Constructive criticism: You call this an effin' sock?

Unfortunately, it is very common for a website to create a culture of bitchyness if the administrators fail to discipline members early on. In the worst case scenario the bitchyness starts with the admins themselves, in which case the site is doomed to it. If the admins don’t know how to behave in a supportive manner, nobody else has a chance turning the site around. I have witnessed this with many websites. One that springs to mind was a community for photographers; the idea was to share your photos for “constructive criticism from your peers”. You can bet that when a new photographer is revealing their work for the first time to a knowledgeable audience and is greeted with nothing but bitchiness, nastiness and sarcasm, (nothing constructive about it) there is no way he or she will continue using that service. When they realize that it’s not really about their photos, but that everyone gets the same treatment, they may feel a little better about it but will find that the site has nothing to offer to them. On a site like this, meanness spreads like wild fire: If you said a nasty thing about my photo, don’ think I can’t find something wrong with ALL OF YOURS, you bitch!

It is completely up to you to set the tone on your websites. You cannot allow ANY rudeness to occur without reacting to it strongly and with as little fuss as possible -meaning that you cannot make it public (will easily result into a public flame war), but you will have to contact the offending member privately and let them understand that rudeness is not tolerated and if he doesn’t clean up his act, he’s good as gone. To fit in, people usually modify their behaviour to suit the surroundings. It is very unrewarding to be the only bitch in a group (because it’s not “fashionable” in the said group), but when you get one “friend”, on board, then another one… An yet and other one, THEN it starts feeling pretty damned cool. If you do not allow the first two bitches to bond, your site will be fairly safe to build on. As your site grows, you need to implement some sort of a report member (and post) -system to help you weed out the bad apples efficiently and without exception. You may put in a zero tolerance policy or a three strikes you’re out -policy, but you do have to be consistent about it. Sometimes people acting rudely are so ashamed of their behaviour that they’ll remove themselves after being corrected by the site admin. They may do this throwing shit at you during departure, but the reason they are departing is not because of you, it’s because they realize that going back into the group of nice people after what they said would be inconceivably embarrassing. And in all honesty, you don’t have anything against a rude person leaving your site. In fact, that’s the best thing that can happen to it. (If they don’t leave but keep bullying people, you can then give them a full ban and be rid of them.)

It is equally important not to let this policing go too far. It is not a relaxed place either if nobody is entitled to an opinion if it’s the least bit provocative (like, say being childfree) or a member is penalised for using words like “big head” describing a doll, because some member happened to be bullied by that name at school. Sometimes the victims can bully the community by being so overly sensitive, that everything reduces them into tears forcing the actually nice people tread around these sensitive souls like they were walking on broken glass. You can not allow this happen either. Everyone is allowed their own space, and their own thoughts and expression, but when one person tries to manipulate the space and dominate other’s way of thinking, speaking and expressing themselves one way or another, it is not cool. As a generic rule, if your first thought to a complaint is “don’t be ridiculous” or “grow a pair”, it’s probably about the member being manipulative instead actually in need of protection. (Unless you are inclined to being a bully yourself, in which case I don’t know how effective measurement this is.)

Even if a general balance is achieved, there’s always people who are so timid, that someone with a little more oomph to themselves will make an other feel inferior. You can’t help that. People are not created equal in talent and self-esteem, and if one person’s shine will make the other feel like she or he is sitting in a shadow then that’s how it’s going to be. It is not fair to ask a superiorly talented person to hide their candle so that others wouldn’t feel bad about themselves, any more than it is fair to belittle the untalented because their candle can’t shine as bright as the other ones.

An English speaker using non-verbal communication.

Tell me if you agree (if you can). This is a thought that just popped into my head and I’m not sure if my hypothesis is accurate or not, but I’m going to share it with you regardless. Over the years, I’ve ran several Finnish language communities and tried to start at least equally many in English, with very little luck. I just realised, that from the get go, the Finnish communities have a different feel to them than the English, even though the same person – me – runs them. The same feel is present in other, successful English forums as well. They are far more reserved and cautious than the Finnish equivalent. And isn’t that a surprise if you have spent half a day with a group of Finns face to face!

