Forum Rules – The Fine Line Between A Lawless And Welcoming Community

What’s the first thing that needs to be created and implemented for a forum? The theme? The sections? For many forums, it should be the forum rules and guidelines. It sets the tone and the mood of the community early on and helps you create a forum around them.

Defining the rules and guidelines for your community can be a hard task especially if you’re doing it by yourself without a partner to bounce ideas off. Should you go for a relaxed environment? Or a community with well-defined rules that are restrictive but may be more welcoming to all backgrounds?

Forum Niche

Of course, the easiest way to make this decision can be based on the niche that you have chosen. A general discussion forum should have a calm, relaxed, and fun environment. This may mean fewer rules which can invite your users to be free to talk about what they want without fear of any warnings or bans.

A promotion or webmaster forum on the other hand should be a little bit more restrictive. You may have rules on where products can be advertised and the tone of the messages that are posted. You want the forum to be seen as being more professional and this can only be achieved with well-defined rules.

Member Personalities & Types

Forum admins want a large number of users for their community, all posting frequently and enjoying the community. But the forum rules that you define can have a huge impact on this.

Less rules can invite users that are more likely to speak their mind and potentially be a little bit more argumentative with others. This can create issues for your staff team who may have a harder job moderating and having to resolve conflict. This can bring in users who like this but also push away some members who dislike the manner in which some users discuss things.

You are more likely to find users who enjoy the fewer rules and post freely without fear of random bans for the smallest rule break. If you’re lucky, it may even result in the opposite of the disadvantage mentioned above. You may find that your staff team has less work, with not much content having to be moderated.

This was certainly an experience that I had with a general discussion forum that I created. I wanted a relaxed and fun environment for my users with no restrictions on the content (legal content of course) they could talk about and no issues with swearing. And this was enjoyed by my users a lot who never created any problems. It created a free environment, and the staff team could simply enjoy the nice yellow rank and spend most of their time discussing topics without focusing on moderating duties that much.

It’s always nice when you don’t have to babysit your members, and this can be the result of a forum with less restrictive rules and guidelines. It doesn’t mean that you give your users free rein to do whatever they want and offend other members. Your moderators will still need to keep an eye on things and may even have to give out a permanent ban here and there for the truly disruptive users. But it can create a calm, relaxed, and fun environment that will be appreciated and enjoyed by your users.

Illustration by Elisabet Guba from Ouch!