What Defines A Great Community Member?

1.  A Desire To Share And Broaden Your Knowledge
A member who is in a community because he wants to learn more or share more about a given topic is usually someone who does well in a community. 

Conversely, a member who has only selfish reasons for being in a community, will not be able to fully experience any community site.  I'm always saddened to read that someone came here only to send their link out to the allotted 20 people per day.  It seems to be such a waste of time, since traffic that results from spam is rarely useful to the site owner in terms of subscriptions, advertisements, sales, etc.

2.  A Desire To Make Friends
I scan through the conversations I see on MyBlogLog and it's heartening to see how many online friendships have developed through this community.  By being able to find people with similar interests, some of our members have decided to co-author blogs together. I've also seen friendly banter that has turned into real friendship.  Making friends with similar interests is integral to any community site.
 

3.  A Desire To Work Within The System
The policies that we set up here are always created with your needs in mind.  The 'community-join' limitations, the Rock Star message algorithm, the racy avatar deletions and the spam flags were all designed to help our users.  Each was created because of an outcry from the community.

A moderately skilled techie can build a bot or any other type of program to overcome these systems, but users who genuinely care about the other members, like they were real people (because they are), would never consider harming their fellow MyBlogLog friends. 

4.  A Wholistic, "What's Best For The Community" Outlook
The perfect example of this, is the response to the racy avatars I've been deleting lately (over a hundred in the last two weeks, by the way). 

1. Some people ignore the fact their avatars have been deleted and post another, just as bad as the first.   
2. Some people will ask why their avatar is wrong, since the human body is beautiful.  Agreed and agreed, but it's not really fair to ask business sites and family blogs to either show your avatar when you visit or spend all day monitoring their site for your images, just because you look really, really hot naked. 
   
3. Some people apologize and upload a new image that is more appropriate for a publicly viewable site.

In each of these examples, you see different ways that people responded to a particular problem, but only in the last one do you see an example of a user who is 'community-minded'.  They may not have realized that their image was a 'mature' image, but rather than complain, they chose to put the community first. 

One guy said, "That's cool. I can respect that."  He understood that we're not prudes here (far from it), but because MyBlogLog avatars show up on a variety of sites, perhaps an image of cleavage is not appropriate, even though it's far from porn.

5.  The Golden Rule
Before a user messages someone or uploads any images, I think a great question would be, "Is this something that I would want to see/read and is this something that the person I am sending this would want to see/read."

• Sure, you want to gain more viewers, but is sending out thank you messages to every person who views your profile the right way to do it?  If you were in their shoes, would you want a thank you from every site you visited online?  I think you might think that was a little creepy to have several dozen thank you emails in your inbox every time you checked your email.

• Sure, you want people to notice that picture of a hot girl on your avatar (whether or not it's you), but would you be impressed by that?  Would you click that avatar?  Agreed that you may see an attractive avatar and think it's hot, but what would be your first impression of the person who needed to resort to the 'hot chick' gimmick to make you notice them?

In my experience, bloggers who write well and actively take part in discussions tend to get noticed, and build large followings.  Bloggers that just leave "I agree" or "Welcome" comments everywhere just annoy people enough that they refuse to read their blog. If you want readers, you'll have to write content that is so darn useful that people can't live without it.

If you aren't writing content like that, then chances are that no matter how hard to message users, you still aren't going to get noticed.   Start by improving your content, and then I assure you that the 'where to find users' problem will cease to exist.

Do you have any additions to this list?  If so, send me an email to robyn@mybloglog.com and I'll pick a few to spotlight here on this blog.

Comments

[Peluka]

Sweet! I like the way you want MBL to grow up. And how you fight against those uses that harmed your idea so much.
I didn't place the widget in my new blog just because the people that was coming were obvious non-readers just showing themselves.I write in Spanish so I can say that at the moment the site is perfect for me to join communities but not to build my own. And I enjoy it like that. Is good news every time I receive that email saying I was automatically added to someones community, since it means that I'm really part of it and not joining just to be noticed.

Tks and keep it going!

[~ SearcH EngineS WeB ~]

A persons AVATAR is a reflection of their personality - unless it is X-rated, or vulgar voilence their should be no deletions.

It is important that individuality be allowed to shine through

[Robyn Tippins]

Search Engine,
I agree, but we have to remember that these avatars show up on a variety of sites all over the web.

Do people suffer when racy avatars are continually showing up on their site? Yes, because many of them (business related sites and family oriented sites) spend all day watching their site for the avatars so they can delete them.

Does anyone suffer when they have to tone down their image? I honestly can't see that this is the case.

Individuality is still allowed, and will always be allowed. However, the freedom of uploading avatars that make other site owners spend hours monitoring their sites comes at the expense of those site owners and can't be allowed.

[Steve Hayes]

Is there any way of deleting people from my communities?

I join communities when I want to visit a blog again, but not regularly enough to have it on my in-blog blogroll. It's a useful form of blogmarking. It Should also indivate to people who read my blog that they might also find those blogs interesting.

But some people have joined my blog communities and never visited again. I would like to be able to remove them.