Finns flock online. We thrive online. We drop our guard in a split second and spill our guts to the world – or well, to our nation, as the world doesn’t speak our language, even Google Translator is at loss with us. Online, we seem amazingly open, friendly and WARM. I make friends of fellow Finns online constantly, but not with such a luck with the English speaking people. A couple, here and there, but not with as much ease. I have a possible explanation for this.

Finns rely on mostly spoken message in their communication even face-to-face. Our basic interaction-face could be described as “a stone face” or “a poker face”. We’ve become extremely efficient in picking up tones and the choice of words from each other, as well as the minimal signals we give out in facial expression. When an English speaker sees no change in a Finns face, we can look at the same person and see if he’s on a bad mood or excited beyond description. But I would guess, that since we are so good at picking up tones in speech, we are more efficient in it in writing as well. Also, the facial expression doesn’t carry as much weight as it does to an English speaker. We would be pretty much as comfortable talking to each other with our heads covered in black bags as we are without them. We would feel silly, but that’s all.

In the photo, I have an English speaker waving his hands around, with a silly grin on his face. As we assume he speaks English, he’s fine. If you saw a public speaker in Finland speaking Finnish doing the same thing, we’d be thinking “what a complete wanker” and would probably not believe a word he said. And probably, the English speaking need exactly that to trust him.

The English speaking, when posting online, are probably thinking a lot more about who is going to read their post. The possibility to be misunderstood is far greater. Essentially, they are speaking to the whole world, to a host of different countries and nationalities, cultures they might not even know about. It puts a fair bit of pressure on you if you start thinking about it too much. Then, of course, they keep telling us that 90% of communication is non-verbal. When you’re not used to relying on people’s words alone, you can feel like you’re walking on thin ice with people you can’t see. Maybe that has been my problem when dealing with the English speaking, maybe they need a lot more reassurance of your character and intentions than the Finns do. I probably can’t use the same template dealing with the English speaking as I do with Finns.

What do you think, especially if you have experience in both nationalities, not only when running online communities, but also chatting with them, tweeting and that.

I started writing a newsletter for my community site theBdoll.com at the beginning this year. First I thought I would just write a normal email and be done with it, but a silly thing happened – I run a bilingual site, so I would need to write in two languages and the other would have to scroll down to read the email in their language. That is when I decided to make two pdf’s, one in each language. And while I was doing the pdf, I thought why not put a couple more pages into it, and ended up writing a full blown e-newsletter, as in a little magazine. My members LOVED IT. They went absolutely ballistic over it, and I was blown away by the reactions. I got email from people who hadn’t visited the site for a while saying what a great idea that was and a lot of people raised their hands saying they’d like to help me with the newsletter in the future.

The whole project has brought the community closer together and as close knit as we were, the newsletter has made us even closer – I feel.

In each of the issues I introduce two of my members. Hopefully that will make all of us look more approachable as well as interesting to the non-returners – there is a lot of different types to go around, and I’m sure eventually everyone will find someone they’ll relate to and feel safe with if they’re more quiet type. In addition to that, the newsletter, or ezine rather, contains news, the latest hot stuff and a humorous gossip column of or members dolls – we’re Barbie collectors.

Of course, not all sites have topics that allow quite that elaborate ezines, and on the other hand, your topic might be even more open to ideas, I know that each issue I’ve made has brought in another idea. Have a look at our newsletter to get ideas for yours! http://www.thebdoll.com

During the years I’ve been working with forums, I always get positive feedback about the emoticons, and when I’m talking to the people on some other site, they often refer to the forum emoticons by typing a description of it in the message like: *the cute hugging smiley* or similar. Doesn’t that tell you how much people love them?

Okay, so here’s a link to my favorite place to find emoticons – Deviant Art, naturally. (Oh there’s some new cute ones, I wanna get a few, too…)

1. Try not to be condescending when you point out that someone has posted in the wrong board.

It happens to the best of us; Sometimes we post in the wrong place. I did that last week, after frequently participating on several boards for the last 10 years or so, never being told I was out of line. I was mortified when a forum mod told me that “this board is not the place for your post”. This happened after I had read through each of the board descriptions and as nothing seemed to fit my post, I posted it on the board that said: “… and everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else”. I thought that would be the safe option, but I was pretty much told off by the admin and I think they updated my status somehow so that a notice “read the guidelines for newbies, this means you” came up! You betcha I din’t feel welcome! I had even thought that I could hang out on the board a bit as I had gained some experience using their product for about 5 years, and could be of some help to some new users… Let’s just say I’m not thinking that anymore.

