Setting up clear, concrete guidelines for online communities is crucial. Doing so:

• Helps  members understand community expectations and culture
• Makes it easier for your team — and other community members– to  manage the community
• Helps get legal buy-in as together you’re addressing many known risk areas

In his book Managing Online Forums, Patrick O’Keefe provides thoughtful, detailed recommendations on developing and enforcing guidelines based on running several thriving communities.  Here are just 10 of his many guidelines; check out his book for more, as well as real world examples and nitty gritty advice on  running a communities.

10 community guideline ideas

1. Advertising and spamming: beware the many, many sneaky advertising  methods people try to use. Patrick provides several examples, which are also helpful to bloggers  trying to understand  whether some comments are legit or a backdoor spam strategy.
2. Copyright: guidelines should help members understand what they can and can’t do within copyright and intellectual property laws.
3. Personal, real-life information and privacy: don’t allow home addresses and phone numbers.
4. Vulgar language and offensive material: Not allowed.
5. Freedom of speech: Communities are intended to be places where people with like interests can share ideas, debate views and give and get help. But they;re not places where anyone can say anything. “You have no obligation to allow people to say whatever they want, whenever they want. It is your site and it is your responsibility to set the guidelines that all users must adhere to.”
6. Respect: Inflammatory or disrespectful comments not allowed, including slanderous information. Related, “Do not allow your site to become a soapbox for someone you believe has some sort of agenda.”
7. Deleting accounts and/or posts in the future: put guidelines in place that will respect someone’s request to have his/her posts removed, without removing valuable content from the community. (Patrick’s advice: change user name to something non-descriptive like username85673.
8. Hotlinking: No posting and linking to images, videos, fies on servers that you don’t have permsission to link to as the person paying for the server  is paying for this. “The result is badnwidth theft.”
9. Caution on advice: “Your policies should make it clear that any advice given on your site is for informational and educational purposes only, that it is not verified by you or anyone else for accuracy and as such, it can be inaccurate.” He notes this is especially important if the community conversations get into highly sensitive — and often regulated — issues like healthcare and financial advice.
10. Who’s the boss? Make it clear who has the final say on enforcing guidelines, and be clear about who people should contact with a complaint and how the complaint should be lodged, e.g., via private email vs. on the community site.

Note: Chapter 6 of Patrick’s book,  “Banning Users and Dealing with Chaos,” addresses issues that every corporate legal eagle worries about when it comes to social media and that not enough marketers think through  before launching. Showing legal that you have anticipated these types of possibilities and have detailed plans in place for dealing with them will help you more quickly overcome legal’s concerns and get them working with you vs. finding reasons why NOT to have a community.