Building online communities is no easy task. The first big challenge is actually getting people to care enough to register and contribute to the community. This then leads to a second problem: community moderation.

This has been a hot topic in the blogosphere this week as bloggers discuss their community moderation policies. For example, Joel Spolsky and Dave Winer both think moderating comments isn't worth the effort, so they've gotten out of the game entire. It's an extreme move, and potentially cuts down on interesting discussions since some of their readers probably have some interesting perspectives to share but may not have blogs of their own. Or, they may have an opinion they would be willing to share anonymously, but no longer have a good way to do so.

Personally, I think Apartment Therapy's strategy is on solid ground. Their experience has shown that a very small handful of community members have the power to destroy the goals of a community site by picking fights and wrecking constructive conversations. Based on experience I have moderating forums it is virtually impossible to turn around the bad eggs, so simply blocking them is often a better choice.

It's usually at this point where someone starts making a First Amendment argument, claiming that community member's free speech rights are being violated. That's when you know someone doesn't realize they're souring the community or doesn't care. Either way, they're beyond help.

So, how to deal with them?

Apartment Therapy uses an editor's consensus approach to decide who needs to be dealt with and blocks users who are behaving badly. As they stated in a recent post, they've given up on coaching bad eggs:


Moderating comments is a problem not just for large community sites, but for personal bloggers as well. Luckily, there are quite a few tools in place that help make the job tolerable. For example, Wordpress blogs have a variety of moderation tools, including the ability to moderate comments from all first-time commenters. While it may be frustrating for first-time commenters to see their comment go into a queue rather than immediately live on the site, the overall quality of the conversation is vastly improved by using this policy.

In the end, it's up to the site owner to create a community that fits their personality. Assuming they're shooting for a civil discussion on a topic, using strategies such as first comment moderation and blocking bad eggs based on moderator voting gives communities a healthy and welcoming feel that avoids degrading into a cesspool of spam and hate.