Hot answers tagged community
44
This is not as simple as it may seem, and although your instinct may be to ban someone, you should first consider the following:
How do you determine what is offensive or not? There are many surnames (last names or family names) that would be considered swear words in English, let alone some other cultures. So you run the very real risk of banning ...
23
It currently accounts for about 20% of the activity on the site.
The fact that 20% of the activity on your site is private messaging indicates that your users consider private messaging to be of high value. So, you should be hesitant to remove it. Even if private messaging is not directly of benefit to your community, it still provides increased ...
16
To me, this is all about alternatives, providing the "value menu" of things most people would want to say in a tiny comment, in one click.
Provided you have made the alternatives, e.g. "click the +1/awesome/like button!" discoverable and easy, I favor a blocking message like:
We prefer that comments be longer than 15 characters so they add ...
10
You need to distinguish between levels of negative behaviour and respond accordingly.
Spammers
Spammers or people posting clearly abusive content should be permanently banned without any warning. It is also useful if your site requires users to achieve some level reputation before they can do something to spam other users. This should be something that ...
10
There are many valid reasons to limit username format.
Uniqueness. If you allow multiple character sets, you can end up with names that look exactly the same, but are technically different. For example, many Cyrillic script characters look exactly the same as Latin characters but are in fact different. "Нarry" and "Harry" aren't the same word, even ...
9
I'm willing to bet that you are more concerned with users not getting their desired nickname than the user will ever be. Right now, users have no reason to care what their nickname is on your site because it doesn't show up anywhere on your site.
Because of this, I recommend not pestering your users with any obtrusive process or notification (especially a ...
8
Have you considered offering a recommended limit? For instance, if a comment is less than say, 15 characters, upon submitting the comment the user is presented with an alert suggesting that they elaborate on their comment. This will make the user consider the value of their comment, and will hopefully trigger the action of adding more substance.
Always give ...
8
Well...is it a problem? I forget where I heard this, but there's a story about how everyone assumes those "no dogs" signs are just put up in stores just because they've always been there, it's convention. But really, those signs get put up because someone brought a dog, and it caused problems. To avoid further problems, they banned dogs. Now, maybe they ...
8
A lot depends on the purpose of the voting, but the general rules that I would follow are:
Show the votes before voting:
the primary purpose of the voting is the sorting the posts / options
you are allowed to vote on more than one post / option
there are potentially many posts / options and you don’t need someone to have read them all before they vote
...
7
One of the simplest methods that I have seen for this is to assign every user a nickname based on their UserID. So one may be "user157" and another "user18" etc. Of course most people won't like these names, which is the incentive to get them to change them.
It would also help to send everyone an email letting them know that this is the case and that ...
6
Show the result after the vote has been cast.
This has to do with conformity (as you briefly mention yourself). Experiments (see f.ex. Asch's experiment) has shown that people in general, are affected by what other people do and say in groups, even if they initially was thinking or knowing differently.
Therefor, showing a result before the vote is cast may ...
5
There are two different issues at hand here. The first is whether you a private message system is needed, and the second is whether you can reasonably remove one that already exists.
Depending on the site, private messaging can be a huge administration nightmare. People sending spam, privacy concerns if you can read the spam to know when to remove it, ...
5
Short answer: No
There are users who like obscenity and vulgarism, there are those who don't. Generally those kinds of people don't like to mix, and will always try to segregate into separate groups. If you ban offensive names (which is not that easy from technical standpoint), you remove one of the flags those people use to distinguish themselves. However ...
5
Any star rating on a public facing website that doesn't limit it to one vote per person, is essentially meaningless. If you want it to mean anything, you need to restrict it to signed in users.
Anything else that you do may look like a rating, but will really offer none of the benefits of a rating. If there isn't some business reason that you want people ...
4
The best solution is for a site to have "safety" levels. By default, content created by users who are identified as offensive is completely hidden from view. You don't see their questions, answers, comments or accounts at all, unless you switch to unsafe mode.
When you switch to unsafe mode for the first time, you have to acknowledge a dialog that you're ...