The way I see it, if people post in the wrong board means that your navigation isn’t clear enough. Secondly, if your forum software doesn’t allow you to just move the topic to a more suitable location without treating the poster like a criminal, you have chosen the wrong software! By just stating that the post is in the wrong place and not moving it you’re forcing the user to break yet another rule: Do a double post. Both of these problems are YOUR BADS, and you should rather apologise for the bad organisational functions of your board than treat the posters like they’ve done a poop on your dining table!

2. When you tell people they should not reply to an old (dead) thread AND that they shouldn’t repeat topics, you’re not making much sense.

When people face situations in their lives or using different products that they need support for, the situations can be similar, but they are still often slightly different. You CAN point them to a direction of an earlier topic, but you should do it respectfully (hope this helps, but if not please tell us more) and again, not treat them like they were idiots. No matter how many idiots there are not using the search function (and if your search function isn’t good enough, it’s again not their fault) you should assume for the first few times that this particular poster has done their best to find a solution for their problem prior to posting.

In my forum rules I have actually stated this: “Try to keep to a topic, and reply to even old topics when it suits, but do NOT reply to a topic by stating that we have already discussed that matter. We all love this topic, and that’s why we’re here, so a little repetition won’t kill anyone. Also, a good laugh is always more important than staying in the topic.” I was especially strong worded about this on a peer-support board, where people were going over their traumas… You need repetition. Each person needs to tell their story, reading that someone has gone through a similar trauma is not nearly as helpful. Often in tech support the situation isn’t exactly that much different. Some users may be so afraid of trying out new things, like your product, that they are nearly going through a trauma while settling in with your product. That’s the last time you want to insult their intelligence.

3. Shut down non-admin-policing

NOTHING is more annoying than a regular member that does the above, and the more frequently they do this, the more annoying it is. Either make them an admin and tell them that when you’re correcting people, be condescending only after they break a rule for the 5th time, or email them and tell them that you don’t need help administrating the forum at this time. If they continue doing this, seriously consider banning them, because this sort of behaviour is very disrupting and can drive people away from the board, no matter how much they like your board. (People won’t say much, because they usually treat this member as an authority, and some will even mistake them for an official admin to start with. They also think that other members support this behaviour.) But again, if you have a board with someone doing your job for you… You should step up to the plate yourself – or officially appoint someone do that for you.

These sort of practises make your board feel very unwelcome to join, and people who are shy to participate or are new to the whole thing are more likely to stay as “lurkers” because they don’t want to be told off. If you are running a “casual, relaxing and fun” board, it is even more important to stop doing this. It is not even that you’re insulting the offending members, sometimes when I read replies of this sort made to other people, I feel like c*** on their behalf. If you are running a board that you know that no topic can never be on the gray area between two boards, and you know every poster is familiar with your structure and with your definitions of topics, feel free to continue this condescending behaviour. If not… You know what to do: Put a sock in it!

Photo of a child on man’s avatar. Probably the last time any woman told him he was cute.

Photo of a child on woman’s avatar. A stay at home mother who has nothing else to talk about but her kids. (Probably uses a screen name such as “MomOf2″.)

Just the eye. Seeks a deep contact with people while trying to remain anonymous and appear soulful. Kind of works but is quite unoriginal and thus utterly forgettable.

Popular cartoon character – A male who is trying the “boyish charm” angle although it has never worked for anyone. We’ve seen enough of Vinnie the Pooh and friends already! Original cartoon characters by the man/woman behind the avatar, are encouraged though!

Disproportioned photo - An avatar of a casual Internet user who hasn’t yet found the delights of Photoshopping. (Has uploaded a photo straight from the camera, without shaping it into a square first.) Unprofessional.

Logo – impersonal. Is here to sell me something.

The vast majority of people prefer the picture of a person in an avatar over a logo or other graphic. People want to speak to people. If your avatar is listed amongst several others (like recent visitors list), the likelihood that you’ll get a click is higher if it’s your face in there. But, sometimes you need to put that logo up there. Another thing is, that if you’re using your photo, it gets boring after a while, and intolerable to you when you get a better photo of yourself. But the problem arises, that people get confused if you change your avatar. They won’t remember who you are for a while, until you say something really characteristic to yourself. I believe I found a solution to both of these problems. You are not likely to change your logo too often, right? So why not use that together with your photograph?

