Change 2: Get An Email Address - Page 3

Next, I made the email address field required. Before, leaving an email address was optional. That meant when Dangerman posted his inappropriate post, I had no way to communicate with him outside the forum. If I had, I might have been able to avoid the whole scenario by emailing him privately. Making this change also meant introducing some new error messages and explanatory text that clarified that the email address was only required for our records, and would not be posted publicly.

Would someone be able to spoof the email address requirement? Of course. There's nothing stopping anyone from posting to the site as "billgates@microsoft.com" or "foo@bar.com." But, interestingly, since making this change, no one has.

The idea here is to give me a way to contact people who are posting inappropriately by mistake. If someone with good intentions accidentally violates the rules of the site, he'll be happy to hear it from me personally, instead of just returning to find his post missing.

Of course, if someone is looking for trouble, he'll always find a way to make it, and requiring an email address will only slow him down for a moment. But I'm not worried about offending troublemakers by removing their posts. I'm only worried about contacting those who make an honest mistake.

And I'm happy to report that, since making these changes, the comment forms on my site have been completely free of cheese.

Unseen Rules Aren't Rules at All

Like it or not, every community site comes with a set of rules. There is behavior that is welcome, and behavior that is not. And no matter how elegantly designed your site is, when push comes to shove, you still need to have rules.

The challenge, then, is to set the rules wisely, communicate them clearly, and enforce them fairly.

Step 1: Set rules wisely

Nobody likes following the rules, least of all the average Joe on the Net. The Internet, even now in 2001, is still rich with the ethos of the hacker. The web is the place where everything is free, and you can do whatever you want, remember?

So it's up to you to set the rules for your site. If you don't, your users may set them for you. And you may not like the ones they come up with.

Thinking up some rules for your site can be a worthwhile exercise, because it forces you to think critically about what kind of material you want from your users. No matter what kind of site you're going to have, take this opportunity to ask yourself some tough questions: What is it you want your users to contribute? What do you want them not to do? Would a post like "I like cheese" be acceptable on your site? Can you think of a post that would be unacceptable?

Aside from the personal considerations, there are also some legal issues to consider. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was signed into law in 1998, but its effects are still being sorted out.

Among other things, the DMCA stipulates that site owners are responsible for their site's content, even if it's a community site where members can post whatever they want. That means if one of your users posts, say, the lyrics to an entire song to your community site, you'll be held liable when the lawyers come calling. (Don't confuse this with Fair Use, which would be the case if your user posted one verse from a song in a discussion about great songs. Using a portion of a copyrighted work for comment and critique is still fair game--just like all the screenshots in this book!)

But don't worry, compliance is easy. The DMCA spells out, in excruciating legal detail, the process by which a complaint must be filed with you, and what you must do to make it right. Here's the Cliff's Notes version: Put up a notice on your site that specifies where copyright complaints should go (this is your Designated Agent, in legalese). If someone submits a copyright complaint, investigate it right away, and if there is indeed a copyright violation (someone has posted something that he does not own the copyright to, without the permission of the owner, in an instance that is not Fair Use), remove the material right away.

If you want to be ultra-secure, you can post a DMCA compliance page on your site that goes into greater detail about what a copyright infringement is and how to report one. For a great example of a compliance page, take a look at Bianca's, a long- standing web-based chat community that has a very specific compliance page (bianca.com/misc/dmca.html).

The bottom line is clear: Site owners are responsible for the content of their community areas. As a result, many sites state up front that reposting of copyrighted material in the community area is strictly prohibited. So long as you remove any disputed material in a timely manner, you won't have any legal worries.

In general, my advice to clients is to use that magic line from above: "I reserve the right to remove any post for any reason." This covers you, no matter what. And while users may not like it, if you prove that anything within the bounds of acceptable behavior will stay on the site, they'll still participate. In the end, the "any post for any reason" is just a great last-ditch insurance policy.

Once you have a roadmap of what you do and don't want from your users, it's time to figure out how to break the news to your users.

...Setting, Communicating, and Enforcing the Rules - Page 2
Design for Community
Step 2: Communicate Rules Clearly - Page 4