Check Out the User Gudelines!

 

Our community is growing by leaps and bounds! To continue to provide an atmosphere that helps project managers be the best at what they do, we recently published our User Guidelines (you can find them in the footer on every page). These guidelines were created to help members make the most out of the community and to establish some ground rules for participation.

As activity in an online community increases, the amount of spam and advertising tends to rise as well. To keep our community valuable and educational, we don’t allow for spam, advertising, self-promotion or solicitation. After all, who wants to participate in a forum that has a bunch of people just posting links to their blogs or to products they sell?

Therefore, one of our most important rules is to keep posts relevant to the discussion and purpose of our community. Our community is not the place to self-promote, pitch a product, advertise your blog, your services, your website, etc.  While you may think you are adding “value,” you actually aren’t. Rather, you are pushing members out of the community instead of helping to build within the community. We’re looking for real conversation. Real discussions.

Genuinely participating in the community is a great way to demonstrate your expertise. For example, let’s say you see a question and you have a blog post or video that provides an answer. Instead of linking to your blog, write your answer out and post it in the community. Just posting a link to an outside site is spammy. Remember – your member profile is where you can list all of your accomplishments and professional offerings. If you have a website, etc. and you’d like to share the link, post it in your profile.

You can drive attention to your profile by providing complete answers within the community and demonstrating that you care by helping others develop professionally. You’ll also raise your Influence Score and members will respect your knowledge. They will look to you for your expertise and check out your profile to learn more about you. When members think of a particular topic, you will come to mind as a subject matter expert and they may reach out to you, visit your website, or send a connection request.

The only exception to this might be the case of when a member specifically asks for a link to another site or you are specifically answering the questions/concerns broached in the thread. This will be a rare circumstance. 

But don’t just post a question anonymously asking for a link to particular information and then post your link underneath. We’ll just remove it.

So, we’re asking for your help to keep your community valuable. We are currently going through the community to remove any posts that are violating the user guidelines, but we may not be able to catch every one. If you see such a violation of our user guidelines, please flag it as spam. Our Community Engagement Specialists will either edit the post or remove it entirely. 

Finally, if you ever have any question as to whether or not something is okay, just ask a Community Engagement Specialist! Just send us a message through the private inbox system and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible to show you how to get off on the right foot. 

*photo by epSOS.de via flicker at https://flic.kr/p/dAPegg