With the holiday season upon us, it may be a little quiet around here toward the end of this month, but I wanted to take a moment to wish everyone a very happy holiday and a happy, healthy and successful 2009!

Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, linked and contributed to ManagingCommunities.com in 2008. I appreciate all of the support that I receive from readers!

Thank you for visiting ManagingCommunities.com.

Tonight at 7 PM ET, I’ll be appearing live on PerfCast, the Performancing podcast. It’s hosted by Jeff Chandler and David Peralty. If you have some spare time, please stop by and participate in the live chat! The show will be broadcast on TalkShoe.

When removing a post or some content from your forums because it violated your guidelines, it is a good idea to let the creator of the post know why, so that they won’t wonder where their post went and so that they will be less likely to commit the same violation in the future.

But, with yourself and however many staff members you may have, how can you ensure that the messages that are going out are consistent and are worded in a fashion that you approve of? How can you save both you and your staff members the time and tedium of having to type up these messages? The answer is contact templates.

Contact templates are pre-written form messages with blank fields that are completed before the message is sent. Let me give you an example of what a contact template might look like, if the violation was cross posting and it was done on KarateForums.com.

Hello <USERNAME>,

Thank you for visiting KarateForums.com.

Unfortunately, I have had to remove your post quoted below as it violated our [url=http://www.karateforums.com/userguidelines.php]User Guidelines[/url] as cross posting.

[quote]<PASTE THE POST THAT WAS REMOVED>[/quote]

Cross posting is posting the same content in two or more locations.

Please keep this in mind to prevent further violations in the future.

Thank you for your time and cooperation.

Sincerely,

<YOUR NAME>
KarateForums.com Sensei

This is how the message would appear in our staff section. Note the BBCode in place, to automatically create a link to our User Guidelines.

Contact templates are created for some of the most common violations of our guidelines, such as inflammatory comments, vulgarities, cross posting and more. We also have a general template that can be used in many circumstances, such as advertising.

I’m not a fan of automation for the sake of automation. I am a fan of automation that improves the quality of your community and helps you to do your job in a more efficient manner. This is such a case.

Contact templates are great because they allow you to maintain a consistent, quality level of communication when it comes to interacting with members and explaining why this or that post may have been inappropriate for your community. They think of most things you need so that you and your moderators do not have to think about them every single time you need to contact a member. They include the proper greetings and they convey the ideas in a respectful manner.

As you can imagine, this also can save you a lot of time because you do not have to type those messages. This allows you, and your staff, to get more done.

As your manage your site, you are sure to notice trends and violations that happen with frequency. These are the types of violations that you will want to create a template for.

How to get started? I would start with the general template and then get more specific from there. You can always take the general one and then create branch templates with specific language for things like inflammatory comments, advertising, etc. The book website has a downloadable archive featuring some contact templates that I use on my sites. You are welcome to use them as a basis for your own.

I have been nominated in the “Community Builder of the Year” category in the 2008 SitePoint Forums Community Awards, the annual awards program over at the SitePoint Forums. Thank you to everyone who nominated me. Voting has begun. I won the equivalent award last year. It’s be cool to win again, but just being nominated is awesome.

Jake McKee has launched Connected by Distance, a new site dedicated to sharing stories about the power of online community. From the index page:

Every day in online communities around the Web and the world people are coming together, creating together, discussing, and sharing. There are literally hundreds of thousands of stories that community members can and do tell about the impact of community on their lives. Whether a cancer survivor is getting support, or a couple meets, dates, and marries, or simply friends make a podcast together across three states, communities can affect us all.

The Connected by Distance project is an attempt to collect and share those stories.

Right now it’s a web project, but Jake hopes to take 50 stories and edit them into book form for publishing. So, if you have a story to share, please give it a look. I need to come up with one. I’m sure I have a bunch of stories, but I see so much that I don’t really think of them in that context!

At my communities, we are proactive when it comes to defending the rights of others, in fairly clear cut matters. There are people out there who are tickled to allow hotlinking, mass copying and pasting of copyrighted articles and blog posts and unbelievable piracy, just as long as no one calls them on it. When they are called on it, they act. But, until then, they are happy to have the traffic. Not me.

