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

[Ash]

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?[]

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[Darth Cognus]

You don't need to fuss about rules until two things start happening.

One is you get rule-pushers who force you to harden the lines a bit, the people who need stronger boundaries and aren't overt enough that you just wipe them out and keep going as you are. If you're appealing to a more naturally volatile community then this comes sooner than later. The other is you just plain get big and you can't wing it anymore. You need more mods and you need to draw better lines. In some ways you'll be doing it to protect the members as much as manage them if you have a broader mod team that you cannot force to mirror your preferred style. Moderator consistency in that case is critical.

In either case the rules need to be extensible and grow organically to the needs of the place, careful to avoid being overbearing, but to stave off casual lawyering or legitimate misunderstandings of what is okay. After all, rules are generally born of experiences you don't want to have happen again. Unless you've been down the same road it's unlikely you'll have many of them to add upfront, and you don't want to do it all upfront because that will stifle what you're trying to build.

They should be natural and common sense: frankly I often haven't even read the rules in places I post in and I tend to get on just fine because well, the whole point is to just keep things sane. Of course there are cases where it's wise to check, and that can be helped by having then discreetly built into areas where certain rules are highlighted over others because of how a given section works. Say, politics that's already seen a fair share of battles.