DEV Community: Blair Ewalt

Community Guideline Best Practices and Examples

Blair Ewalt — Sat, 07 May 2022 02:27:51 +0000

When running an online community, whether it is a forum, chat room, game, sharing economy app, or other platform that allows user-generated content, it is imperative to set out community guidelines to lay out your cultural objectives and make taking action against your users or their content justifiable. Community guidelines are the rules of the road on how to behave. Your community guidelines will help mold your community to your vision, and in turn promote a healthy discourse as well as user retention and growth. In this article, we will discuss some of the best practices around community guidelines and look at examples of how companies are utilizing them today.

Define your community purpose or values

First, lay out your purpose or your values. These should be short and concise with little ambiguity. Whether you decide to start with your purpose or your values is up to you, and there are great examples of both. Expressing your purpose and values is an important guiding north star which leads your community to success from the beginning.

Twitter starts their community guidelines with a simple purpose statement before talking about their user limitations. “Twitter's purpose is to serve the public conversation. Violence, harassment and other similar types of behavior discourage people from expressing themselves, and ultimately diminish the value of global public conversation.” Twitter goes on to list their community rules and appeals process.

Buffer lists their community values as Positivity, Courage & Respect, and Thoughtful Language with explanations of what each value means to them, and what they should mean to the community.

Encourage, do not discourage

Rules of encouragement can lead users in the right direction to effectively utilize your community. These can include descriptors of what the platform should be utilized for. For example, in your guidelines you can encourage your users to use your community to share questions when they are in need of help, answer questions for others, start and join in on discussions, share helpful tips, or talk about your product, to name a few. It is commonplace to set out a list of rules in a section which defines what is allowed and what is not allowed.

Vodaphone UK does this by encouraging their community to be nice and share their knowledge for others if it should be useful. They even encourage users to say thanks when they’ve been helped by others. Vodaphone UK has a very succinct summary of their community rules within their guidelines where they offer a list of “please do’s” and “please don’ts.”

It is very important when writing your community guidelines to not disparage or belittle people, including calling out peoples’ morals, justifying violence, claiming them as criminals, referring to them as inhuman, or promoting discrimination. Your community guidelines may be the first thing people see when they join your community, so you want to set a good example from the beginning.

Get your guidelines front and center

How many times have you signed up for something and checked the boxes “I have read and agree to the terms and conditions” and “I have read and agree to the community guidelines,” without actually reading either of them? It may be one of the biggest lies of the internet, especially since companies have been known to bury things in their terms and conditions expecting people not to read them.

For example, Apple says no matter if you buy music off their store, you still do not actually own it, only the right to listen to it (if you dig in, they also say you cannot use any of Apple’s online stores to create biological weapons… makes you wonder what happened there). When you sign up for Spotify, you give them access to all the data stored on your phone. A Finnish IT security company, F-Secure, once added in a clause in their free Wi-Fi hotspot saying “the recipient agreed to assign their first born child to us for the duration of eternity,” just to see if anybody was actually reading.

The point is this, if you can present your community guidelines in a concise manner to your community as they sign up, they are more likely to actually read them. Dating apps usually are very upfront with this. One example is Bumble who presents their community guidelines right as users sign up. If users get the short and sweet during the signup process with a link to expand, they can understand the general gist of what you’re getting at, instead of ignoring it altogether.

Be transparent and have consistency in moderating content

If you want to keep your community happy, you will want to start by laying out your community rules inside of your community guidelines. Your rules should be straightforward. What is not allowed in your community?

Lyft explains their rules in the context of their values in a positive light. For people not willing to comply with their rules, they include another section, “What if these guidelines aren’t for me?” where they tell their community, in short, these rules may not be for you, but if you are not going to follow them, you will be banned.

Rules are helpful as they lay out a framework for your moderators to consistently follow which provides your users with a sense of continuity and transparency. It puts all users on a level playing field.

Another measure of transparency is letting people know about your tolerance policy. Is there a penalty for repeat offenders? What will happen if the user goes against the community guidelines? Are you just removing their content or banning them as a whole? How much bad behavior is allowed?

Some platforms give users the ability to report content natively inside of their app. Google Help adds in their participation agreement, “If you believe that someone is violating these posting guidelines, flag their post or thread for review: […] Report Abuse.” You may want to consider laying out the workflow so your users can help you align your community with your guidelines.

Other best practices

Keep your user guidelines updated. As your community evolves you may need to change certain facets of your guidelines to keep your community as you would like it and your brand reputation intact.
Allow a space for open discussion about your community guidelines. Whether by email, on your channels, etc. Keep people involved so that if they have any problems, they can reach out to whoever is in charge. This can also help boost transparency.
If you want to foster a strong community, try to refrain from being “power crazy,” for lack of a better term. If you see a conversation you do not like there are many opportunities to try to resolve the issue before taking drastic action such as banning a user. Some actions include steering conversations in other directions (in the case of public forums), or reaching out to community guideline breakers individually.
Do not be afraid to have fun with it if it makes sense for you. Many of the community guidelines examples linked above help set the tone they would like for their community right from the beginning.