Here are some of my recent avatars:

See what I mean? There are elements in the avatar that stay constant while I get bored with the rest of it – me. :p This of course requires some Photoshop skills, but nothing too complicated. This also gives you the option of using different theme in the photos while still tying them to yourself. The one I’m holding my dog is used on social sites for field spaniel owners. The one I hold a pen in, is designed for my writer’s profile.

Lastly, it’s a good idea to upload your avatar to Gravatar, which is a centralized avatar storage, that will allow you to link a photo to your email address. This way when you comment on a blog (all that have Gravatar enabled) will fetch your photo that matches the email address you used. Sweet.

When ever I’m a member of a discussion board that only allows the basic set of yellow faces, I feel kind of depressed. It tells me that this board is SERIOUS, and the guy running it doesn’t really care about the members. The set of emoticons that are available on a board, also tell me about the sense of humour on the board, and topics that area allowed. (You can get rather naughty little emoticons if you look for them!) There is a wonderful world of emoticons out there, let me tell you! They make you laughThey make you cry.. and when you’re feeling low, they give you a hug.

To help you to get started, I have collected a basic set of smileys for you to use instead of those awful yellow ones. It still comes with Mr. Green though, as there’s nothing better than Mr. Green! (What? You didn’t know he had a name?!)

Download the groovy basic smiley set

As far as I know all these emoticons have been published in the public domain. I have mainly downloaded them at Deviant Art, which has a great section for emoticons!

One word of advice though: Don’t put all the icons into the post form, but set most of them into the pop-up window, as having a lot of them clickable will slow down your forum. Put the most used icons on the form and the rest of them behind the “more” screen. Also when selecting post forum icons, stick with the standard sized icons, that won’t stretch the rows too much, or it’ll look quite messy.

Then wait to see the reactions when you put up more smileys! I quarantee your members will be stoked!

There are different type of discussion boards though. I don’t love all of them.

1. Super popular general boards

Example: MySpace Forums
These forums rarely produce discussions that are worth following. They are riddled with people who are there just to annoy you or make you feel like shit. Even if they didn’t have that effect on you, why would you want to hang out with those people anyway?

2. Super popular niche boards

Such as: Blog Catalog Discussion
These are a little better. Everyone has something in common, so everyone cen find something to talk to, help each other and give tips. The downside is that the discussion rarely gets very interesting, as because you know there will be 30 replies in about 30 minutes, if you take time to reply people will skip your reply anyway so there’s no point.

4. Small niche board

Little like doll collectors discussions.
Easy to start! Everyone has the interesting topic in mind so it’s easy to start talking. However, things rarely get very personal on these boards, as there is that topic, and even though off topic board would be introduced it’s a bit hard to “go there” as people are a tad bit worried about their credibility as a hobbyist if they stray too far from the topic.

3. Small general boards

Such as My Old board.

Hard one to get off ground! With nothing to base the conversation on, it can start out like pulling teeth! A good humorous base group is essential, people who like talking and chattering away to each other, even if nobody else was around. On these boards discussion CAN get really interesting. On the downside, after all that hard work, as they are small, the ripple effect of one disruptive member can actually take down the whole board. At best, the conversation can go really deep and personal, and you can make real friends on these boards.

Related reading:

Handling a conflict on a forum – relating to types 3&4 really.

1. Discussions on this board are to be written in good humour. Any user that is creating and promoting negativity by in any way provoking other users on this board can be banned for set period of time or permanently according to case-by-case consideration by the administrator.

2. Humour needs to be funny – do not try to insult a fellow member and cover it with humour.

3. Tasteful erotic / sexual content is allowed. Health related topics are welcome. Pornographic photos and texts are not allowed. (If you are not sure if your content is okay, ask the moderators or administrator.)

4. All content provided by you remains yours. The site does not claim any copyrights of sent material. Also, you are responsible for any content you send, and remain so in all circumstances.

5. All content on restricted user areas like “members only” or “certain members only” sections is to be kept between the allowed users. Mentioning this content is allowed if the people in question remain unidentifiable. (Take into account the situation and their friends, who may know enough to put two + two together.) Understandably it is hard to control, and hard to judge, but it would be too much to ask of members to never mention anything to their spouses for example.

