Moderators — A Set Of Customizable Guidelines For Your Discussion Groups or Forums

If you moderate a website, forum, or discussion group, it’s likely you will need a set of guidelines for member behavior. I have created the rules below for you to use in your own forums.

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

If you are a moderator, please feel free to either link to this article or use the content in your own posts or community, it’s licensed under ‘Creative Commons’ (details at the end of the article.) Please link back to this article as a credit.

Introduction & general approach

• These Community and Moderation guidelines exist to make this community a safe, respectful, and useful destination for all community members
• By reading, posting, and participating in this community, you agree to read these guidelines and act according to them
• These guidelines may be updated at any time by the moderators of this community; any updates and the new version of the guidelines will be posted here
• Please use the predominant language of the community — It should be clear what language(s) are supported by this community; please ensure that you post in a language that most community members can understand
• You should consider the information shared on this community to be in the ‘public domain’; information shared on this community may be indexed and searchable on Google and other search engines

Moderators and Moderation

• This community is moderated by one or more moderators; you can find a list of them here <link>
• Moderators will use their best judgment to apply these guidelines in a fair way and moderate activities appropriately to ensure the overall health of this community
• Moderators may not have the time or inclination to explain their moderation decisions and are under no obligation to do so
• Any activity, comments, posts, or other interaction that you have with this community may be moderated by the moderators of this community, with or without explanation
• Moderators have the final decision on what is and isn’t acceptable use of this community
• If you are not sure if something you want to post will breach community guidelines, please contact a moderator privately before you post it an explain your concerns; they will let you know how to proceed
• In the event that you have a disagreement with a moderator, please contact the appropriate moderator privately and enter into a discussion with them

Treatment of other community members

Our community needs to remain a safe, mutually beneficial, and engaging place where members are treated with decency, courtesy, and respect. This means:

• Treat others as you would wish and expect to be treated yourself
• Be tolerant towards other’s behavior and accept that generally, other members of this community act in good faith
• Give other community members the benefit of the doubt unless their behavior shows otherwise
• Treat others online as you would treat them in real life; this means behaving with common decency, common sense, courtesy and respect; you are not anonymous here!
• Do not make personal attacks on other members of this community
• Do not make defamatory or false statements against others
• Do not reveal private or personal information about other users
• Do not make prejudiced comments, remarks, or other statements about members
• Do not bully, make ‘trolling’ remarks or otherwise start trouble with other community members

Disagreeing with other community members

Whilst we need to ensure proper behavior towards others in this community, we do not want to stifle discussion, debate, and, occasionally, disagreement. It is also important that members feel able to properly express their opinions on various topics when it is appropriate to do so. If you are engaged in lively debate or disagreement with other people, please keep the following in mind:

• In many cases, you will be arguing about ‘opinion’, and there may not be an objectively right or wrong answer
• Remember that people are generally passionate about defending their beliefs and thoughts
• Accept that other community members will have different thoughts and beliefs to you and respect that
• Disagree with and discuss content and posts, not the people making them
• Do not engage in personal attacks
• If you are providing commentary, rebuttals, or feedback please keep your comments positive and constructive
• If you have a complaint about another community member, please initially take it up with them in a civil way via private message; if this doesn’t work, please contact a moderator via private message

Posting general content — Things to do

Our aim is to ensure the posting of high-quality posts and comments in this community. You can help us to achieve this by:

• Thinking before you post — This is the golden rule; think about your content before you post it, is it something the community is going to care about?
• Staying On Topic — Please bear in mind the title and reason for this community’s existence and post with that in mind
• Posting content in the right topics — Please pay attention to the topic list in this community and post your content in the appropriate place; this helps to keep the community organized and means your content can be found more easily by others
• Posting content that is informative, educational, entertaining or encourages discussion — We want content posted here to be engaging. If what you are going to post does not meet those criteria, it is unlikely to be of value to our community members
• Post ‘for’ the community, not ‘at’ the community — Remember your audience here; try to post content that will be relevant to them, take time to learn about the content that does (and doesn’t) do well, and post with that in mind

Posting general content — Things Not to do

In addition to the guidelines above, please avoid this behavior:

• Posting questionable, obscene, illegal, confrontational, or defamatory content — Please keep your postings to appropriate topics and discussions
• Plagiarising, breaching copyright, or failing to attribute — Please attribute content appropriately, respect copyright, and do not steal other’s content
• Posting invitations to other communities — Please do not post invitations to other communities unless invited to do so by a moderator; this is considered very rude!
• Posting too often — Please keep your posting frequency to a reasonable level; please do not make back-to-back posts and do not post just for the sake of it

Posting links

In addition to the guidelines above for general content, please also take the following into account when posting links to other online content.

• Providing an introduction to your link and reasons that others would find it useful — Please provide a context, description, and introduction to any links that you post; tell the community why you found it useful or what they will notice if they click on the link
• Do not post ‘naked’ links (links without context or introductions) — Naked links are often irrelevant to the community and should be avoided; always post links that are appropriate
• Do not post spam links / cross posting — Please do not post links here that you have recently shared elsewhere in other communities
• Do not post purely promotional / advertising links — Avoid links that purely promote businesses, services, products, or other areas; again, links must provide value to community members. Promotional links will be removed
• Do not post the same link repeatedly — You generally only need to post each link once; in some cases, it is acceptable to post a link again if some time has passed (at least a month)
• Tell the community if you are involved with the link — Declare any interests that you have in the link that is posted

By taking part in this community, you agree to abide by these guidelines. If you do not do so, the following actions may be taken against you or your posts (in ascending order)

Note that in some cases, a moderator may decide to apply a higher level action against your or your posts immediately, without prior notice or warning.

• A request from a moderator to post appropriately in the community
• A warning from a moderator
• Removal of your post
• Your removal from the community (you may be able to rejoin the community later; contact a moderator to find out why you were removed before joining again)
• Your banning from the community (you will not be able to rejoin the community without permission and approval from a moderator)

As always, if you are unsure about any part of these community guidelines, please contact a moderator before posting your content, they can advise you.