
Question about managing communities - ddumik
At our company, we manage a vibrant and active community forum through Facebook Groups. We have many free customers (we have a freemium solution with our product) and paying customers. We use the group to share live Q&amp;As, News, different videos, and important notices. Our users also actively post on our group asking for help from various community members, but also to give feedback about our product. We value the feedback we receive, but often the feedback is polluted with a lot of negative comments from other users. Sadly in some cases, the conversation devolves to unprofessional&#x2F;inappropriate behavior. We do have a staff of volunteers that help us moderate these conversations, but ultimately we are looking to change the tone and habit of the community.<p>Our goal is to share more positive stories, drive our customers to our support team when they need help, encouraging our paying (and more professional customers) to participate and influence our community to have more productive conversations.<p>We are debating internally on several ways to do this. One idea is to start a new Facebook community group, and slowly sunset the old one. The other is to maintain the current community, but be more aggressive about moderating conversations, and proactively post more content. We see many pros and cons with both approaches. We don&#x27;t want to give customers the strong impression that we&#x27;re attempting to cover up or censor our community, but we also feel there are many members of our community that is introducing an unproductive and often mean energy to many conversations.<p>For those of you that maintain your online community, have you ever encountered this problem? If so, how did you deal with these type of issues?
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gitgud
The best online communities I've seen have a clear set of guidelines to follow
(Hacker News, Subreddits).

Give out warnings and link to the guidelines. If people still don't follow
these rules then remove them from the community.

The community will slowly become more positive

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gus_massa
Moderation is very hard.

Perhaps you can try to force all the comments to be approved before being
shown, at lest for some time.

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DoreenMichele
Proactively posting content is a good idea, assuming it is content that helps
set the right tone. If handled well, this is the most effective goal you have
listed.

You should have community guidelines. They should be fairly short and
reasonable.

You may need to provide guidance and training to your volunteer moderators.

Moderation is an inherently challenging task because it is a form of policing.
While necessary, if done too aggressively, it can easily be counterproductive.
You want your primary emphasis to be on inviting people to a pleasant
conversation, not on crabbing at them about doing it wrong.

You might try splitting moderator duties between enforcers who police behavior
and a hostess position whose primary role is to actively post good content and
foster good discussion.

If it's a small community, enforce two rules on staff:

1\. Greet new people.

2\. Leave no question unanswered.

I found that speaking with new people the first time they posted was the
single best way to set the tone for the community and to encourage them to
remain active participants. Ignoring new people meant they were much less
likely to participate in the future.

Even if I didn't have the information they needed, if there was no response at
all to a query after two or three days, I would reply to it personally. This
bumped the discussion and sometimes got them the answer they needed. Even if
it didn't result in an answer, they didn't feel ignored. It made a big
difference in the atmosphere.

It's best to inform people of community norms in a friendly and respectful
manner as a form of educating them when "first offenses" occur. In other
words, don't crab at them like they are intentionally behaving badly if it is
reasonable to assume they just didn't know. Instead, advise them, for example
"We don't use all caps here because it's hard to read and comes across as
yelling." Only if they persistent should you move to "Please don't do X.
That's against community rules/guidelines." If they still persist, then you
can break out policing type language.

I'm wondering why you are doing this via Facebook. My knee-jerk reaction is to
feel like the venue is part of the problem. If you don't have a compelling
reason for doing it via Facebook, consider trying a different venue. You could
A/B test it by offering it as a second channel. See if a different medium gets
a different result.

I would also start tracking who the troublemakers are. I have read some things
suggesting that your non-paying customers are typically also your most high
maintenance. If you find that this is generally the case, solutions might
include a sequestered area for paying customers or even rethinking your
monetization strategy with this issue in mind.

Find out where the problem is coming from.

