The Rules That Actually Govern a Forum Are Never in the Rules

I wrote and rewrote the rules of a large forum four times. They were clear, short, and enforced consistently. They also had very little to do with how people actually behaved, and understanding that gap is the single most useful thing I learned in six years.

The written rules covered a narrow band: harassment, spam, illegality. Enforcement of those was mechanical and uncontroversial. Everything else — which is to say almost everything — was governed by norms that appeared nowhere, that nobody had agreed to, and that were enforced entirely by other members through voting, replies and silence.

Some examples of what our unwritten rules actually were, none of which I would have predicted. Asking a question that could be answered by searching was worse than posting something wrong. Apologising in a reply was read as weakness and reliably got a hostile response. A post with more than about four paragraphs was assumed to be self-indulgent regardless of content. And there was an extremely precise, entirely undocumented standard for how much self-promotion was acceptable, which everyone knew and nobody could articulate.

These are the rules that determine whether a person stays. Nobody leaves a community because of the harassment policy. They leave because they posted something ordinary and got a response that told them they had violated something they did not know existed.

What this means practically, for anyone joining a place: read before posting, and read specifically for the replies rather than the posts. The posts tell you what the community talks about. The replies tell you what it punishes. Twenty minutes of reading replies to new members’ posts will teach you more than the rules page, which was written by someone like me and describes a place that partially exists.

For anyone running a place, the harder lesson: you can write the rules and you cannot write the norms, and attempting to legislate a norm usually fails. We tried three times to mandate friendliness toward new members. It produced nothing except a period of performative welcoming that everyone found irritating. What did work, eventually, was changing what was visible — we made new members’ posts appear in a place where the people inclined to be helpful would see them, and left the rest alone. The behaviour changed because the audience changed, not because the rule did.

The last observation, which I think generalises well beyond forums. Every norm I could trace back had a sensible origin. The hostility to easily-searchable questions came from a period when the same three questions were posted daily and the community was drowning. By the time I left, that condition had not existed for four years and the norm was still enforced, on people who had never seen the problem it solved. Norms outlive their reasons by a long way, and nobody notices, because a norm feels like a fact about how things are rather than a solution to something that used to happen.