One good example of this is our handling of hotlinked or direct linked images. I use hotlinking as an umbrella for when someone embeds or directly links (such as posting the link http://www.ifroggy.com/image.jpg) without permission from the person who is hosting the photo.

We make a reasonable effort to ensure that the person is using a free file host that allows it, a website that has permitted it or their own web space. One site that pops up, from time to time, is Flickr. Flickr’s community guidelines are clear. You can link or embed an image on their server, but you must link to the actual image page on Flickr, as well. So, for example, if you post a link to or embed http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3126/2588974860_9e53e85043.jpg, you must link to http://www.flickr.com/photos/65547304@N00/2588974860/. A common and acceptable way to do this is like this:

As you can see, I have embedded the image here from Flickr’s servers. When you click it, it goes to their photo page. Another way to do this is simply to provide a “photo source” link below the photo. Either way, you are accomplishing the objective and respecting Flickr’s wishes and requirements.

We had a person sign up for one of my sites just the other day and start posting multiple links to images on Flickr’s servers, apparently to photos on his account. Not embedding them, but linking directly to the .jpgs. No big deal, we’ve seen it before, many times. Post removed, documented in our staff area and a kind and polite private message (PM), explaining the problem, is dispatched.

The next day, the guy does it again and adds a question, why was his other thread deleted? (Which, of course, violates our guidelines as referencing administrative decisions). So, again, it was removed and a kind and polite PM was sent, explaining the situation once again.

Now, my moderator – the moderator who handled all of this – did a wonderful job and is a super nice person (as all of my moderators are). With that in mind, here is what the member sends back (note: this isn’t the exact PM, but it is basically a rephrasing of what he said, except with better grammar):

Look,

I linked to Flickr. http://www.flickr.com. Flickr is a FREE host of pictures and videos that allows you to upload your pictures and videos for their blogs and websites. Again, FREE. So you know, Flickr is very large and tons of people use it for direct linking of pictures on their blogs. There’s nothing illegal about it. [Editor’s note: no one told him it was illegal]. Furthermore, the pictures are MINE. I downloaded from them Google and I uploaded them to Flickr MYSELF. You got it now? If not, go to Flickr. http://www.flickr.com. Actually, here are their guidelines: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne.

Thanks for your NICE message. PERIOD.

So, basically, he was a jerk to my moderator. But, this message is pretty funny and the actual one killed me. He probably violated Flickr’s TOS by downloading images from Google and uploading them to their server. That’s nothing to be bragging about.

But, the real gold is in the fact that he linked to Flickr’s guidelines. If you go to the page, you will see that they clearly state:

Do link back to Flickr when you post your Flickr content elsewhere.
The Flickr service makes it possible to post content hosted on Flickr to outside web sites. However, pages on other web sites that display content hosted on flickr.com must provide a link from each photo or video back to its page on Flickr.

My moderator sent him back a very nice message, showing him this excerpt and I ended up banning the fellow. But, that message was just too good not to share. There’s a certain hilarity when someone like this links to the page that shows that he is, in fact, mistaken.

Recently, on one of my communities, there was a member who had a post removed. He didn’t care for this and in his next reply, on the very same thread, he talked about how someone had “snitched” on him. His aim, of course, was to speak poorly of the person who supposedly reported him to a staff member and to devalue the action itself, in general.

Of course, this post was removed as well, for a couple of different reasons, with one of them being that it is inappropriate to attempt to intimidate or belittle members who report posts on my forums. We encourage people to do so, proactively, through our guidelines, through messages displayed on our site and directly to members, when they reply to a painfully obvious violation of our guidelines.

I told the person, in no uncertain terms, that his behavior was unacceptable. Members who report potential violations to us are to be thanked and appreciated, not ridiculed. This is why we never say whether or not something was actually reported and, even in a case where it might be relevant, we’d never say by who. We’d never put someone out like that. You have to protect the people who are helping you and your staff, who are helping you to maintain the atmosphere of the community.