6. Do not rate users expecting them to rate you back. Positive feed back systems are to give an accurate idea of a user, not to promote a popularity contest.

7. Any harassment of members via public or private messages result to an immediate ban. Harassment includes but is not restricted to unwanted sexual comments, repeated dating requests, insulting comments and the like.

8. Avoid using animated images as your avatar. If you animate, keep it stylish and discreet so that your avatar doesn’t irritate readers. You may be asked to change your avatar, or it may be changed for you.

9. Keep signatures at reasonable length. The larger signature area is there to enable users to use html or javascript on their signatures, creating a small interactive signature. Keep the size under 150 pixels high, which is about the hight of your avatar + user name on the side of your message. (Depending on site settings.)

10. When posting images and long links, make sure they do not stretch the site layout out of proportion. If this happens, make the image smaller or use the Link-tool to create a linking word instead of the whole URL. This applies to signatures as well.

11. If a member tries to take or takes advantage of another user, for example agreeing to a trade without holding up to the agreement, his or her access will be limited or denied, depending of the situation.

12. The administrator reserves the right to edit or add to these rules at any time there is need to. New rules will be announced on the board.

13. Any violation against these rules or the spirit of the rules can result into full or partial ban or removal of the account without notice. A person who has received a limited time ban, will be excluded from any post count groups from then on.

Ps: It’s not advisable to edit rules right after someone does something wrong that is not included in the rules, even though I end up doing that all the time – as a lot of times people keep surprising you with the things they do…

When ever there is a group of people who don’t really know each other, everyone have their own way of dealing with other people, there’s always bound to be a conflict. Most people will handle the discussion boards without any problems at all, they are socially capable of taking into consideration other’s feelings and navigate their way through even heated discussions gracefully. But there will almost certainly be one person who doesn’t quite get it. She or he says things in a coarse manner, offending people and not even take notice. So you try to give them a bit of feedback in the public saying: “Please take into consideration everyone’s feelings when posting. Thank you.” So what happens? The person who you aimed it to, doesn’t take notice, but everyone else does. “Was it me? If I said something, please accept my apology, oh dear God, what did I do?!” So in the end you end up sending private messages saying no it wasn’t you, please don’t be alarmed… And then post into the topic that please everyone just ignore that, I’ll contact the person in question directly, as you should have done in the first place.

BUT, if and when you do that as your first action, you risk them going all martyr on you, posting to the forum a similar vague post that you would have posted in the first place. “Oh, I was told by the admin that I create chaos here. I better shut up from now on.” So then everyone is one big question mark. “What is this? What happened? I don’t understand?” So to reassure everyone that you didn’t suddenly go mental on one innocent member, and you had a good reason to contact the person, you have to bring it up publicly, whether you like it or not.

So, in short, you have to make sure that EVERYONE understands the issue without question (single out the offender) or you have to make sure NOBODY other than the person in question knows the issue. And that is almost impossible to do. If you ban that person suddenly, question will rise. Where did she/he go? They probably have friends on the board who will more than happily inform everyone of the ill doing of the administrator, again creating chaos.

If you do nothing, you’ll end up with a board with trolls everywhere, people provoking each other and eventually everyone worth talking to disappearing to nowhere.

So… What to do… Create really good, easy to read code of conduct, that you can refer to every time someone steps out of line. Update it every time you find another way of disrupting the peace of your board. When someone does something you didn’t think of, post a notice saying: “This thing here isn’t cool. The person in question will be contacted privately.” But the problem with strict rules is that, your board starts to sound like a Catholic School Sunday Mass, and you don’t want that either. You want everyone to be relaxed, happy and humorous, and you don’t want to ban specific words for example, unless you’re running an under aged board, or are somehow personally very offended if I use the word fuck. (Test yourself free of charge here: This is fucking delicate business.)

You also need to be very confident when running a group of people like this. You need to know what kind of board you want to have in your hands, and what is acceptable and what is not. You need to predict problems, and that can be very hard, if you think nobody would do that, surely. But rest assured, someone will, even if you were only discussing collecting Barbie.

Any good ideas on what to do in these difficult situations and examples of things that got horribly wrong would be very welcome in the comments!

Related reading: The Perfect Set of Rules