Handling a conflict on a forum

Posted by Sebastyn in Forums, Online communities | 1 comment

I’ve been running discussion boards of different topics for years… I would say since 2001 but I’m not sure. Anyway, I’ve learned a lot of things, one of them is that no matter how innocent the topic, there’s always going to be problems with members not getting along – and it’s often your job to stand in the middle. The following is to ponder about how to handle these situations with as little interruption or damage to the board morale as possible.

When ever there is a group of people who don’t really know each other, everyone have their own way of dealing with other people, there’s always bound to be a conflict. Most people will handle the discussion boards without any problems at all, they are socially capable of taking into consideration other’s feelings and navigate their way through even heated discussions gracefully. But there will almost certainly be one person who doesn’t quite get it. She or he says things in a coarse manner, offending people and not even take notice. So you try to give them a bit of feedback in the public saying: “Please take into consideration everyone’s feelings when posting. Thank you.” So what happens? The person who you aimed it to, doesn’t take notice, but everyone else does. “Was it me? If I said something, please accept my apology, oh dear God, what did I do?!” So in the end you end up sending private messages saying no it wasn’t you, please don’t be alarmed… And then post into the topic that please everyone just ignore that, I’ll contact the person in question directly, as you should have done in the first place.

BUT, if and when you do that as your first action, you risk them going all martyr on you, posting to the forum a similar vague post that you would have posted in the first place. “Oh, I was told by the admin that I create chaos here. I better shut up from now on.” So then everyone is one big question mark. “What is this? What happened? I don’t understand?” So to reassure everyone that you didn’t suddenly go mental on one innocent member, and you had a good reason to contact the person, you have to bring it up publicly, whether you like it or not.

So, in short, you have to make sure that EVERYONE understands the issue without question (single out the offender) or you have to make sure NOBODY other than the person in question knows the issue. And that is almost impossible to do. If you ban that person suddenly, question will rise. Where did she/he go? They probably have friends on the board who will more than happily inform everyone of the ill doing of the administrator, again creating chaos.

If you do nothing, you’ll end up with a board with trolls everywhere, people provoking each other and eventually everyone worth talking to disappearing to nowhere.

So… What to do… Create really good, easy to read code of conduct, that you can refer to every time someone steps out of line. Update it every time you find another way of disrupting the peace of your board. When someone does something you didn’t think of, post a notice saying: “This thing here isn’t cool. The person in question will be contacted privately.” But the problem with strict rules is that, your board starts to sound like a Catholic School Sunday Mass, and you don’t want that either. You want everyone to be relaxed, happy and humorous, and you don’t want to ban specific words for example, unless you’re running an under aged board, or are somehow personally very offended if I use the word fuck. (Test yourself free of charge here: This is fucking delicate business.)

You also need to be very confident when running a group of people like this. You need to know what kind of board you want to have in your hands, and what is acceptable and what is not. You need to predict problems, and that can be very hard, if you think nobody would do that, surely. But rest assured, someone will, even if you were only discussing collecting Barbie.

Any good ideas on what to do in these difficult situations and examples of things that got horribly wrong would be very welcome in the comments!

Related reading: The Perfect Set of Rules

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