What rules should be added to the help center?

Practical CM Course Grow Your Community
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What rules should be added to the help center?

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Not all violation related discussions need to end with creating a new rule in the help center. Many nuances of moderation and user interactions on the platform can remain in the form of publicly accessible meta-discussion.

Here is a list of things that usually need to be added to the help center of an online community.

  • The most important rules that shape the culture of your community that you want to pay special attention to.

  • Rules that will not change over time. This is especially important for rules where users’ views are almost equally divided, and all the proposed solutions have their own pros and cons. You need to choose one thing, add it to the help center and then live with the rule.

  • Counterintuitive rules that may cause controversy. The rules written in the help center are perceived as official; people either accept them and remain in the community, or leave the platform. This helps to keep the community out of disputes.

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.