Conclusion

When you create strong community guidelines and present them in an upfront manner to your users you are laying the foundational bricks for what your community will become. Your guidelines are important to fostering a healthy community, so take the time to encourage your community using the best practices described above.

For more info, check out cleanspeak.com.

Content Moderation and Profanity Filtering Best Practices

Blair Ewalt — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 16:43:00 +0000

These profanity filtering and content moderation best practices include key platform requirements and essential tools for enterprise-scale advanced filtering systems.

Why Organizations Need Advanced Profanity Filtering Technology

Massive quantities of text, images, and videos are published daily. Organizations that have platforms that rely on user-generated content are struggling to maintain customer safety and trust due to the exponential amount of content being created every day. Problems with profanity in customer communications can have a substantial impact on corporate revenue. Litigation, bad publicity, negative consumer sentiment can cut into the bottom line.

Most B2C companies understand that customer satisfaction is crucial to the success of the business. Beyond billing statements, B2C companies communicate with their customers through online form submissions, chats, forums, support portals, and emails. Organizations need to monitor the content that their platforms host to provide a safe and trusted environment for their users, manage brand perception and reputation, and comply with federal and state regulations.

Content moderation involves screening for, flagging, and removing inappropriate text, images, and videos that users post on a platform by applying pre-set rules for content moderation. Moderated content can include profanity, violence, extremist views, nudity, hate speech, copyright infringement, spam, and other forms of inappropriate or offensive content.

The most effective way to keep tabs on all of this content is by using profanity filters and advanced content moderation technology. Here, we’ll cover 10 platform requirements and 10 key content moderation tools that a profanity filter must have to provide an ideal first line of defense.

10 Content Moderation Platform Requirements

Organizations need to implement advanced, automated profanity filter and content moderation capabilities that will reduce or eliminate inappropriate or unwanted content. The following 10 platform capabilities are critical:

Broad Content Filtering Capabilities – Perform content moderation (text moderation), image moderation, and video content moderation.
Multiple Application Use – Manage users and content across multiple applications, set up different filtering and moderation rules for each application and content source, and isolate moderators so they moderate content and users only for specific applications.
Scalability – Filter tens of thousands of messages per second on a single server.
Ease of Use and Performance – Rapidly implement an integrated, developer-friendly solution that begins working quickly to ensure that all visible online content is safe and clean.
Accuracy – Generate few false positives and misses with fast and accurate filtering in multiple languages to meet diverse business needs.
Built-in Reporting Tools – Use content moderation and content filtering reports and analytics to better understand the user community, extract meaningful insights from user content, and improve overall business performance.
Preapproval/Rejection of Content – Allow moderators to pre-screen content in a preapproval queue before it’s visible to other users.
User Discipline – Automatically take action after a user’s reputation/trust score reaches a designated threshold, as well as use progressive disciplinary action to manage repeat offenders and enable moderators to escalate issues to managers immediately.
Security – Choose an on-premise solution that ensures each customer’s data is isolated and ensures personally identifiable information (PII) is secure.
PII, COPPA, and EU Data Direction Compliance – Choose an on-premise solution that provides strict compliance with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, InfoSec, and EU Data Privacy Directive requirements.

10 Content Moderation Tools

Organizations that leverage the following 10 content moderation tools can protect their user community, save time and money, and vastly reduce the manual workload of human moderators:

Text, Image, and Video Moderation – The solution should filter and moderate text, images, and video, as well as verify that approval policies are being enforced by the moderation team.
User Flagging – Users should be able to report images they deem inappropriate, resulting in content removal or content moderation.
Username Filtering – Advanced language analysis and more aggressive rules should ensure that only appropriate names are allowed.
Blacklist Filtering – Natural language processing and proprietary algorithms can be used to determine if text contains blacklisted words or phrases.
Kid’s Chat Filtering – Filters can be used to allow only acceptable words and phrases and reject any words not included in the whitelist.
PII Filtering – Email and phone number filters, PII filters, and personal health information filters (PHI filters) can be implemented to protect users.
Chat and Commenting Filtering – Filtering can keep communication productive in community chats, customer communications, HIPAA communications, gaming and mobile app communications, forums and reviews, kid-focused communities, in-venue digital displays, and organic user-generated content.
URL Filtering – An advanced filtering capability can limit users’ ability to include URLs in their communication to avoid spamming.
Profile Picture Filtering – The platform should allow moderation of inappropriate and offensive images used in profile pictures and other visible user account information.
Filter Bypass Prevention – Implementation of the latest filtering techniques should keep false positives to a minimum and prevent users from bypassing filters.

A quick plug

Today, businesses large and small are investing in automated solutions to prevent offensive and inappropriate language, imagery, and videos in all communications, particularly customer-facing content.

Our team at CleanSpeak has been working on our profanity filtering technology for more than a decade to keep customer communications clean and productive and maintain a safe environment for users around the globe. To see if CleanSpeak is right for your business, try it for free today!

Learn More