I like MyBlogLog, and trying to encourage my blogging friends to join, but I want to link to real friends, not "friend collectors".

Notes from underground: Social blogrolling

[Robyn Tippins]

Yes, you can delete people from your communities by hovering over their avatar and clicking the red x.

[surjit]

A wonderful initiative has been taken...specially naked avatars are being removed.Those were very horrible to see on one's page...
Congratulations and many thanks for the betterment.

[Zep]

I'd like to add that I find members in my community that never visit my blog but are listed before my loyal readers. My stats tell me there are visitors to my site that simply click on my site's icon again and again and never stay for a second - up to 90 times in ten minutes! They are listed atop all real readers, that's just wrong.

[timethief]

Thanks for tackling the insensitive people who have posted naked and provocative avatars.

IMO avatars represent who we are. Those who have precious little else to share tend to choose promiscuous avatars to get attention and they do -- the wrong kind of attention.

I do not wish to be part of an online community populated by those choose appear to be selling their bodies online.

So IMO your stand was the correct one to take. "... the freedom of uploading avatars that make other site owners spend hours monitoring their sites comes at the expense of those site owners and can't be allowed."

[JohnC]

Peluka,
Other than the normal expect bans on sex/violence/hate kind of avatars, MyBlogLog's been pretty lenient. Back when they made the announcement of animated gif's being disallowed in advance of making the policy effective.

In terms of pressence and personality, guys that have avatars of hot women in bikinis fall in to two categories: 1) Hit Fishers, or 2)guys who like to make people think they're hot women in bikinis.

Robyn's does more for me. I know what I'm dealing with there. A face. Not a$$. :)

[Robyn Tippins]

Zep-That is annoying!

JohnC-You almost made me spit out my drink. LOL An A$$... I love it!

[Search engine marketing]

Happy to be a new member of the community.
I heard so much about social networking. Sounds really interesting

[Sam Chan]

Hi Robyn,
Thanks for this wonderful advice!

I do not deny there are certain truth to this statement:
"Some came here only to send their link out to the allotted 20 people per day. It seems to be such a waste of time, since traffic that results from spam is rarely useful to the site owner in terms of subscriptions, advertisements, sales, etc."

However, one mustn't just look at the negative side of the story. There are still many people who like to be welcomed. It is just like a friendly welcome to a strange place. I tend to believe only those people that sign up for a number of a/c will get annoyed when receives such welcome message.

As more and more blogs are coming out every few minutes, many good blogs will definitely go unnoticed. IMHO, those that are good in SEO and technical skillful in traffic building somehow could win the game better even though they might not be spending much effort in content building! The reason is because they managed to get their blogs ranked higher pushing down all the rest till the loop hole got patch.

The reason many people blog is because they want their writing to be noticed. It just that different people use different approach!

Anyway, I agree fully that the quality of one blog content is very crucial to gain repeated visit.

Best Wishes
Sam Chan
"All experiences are opportunities for us to learn and grow."
http://acquirewisdom.blogspot.com

[Alex]

Finally - some ground rules we can discuss ...

On 20 messages per day - I absolutely agree and what is even more annoying when I visit profile pages for people who visited my blog - I see same spammers posting there that did on mine, with same message. What I find even more annoying is that I have seen one of those spammers been shown as "hot" member ... I guess spamming pays?

On avatars - great idea and not so great. I absolutely agree that business blogs and personal family blogs shouldn't have to suffer and at same time agree with Peluka's comment. What is we can find a solution in form of forced ratings of the profile? Something similar to what stumble does - specify if your avatar (profile) is x-rated and allow blog owners to choose whether to display x-rated profiles (avatars) or not. And some form of simple mechanism to report x-rated profiles. For example - someone posted a porn or hate avatar and didn't specify they are x-rated - when they are reported - permanent ban based on ip, cookies, email, etc ... So that will give a chance people to express themselves, as long as they give us choice to ban them for not allowing to protect ourselves.

[Robyn Tippins]

Alex,
Because these avatars show up on blogs all over the web, ratings just aren't practical at this time. First, this adds a whole level of complication that some users will not be able to navigate correctly. Second, one person's PG is another person's R, so user-moderation, at this time, is not an option.

However, at some point, it may be an option. MyBlogLog is growing at a rate that is almost impossible for us to believe sometimes, so for now, this is the best measure. But, know that we are constantly refining our moderation, with a goal of making it completely user-moderated in the future. So, stay tuned, and you may soon get your wish :)

[Robyn Tippins]

Sam, I agree. That's why we don't normally take action on a spammer unless a few people report 'spam'. While one person's spam is another person's welcome, when 'welcome' is being reported as 'spam', by multiple users, then it's spam. It's like the old saying, 'your rights end where mine begin'.

However, our first job is always to warn, not blacklist. We don't want to punish anyone w/o warning, and most 'spam' that we see is just overzealous messaging.

[Erik Willumsgaard]

puh, another social network!

But I am currently investigating web-based social networks, and am also curious about looking more thoroughly into the facilities here at Blognation!