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I hate the term User Generated Content…The proper (respectful) term is community, and running one is a real challenge
No matter how patient you are, inevitably someday you'll encounter a user trolling the site for laughs, or someone copying your RSS and/or design, or making false claims on your own site, and your impulse will be to lash out at the user causing problems, to ban their account, and delete stuff they've written
Once I got other moderators on board, this became much, much easier to do. Whenever something on the site irritated me, I now had someone to bounce it off of
If I had to give a reason why most newspaper blogs are filled with cranky screeds posted anonymously, I'd have to say having a generic blank comment form is key. Most every community that I contribute to offers a comprehensive user profile/history page, letting members customize to their hearts content and allow their profile to reflect their personality. When I think of mainstream news, TV, and newspaper sites trying to solicit comments from readers, I've yet to find something close to even a basic community site. The New York Times requires me to register to read most stories, but their blog system gives me a blank generic comment form when I want to comment on a blog post.
I'd love to see a large paper like the NYT implement a real community system. Based on my existing NYT login, I'd love if I had a profile page on their site, tied to any comment I left on a blog or any article I wrote for the paper (I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but there are writers for the NYT that would also be active on the site).
Let me list my blog URL and track any posts I make about NYT articles on my profile page (the NYT already has a "most blogged" feature on their site). If you gave readers a real profile page on a real community system at a newspaper site, I suspect the quality of contributions would go way up. Of course, you'd still get trolls and griefers trying to game the system, but the remainder of readers would post more often and post better things.
Heck, you could even let readers connect to their friends that also read the site and offer tools useful to members (like "your friends liked the following articles") as well as gain additional traffic from repeat member visits
Forum about the site: run an entire forum devoted to discussing the site itself. I float new ideas and new UI enhancements there and anyone else can start a thread about some aspect of the site. When I have to make a tough decision, I mention it in a new thread and get the members' reactions and often tailor the final result based on their feedback
Target ads: Feel free to show me ads that would actually make sense (example: I don't live in NYC, but I see NYC ads on the site -- you might want to pitch me home delivery or general ads aimed at out-of-towners) based on my profile.
"flag this post" links sprinkled around the edges of postings. I took a page from Craigslist and implemented a simple user flagging system last year on MetaFilter. It's a basic mechanism that gives the community a policing outlet, but beyond the simple act of empowering users to help you moderate a large site, if you build the right toolset you can save yourself loads of time and stress moderating content.
My flagging system records the id of the item being flagged, the person flagging it, and the person that wrote the item.
On the flipside, I also implemented a favorites system throughout the site and do similar things to help publicize the best bits on the site (favorites are all public, flagging is not). Metrics are tremendously helpful tools that are pretty easy to implement. About the hardest part is figuring out what to do with the data, and writing the necessary SQL queries to get what you need.
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