends that we know from real-life who are members of the forum. One particular friend persistently tests the rules, his ...
user642
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User complains that their freedom of speech is violated
I recently deleted a post of a user because I considered it off-topic and driving a discussion into an unconstructive direction. When the user reposted the same post a few minutes later, I deleted it ...
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Why do forums discourage necro-bumping? [duplicate]
When I'm stuck on a Linux problem, the Wisdom of the Ancient Masters is normally buried in old dusty forum threads. This is great.
However, I often see the thread terminated with a user coming along ...
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How much effort should be put forth in directing new users who post without familiarity?
When the first post of a new user is in good faith but inappropriate as posted, it needs to be deleted, addressed, or moved. How much effort should I as moderator/admin put into educating the new ...
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What to do when I as a moderator feel abused by a member?
Usually when a user complains about getting insulted by another user, a moderator reviews the claim, and when they feel that the complaint is warranted, they punish the insulting user as appropriate.
...
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How should one handle a foreign user with a desire to be constructive, but a severe inability to communicate?
I moderate a gameserver that revolves around a community-built virtual world, in the style of games such as Minecraft (but a FOSS clone). We have a fairly basic common-sense ruleset regarding ...
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What are techniques that encourage new members to familiarize themselves with community guidelines?
Almost every community has rules and guidelines. Often these are buried in terms of use pages that users click through to register, or are shoved in a link in the footer of the page. These guidelines ...
Andy♦
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Judging the effectiveness of disciplinary actions, moderation principles and rules
Is there a magic ratio of Player Loss to New Players (or Active Players) that I should be looking for in a MMO Browser Game?
How else could I gauge the effectiveness of Moderation Principles, ...
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Can it be good to give users a "zero moderation" area?
I have seen a couple of websites (mostly forums) that had a small area (e.g. subforum) where moderation was intentionally limited or completely absent. This is usually done to allow people to let off ...
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How can you prevent 'rule creep' when moderating a community?
Rule creep happens.
There's that one guy who enjoys watching the ballgame while sitting in the bathroom stall, so you end up getting a departmental mail sent to the entire company explaining that it ...
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Are implicit rules bad at all, or should the rules be explicit?
The short question is: What factors do you take into account when you decide on rules for a community?
I live in a puzzling community for 5 years. It has an entry test. It is simple enough, but it ...
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How do I determine which policy decision to enforce if opposing views have significant support?
In a community where the users drive policy, like Stackexchange, how, as a moderator, should I enforce policy when there is clear support for two opposing viewpoints?
At what point can we declare ...
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Should I intervene if my community acts contrary to its own policies?
I am a moderator on Cooking Stack Exchange. Our activity is quite low compared to the tech-oriented sites on the network, but we do have a bunch of users with sufficient reputation to cast close votes,...
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