Oh, yeah. By the way, the post that was removed, where the person said someone “snitched” on him? No one reported the post. I saw it myself and I removed it, myself. But, I didn’t correct him because it is irrelevant, whether or not someone reported it. The important thing is that he not be allowed to treat post reporting as something that is dirty, or wrong.

Some communities have moderators who only have power in individual forums. This post is not about these communities. This post is about communities who give their moderators power in most if not all forums. Some would call them “Super Moderators,” but I just call them moderators because, for the most part, the guidelines will be the same across your entire site, so they may as well have power in all forums, in case they spot something.

On forums like this, you want to make it clear to your moderators that if they see it, they deal with it. The report posts function is for regular members to help staff members. It is not for staff members to be lazy or, worse, condescending, by dumping violations onto other moderators.

I don’t care if they are “officially” the moderator of an individual section. If they have power in all forums, they should be expected to handle what they see and it should be a part of their responsibilities. I have seen moderators report something and leave it for days and days because they expected a certain moderator or group of moderators to handle it, full well knowing that it was a violation. This is unacceptable and this attitude would tend to betray a lack of understanding of what a moderator is actually supposed to do.

Moderators are there to support one another and the administrator. They are not there to bicker over which violation is whose responsibility.

Funny story. I had someone send me a message on AOL Instant Messenger and tell me that they were interested in affiliating with my site. They wanted to know what my traffic was. So, I thanked them for their interest and asked what their website was.

I took a look at it and while it looked OK, it was similar to what our site was (if different as far as what was/wasn’t allowed), but smaller. In considering the site, I didn’t see any reason to affiliate. So, I thanked him again for his interest, but said that I would have to decline, at this time.

Here’s where it gets good. His next message is basically “Yeah, same here. My members say your site is boring, anyway.” Heh. I didn’t send him another message and he didn’t send me one, either.

So, I visit my site and I see that, before contacting me directly, this person had posted a thread in our introductions forum. Basically, he gave a really quick introduction and asked about affiliating. Then, he closed his message with “This place looks great!” Heh.

Let’s recap. This guy went from “This place looks great!” to “I want to affiliate with you.” to “I didn’t want to affiliate with you, anyway. My members say your site is boring.” All in few minutes. Instant classic.

In September, I went to the Blog World & New Media Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada and spoke on a pair of panels (Blog World Expo 2008 recap). The final panel that I spoke on was called “Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media.” Here’s the panel description:

This panel will discuss how not to approach social media for people looking to promote themselves and/or their companies through blogs, forums, social networking sites and other types of communities online. We’ll highlight and discuss strategies and tactics that can damage you and your brand, such as introtisements and adverquestions (veiled advertisements), lying about your affiliations, never giving anything of value, being ignorant of your surroundings and much more. The end result will be a better understanding of how to utilize the social web to get the word out about yourself and/or your organization. We learn not only from best practices, but from poor practices. Who you want to be, directly relates to who you don’t want to be.

I was joined on the panel by Lee LeFever (Principal, Common Craft), Jason Falls (Social Media Explorer, Doe-Anderson and Blogger, SocialMediaExplorer.com) and Darren Rowse (Owner, ProBlogger.net; Co-Founder, Sixfigureblogging.com; Co-Founder and VP Training, b5media and Co-Author, “ProBlogger: The Book“).

The panel went really well and I was really proud of it and how it all came together, from organization to finish. The only thing that I regret is that I didn’t switch out the battery on my camcorder before going in the session, as my camera died and we lost probably 15 minutes of questions which kills me because the questions were the best part and there was a funny moment or two in there. Hopefully, the Blog World Expo folks taped the questions segment and will release it at some point.

Thank you to my friend Chrispian who did an excellent job manning the camera.

No further description needed, here is the video. After viewing, please let me know what you thought! Thank you for watching.

Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media Panel at Blog World Expo from ManagingCommunities.com on Vimeo.

In addition to Vimeo, the video is also on YouTube (parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).