Online Community Guidelines

Author: Ian Aldridge, Progressive Legal

Online community guidelines are policies and best practices for your business’ website. They set the tone for the culture you wish to promote for users and we strongly recommend obtaining legal advice when creating online community guidelines.

Key points to consider for your online community guidelines

Rules for engagement

This outlines the expectations of how users on your site will communicate with each other. This may include guidelines to do with kindness, swearing or offensive comments.

Violations and grievances

This outlines what will happen if a user misbehaves on your site or how to address grievances they may have with other users. We recommend having a plan in place to deal with these issues, specifying the number of violations allowed, whether posts will be deleted, and when and under what circumstances users will be removed from your site.

Ethical/ legal issues

This may include guidelines to do with plagiarism, copyright, and/ or trade mark law, and may be included in your online terms and conditions.

Safety and privacy

This may include outlining rules to do with confidential information and policies relating to the privacy and/ or anonymity of users.

Advertising and spam

This is where you outline whether or not users may advertise products or services on your site, and if so, where/ how they may do this. For example, are users allowed to offer products or services or is this forbidden? Perhaps there is an area on your site specifically designed for this?

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