Write community guidelines and moderation policies

Every rule should trace back to the community's purpose, so Kite settles that purpose before drafting anything. A customer community for a software product exists to help people succeed with the product and learn from one another. A hobby forum exists for people who love the hobby. Those purposes lead to very different rules about vendors, links, and off-topic conversation.

Kite already holds your positioning, your customers, and your brand voice in your team's knowledge base, so it knows who the community serves and how your company sounds. It adds what it learns from the community itself. Kite reads your community's public pages, such as an existing rules post, a welcome page, or a forum's FAQ. You can also upload screenshots, exported moderator conversations, or a PDF of your current rules in the Kite web app, and Kite reads those too.

The most useful input is a short list of what keeps going wrong. "Agencies post service pitches in the help channel" or "two long-time members keep turning threads into arguments" tells Kite which rules need the most precise wording.

Kite also researches how comparable communities handle the same problems. It reads the published guidelines of communities in your space, notes how they treat self-promotion, vendors, and off-topic posts, and cites its sources so you can read the originals.

Community guidelines should include the community's purpose, a short set of rules members can remember, a reason for each rule, an example of what crosses the line, and what happens when someone breaks a rule. Kite writes them in that shape and in your community's voice.

Most communities need rules on a handful of subjects:

• How members treat one another. Disagree with ideas, not people, and leave out harassment, slurs, and personal attacks.
• Staying on topic. Explain what belongs in each channel or category and where off-topic conversation can go.
• Promotion and links. Say where members may share their own work, products, or services, and where they may not.
• Privacy and safety. Don't share someone else's personal information, private messages, or screenshots without permission.
• Spam and automation. Ban bots, repeated posts, and mass direct messages to members.
• Reporting. Tell members how to flag a problem and who reads the reports.

Kite keeps the list short. Five to ten rules is a good range for most communities, because members actually read a page that length. Each rule gets one plain sentence, followed by a sentence on why it exists. Where a rule invites argument, Kite adds an example. "Posting your agency's rate card in the help channel" makes a promotion rule clearer than any abstract wording does.

The guidelines also need to sit comfortably on your platform. Discord, Slack, Discourse, and Reddit each have their own terms that every community on them must follow, and each has its own features, such as Discord's rules screening for new members or Reddit's list of subreddit rules. Kite writes your rules to sit on top of the platform's terms and fit the way your platform displays them.

The best self-promotion rules say exactly where promotion is welcome, where it is never allowed, and what members, vendors, and staff must disclose. A flat ban drives off the members who have something useful to share. No rule at all turns the community into an ad board.

Kite usually recommends giving promotion a home rather than banning it. That can be a weekly thread or a dedicated channel where members share their work, plus a rule that help and discussion spaces stay free of pitches. When someone asks for a recommendation, the rule can let members suggest their own product as long as they say it's theirs.

Vendors and sponsors need their own rules. If companies pay to reach your members, the guidelines should say what they're allowed to post, where, and how often, and that every sponsored post is labeled. Kite also writes a disclosure rule for members with a tie to a product they recommend.

The self-promotion rules bind your company, too. Communities notice quickly when the company running them starts treating members as an audience, and a community that feels marketed at stops being worth joining. So Kite writes down where your own team will and won't promote: for example, product announcements in one announcements channel, no sales outreach to members who haven't asked, and no staff posts in the help channel that steer people toward a paid plan. Kite saves those limits in your team's knowledge base, so its own later work, like a launch plan or a reply to a community thread, follows them.

Your community can still help your marketing without being marketed at. Kite can grow it from the outside, for example by making your best community threads findable in search or running a membership drive through channels your members already welcome.

A moderation policy should name who can take each moderation action, list the steps for a first, second, and repeated offense, say which behavior leads to an immediate ban, explain how members appeal, and describe how moderators record what they did. Kite writes the policy for your moderators, so it can be more detailed and more direct than the member guidelines.

The center of the policy is a ladder of consequences. A typical one looks like this:

1. The first time someone breaks a rule, a moderator removes the post and sends the member a short, friendly note that links to the rule.
2. The second time, the moderator issues a formal warning and records it.
3. The third time, the member is muted or suspended for a set period, such as seven days.
4. After that, the member is removed from the community.

Some behavior skips the ladder. Harassment, threats, sharing someone's personal information, and spam bots usually lead to an immediate ban, and Kite writes that list explicitly so moderators never have to debate it in the moment.

The policy also covers how decisions get made. It says which actions any moderator can take alone, which need a second moderator, and which go to the community owner. It explains how a member can appeal and who reviews the appeal, which should be someone other than the moderator who made the original decision. It also sets out how moderators record each action, so the team can check whether the rules are being applied evenly.

Kite tests the policy against real cases. It takes the problems you described at the start and walks each one through the policy to check that the outcome is clear. When two moderators would reasonably reach different decisions, the wording needs work, and Kite revises it.

A volunteer moderator agreement is a plain-language document that sets out what moderators are responsible for, what the community owner is responsible for, the conduct expected of moderators, and how someone joins or leaves the team. Kite writes it as a clear mutual understanding between the community and the people who give it their time, rather than as a legal contract.

The agreement usually covers:

• The role. Which spaces each moderator looks after, and which decisions they can make on their own.
• Time. A realistic expectation, such as a few hours a week, and how to take a break without quitting.
• Conduct. Moderators follow the member guidelines more strictly than anyone, because members watch how they behave.
• Conflicts of interest. Moderators step back from disputes they're involved in and disclose any tie to a vendor or competitor.
• Confidentiality. Member reports and moderator discussions stay inside the moderator team.
• Voice. Moderators speak for themselves. Official statements come from the community owner or an official account.
• What the community owes moderators. Backup in hard situations, a clear way to escalate a problem, recognition for their work, and a say in how the rules change.
• Joining and leaving. How new moderators are chosen and trained, how someone steps down, and when a moderator can be removed.

The "voice" and "what the community owes moderators" sections matter most when volunteers moderate a community owned by a company. Volunteers often enforce rules they didn't write, and the agreement is where the company commits to listening to them.

The member guidelines only work if members can find them, so Kite publishes them as a page on your website once you approve them. On a website Kite builds and hosts, it publishes the page directly and returns the live address. If your website runs on Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, or Storyblok, Kite publishes through your connected content system. You can then link that page from your community's rules channel, welcome message, or sign-up screen.

The moderation policy and the moderator agreement are for your moderator team, so Kite delivers them to you to share however your team works. All three documents stay in your team's knowledge base.

Rules need updating as a community grows and new problems appear. When a hard case comes up, describe it to Kite or share a screenshot. Kite checks it against the current rules, tells you what the policy says to do, and proposes new wording if the case exposed a gap. You can also have Kite review the rules on a schedule, such as every quarter, and come back with any changes it recommends.