What are the best practices for building a community site?

Question

QUESTION: What are some best practices for building a community site?

I LOVE StackOverflow. This is what I think of when I think of an online community.

I have an idea for a website that educators could use. (High School Teachers, Curriculum Reviewers, College Professors, etc...)

I want to build a community site simular to StackOverflow. However, the UX will not be the same, because the users are not as web savy as we are. Anyway, I don't want to think too much about UI at this stage. Right now, it is just an idea.

What are some best practices for building a community site?

I have also looked at Digg.com for ideas.

So far I like the concepts: 1) Votes on everything 2) User Reputation 3) Badges

What other things are useful?

As kind of a sub question, is there a way to determine if someone is an educator? If I charged a registration fee (small, very very small) I could maybe have a human call and verify they are who they claim. However, that seems wrong to me to charge the users.

There are many companies that would LOVE to SPAM these individuals. How do I keep the SPAMers out, and verify that those registering really are educators? Should I even try? Or, just let the community police itself.

I have many question and I am just looking for some guidance. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I think one of the best qualities of SOF is that the more you immerse yourself in the community of SOF the more reputation you build and the more rights you receive. With the additional rights you can further influence the community as a whole, and hopefully make it better. Your first focus should be to create a site that people want to be part of, and then as they do good things for the site, make sure the site does good things for them.

Focus on a symbiotic user/site relationship model.

Answer 2

First of all you have to know your audience (ok sounds like "marketing for dummies" but you can't avoid that one). The best way is to be one of them or to talk to lots of them (what SO creators did obviously). Having a small number of people ready for a beta is needed : some thnigs will have to be fine-tuned and you can only know what and how seeing how people do use it...

About registration fee / checking etc. :

Any barrier on registering would lower your chances to success : a community site only work when there are enough people.

About spammers: Reputation systems are supposed to keep spammers away : if no one think what your provide is of value your reputation will go down and no one will hear you anymore...

Answer 3

The key to a successful "social" website is to get the end-users invested in generating your content for you. Steal anything that isn't nailed down in terms of site design or functionality, but the key concept is to get users to feel rewarded by other users for doing your work for you. At that point, it becomes more self-sustaining.

Answer 4

Yahoo provides some resources that treat the problem of building community-driven sites from the perspective of Design Patterns. For example, see Reputation and Ratings & Reviews, and Ranking.

The gist seems to be: know your community and what motivates them. What works for one group (young developers) may fail badly for another (school teachers). The Yahoo patterns have some interesting ideas for tailoring your service to the needs of your community.