4
It depends on the service and your expected user base. Deciding between blocking and allowing potentially offensive usernames is fairly easy. The more difficult decision is where exactly you draw the line.
You are making a tradeoff. You are disallowing some users from doing something they'd like to do (use a vulgar/offensive name) in order to create a more ...
3
Short answer: Yes, ban it.
Always a good idea to prevent the user from creating such names. There will be some who bypass this and use numbers for letters and stuff, but you should not make it easy for them use it blatantly.
Also, depending on the context, it is highly desirable, for example, here on stackexchanges, it shouldn't be that big a deal, but in ...
2
It goes down to your strategy. Do you want users to user engagement? or Do you want quality user engagement?
Good example is Facebook like button. Simplest way for a user to engage with any content. And there is still a comment field for users to comment. This way users who want to say "nice" will just like it. If someone wants to comment you still can.
...
2
I think you should consider the ability to rate the individual comment again, in a similar style to the thumbs up/down buttons on YouTube. You could then have a top comments section which I'm sure would highlight comment that are limitlessly more thoughtful than simply "Nice one!!".
Further to this I find minimum constraints quite annoying wherever they are ...
2
As in many of UX questions, the answer is it depends. It depends on several factors such as your sites' business goals, the users preference. If you're after "lengthier comments" - then go ahead - restrict a minimum lenght. But be aware of that it doesn't mean you'll get "quality comments" - which I read between lines is the real issue here - not length.
So ...
2
As a chat service we sometimes have over 4000 people in one chat.
The most viewers of a chat like listening to a podcast or see a video in parallel to the conversation. From our experience most chat participants do not actually talk (only 15% do); most of them are just viewing the conversation.
2
Go the middle way and give the users the freedom.
What you want to avoid is users being subconsciously influenced by the currently leadning answer(s). Consequently, hiding the intermediary results of the poll from the user seems to prevent that. However, you must not force users to vote to access the results, if they are only interested in the results, and ...
2
Given that you stated that you're going to cater for mostly British folks, you should consider following their laws. I am not a lawyer, but reading Wikipedia's article on the topic you'll need to account for users who use hate speech in their nicknames.
This might be a hard requirement for you, something you don't really decide “if”, but “how”.
2
Behind the site you're most likely to find a "we" with phrases like (pluralistic):
About us
Our products
But this remains true only when there's a team of people behind that site. If you're an individual (like an online resume, or similar, you should try individualistic).
On the other hand, when addressing users, sites tend to focus on the individual ...
2
Yes, users waste time to post exist information.
Question and answer boards were designed to contain knowledge to be reused, so it is not make sense that askers do not learn from exist information, and ask questions which are similar to answered questions. Duplicate questions waste time of users who answer questions. Users should create new knowledge ...
1
You mention that the visitors will be allowed to provide ratings to articles.
You could ask the author of each article to compile a set of five questions on the content of the article (be very specific). Once the visitor accesses the rating functionality, they are asked one of the pre-defined (not multiple choice) questions, and have to provide the answer ...
1
Instead of enforcing a minimum requirement you could just encourage users to go beyond a certain length (e.g. 15 characters). Similar to the current StackExchange comments you could have a dynamic progress indicator as users type but rather the 'limit' could be soft and in a large-ish number than turns from red to green or perhaps a frown that turns upside ...
1
In relation to your example, I think it's necessary to consider the question:
Why did the user feel the need to commment vs clicking a "Like" button
Is it because:
They didn't see the "Like" button?
They don't want to hide behind the anonymity of a like (or the opposite)?
If it's 1. then your commenting system could, of course, prompt the user to like ...
1
Moderating/constraining comments may be a good idea for readable discussions. However, in this case your </sarcasm> could be replaced with <opportunity>. If your users are not clicking on like, you should ask why before you introduce a rule. Maybe it's because they are individuals, and individuals seek to express themselves in unique ways-words, ...
1
Rather than use technology to restrict user behavior (and thus preventing amazing yet short posts like the Hemingway story), you can implement a commenting guide. Its success would depend on the type of site and your users. Generally if it were something like flickr, nobody would read a commenting guide because the majority of user do not think of it as ...
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