How to help new users adapt to the unique features of an online community?
If your community has some unique social norms or technical features that people haven’t experienced before, they will be ineffective in the community. To avoid that you need to educate users on how your platform works.
Leave explanatory comments when you see users doing something incorrectly or not doing what you expected them to do. Comments should explain what is expected of the users in particular situations and how to do it effectively. Be sure to accompany each comment with an action so that the users can clearly see what you mean. At some point you will notice communalities in issues that new users experience. It makes sense to create comment templates for those issues.
When drafting comment templates, keep in mind that comments should be written primarily from the perspective of the reader, i.e. the person to whom a comment is addressed. Comments are recommendations, they should not contain any negativity, judgment or criticism. They should be short and clear.
Creating comment templates is a great task for the community. Once you have some examples for the first few templates, initiate a public meta-discussion. In the discussions provide your templates, explain in what situations which template to use and give users the opportunity to suggest improvements. Public discussions will drive adaptation of the templates by users who like to moderate the platform.
Please, note that comments that help users to learn the platform lose their value when the users whom they were addressed have read the comments. You need to clean your platform from those comments sometimes.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.