Roundtable on Communities of Purpose (6) - Site Terms
Part Six in our roundtable discussion series on Communities of Purpose. This time: Terms of Use.
eModeration: What are the best ways to lay out the terms of the site to make it clear to all members what the site is trying to achieve?
Ashley Cooksley: Any site will have a Terms and Conditions area that will contain the site rules, but are unlikely to be user-friendly or written in layman’s terms. We always recommend that the person who manages your community works with the legal team (or whoever wrote the Terms and Conditions) to create a House Rules or Community Rules page. These will contain a summary of the issues that you want your members to adhere to while in your community. These rules should be written with your target audience in mind. For example, a children’s site should have short, clear House Rules that a child would understand. Instead of saying “harassment or abusive language is not tolerated”, consider saying “making fun of or being mean to others is against the rules”.
These House Rules should be promoted heavily and clearly throughout the community on pages such as Registration (along with Terms and Conditions), Terms and Conditions, within the top and bottom bar navigation, Help page, Report Abuse page, and throughout your community products such as forums, chat and blogs.
Leah Williams: Although the purpose of the site is pretty clear, we have a landing page (http://www.breastcancercare.org.uk/community/) which explains what the forum is for and why people might want to join. We also put it at the top of our community guidelines, which means we can refer back to it if we feel that discussions are inappropriate for the purpose of the site.
Patrick o’Keefe: I look to community guidelines for this. Community guidelines, for me, are a vision statement. They talk about who you are and who you want to be.
My guidelines not only detail what you can and cannot do, but in doing so, they also illustrate who we are in plain language. For example, on one community aimed at martial artists, it is made clear that we’re a respectful, friendly community where anyone is welcome, as long as they participate in line with the guidelines.
Once in a while, you get someone who feels like they need to be able to use vulgar terms or say that this art or that art is stupid. And then I have to tell them that that isn’t what we’re about and that they may need to look elsewhere. Your guidelines, your publicly available vision statement, allow you to say such a thing with confidence. They always give you something to point to, that everyone has access to.
You can tie your guidelines in with an about page or a mission statement page. The type of page or area isn’t the issue, that’s just verbiage. The key is that you make your goals clean in a public area and that you make sure that those goals are vigorously pursued.
Alison Michalk: We follow a ‘stage of life’ navigation. Our research has shown that a majority of members come to the site whilst thinking about conceiving, so the top forums are conception and it progresses. We do have some of our most popular and contentious forums ‘hidden’ at the bottom of the forum as they can be confrontational for new members.
Blaise Grimes-Viort: I create a page outlining the site or community's mission statement in friendly language, and link to it from the Terms & Conditions page and Community Guidelines pages. I then try to spread little reminders throughout the tools, particularly on the content submission sections, to encourage members to follow these aims when contributing.
Our thanks go to the community managers that we spoke to and who took the time to share their experiences with us and contriubuted to our White Paper on the subject:
Leah Williams, Community and Social Media Manager at Breast Cancer Care; Patrick O’Keefe, owner of iFroggy Network and author of "Managing Online Forums"; Alison Michalk, Director of Quiip and ex-community manager for Essential Baby at Fairfax Digital Australia; Blaise Grimes-Viort, Head of Communities and Social Media at National Magazine Company and Hearst Digital and Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of LeaderNetworks.
Look out for Part 6) in this series: What are the best ways to lay out the terms of the site to make it clear to all members what the site is trying to achieve?
And our previous posts ....
Part 1) How do you engage with a community, as opposed to just informing a community?
Part 2) What is the value of that community once someone has reached their goal?
Part 3) How do you make an information-based site relevant to newbies as well as to those who’ve been using the site for a long time?
Part 4) How do you encourage experienced members to help out new members?
Part 5) How do you keep members motivated (for example in a weight loss site)? Read more...









