The blog entry on creating "Passionate Users" (small bit quoted below) seems to have gotten a lot of attention on the blogosphere of late. The whole entry is a good read and makes some good points. One of them is that you need rules in an online community. In many ways, the type of rules you have will determine the type of community that you get. There is a lot of talk on the Internet about "free speech" but people are far from complete agreement about what that means. Or more importantly what that should mean.

There are some people who think that anything should be allowed including profanity, racist/sexist/etc comments, insults, and lots of other talk that would be considered bad form in “polite society.” Well perhaps there are places for all of those things. That doesn’t mean that every place is for that sort of thing.

I personally don’t like profanity for example. If I am at a social gathering where profanity gets out of hand I may get uncomfortable enough to leave. The same is true of an online community. So a community with a lot of profanity is not likely to have me as a member. Is that asking for censorship? I think not. Rather it is about letting me have choice of association. Likewise if I am part of a community that doesn’t like profanity and someone joins who wants to use profanity a lot and we ask them to leave that is also not censorship. It is the right of association with who we want. They are still free to use what ever language they want some place else. That is just one example or course.

A community has a right to set standards of behavior, either formally or informally. Those standards should not be forced on the community by external forces. On the Internet attempting to enforce standards externally is likely to result in a community “moving” to avoid the whole thing.

Good communities, even or perhaps especially those with passionate users, will have standards. The standards for successful communities will often have some rules about how to treat newcomers to the group, how to treat dissidents, and who will enforce the rules. Sure there will be wild and woolly communities (Slashdot comes to mind) and they may even be successful. But they’ll attract a whole different sort of people from those who want a “safer” place to talk.

BTW It is important to remember that different does not always mean better or worse. Sometimes it just means different.

- Alfred Thompson

Quote

Creating Passionate Users: Building a successful online community

So how did Javaranch do it? (Oh yeah, they did win a 2003 award that night, and the next year as well, beating out Sun's java.net and Microsoft for a 2004 Jolt award.)

They did it by being passionately, single-mindedly, ferociously committed to enforcing one rule: "Be Friendly."

Not that you can't have a huge community without that rule... slashdot is the perfect example. But if you're trying to inspire passionate users, I believe that enforcing a "Be Friendly" rule can be one of the best moves for long-term growth and retention of the community.