At our company, we have a clear policy on community terms of use. In general, you’re allowed to say anything you want, as long as it isn’t illegal, defamatory, or disruptive. (There were lawyers involved, so Section 3 [...]]]> Today I had to ask an employee of a partner to pull a post on their personal blog.

At our company, we have a clear policy on community terms of use. In general, you’re allowed to say anything you want, as long as it isn’t illegal, defamatory, or disruptive. (There were lawyers involved, so Section 3 of that document goes all the way from from “a” to “q”. There’s quite a bit of fine print to the conduct guidelines, but it’s very readable in my opinion.)

Our community team will sometimes get marketing managers coming in asking for certain forum threads to be pulled where somebody says something bad about the company or the product. But our rule is that you can say bad things about us all day long as long as you don’t get personal, so the threads stay. We try to direct bug reports to the appropriate channel, but you’re welcome to tell us our products suck or we screwed up in some way. The tone on our communities is very professional and clean, so when somebody goes over the line it’s usually pretty clear.

Posting something illegal is different – license keys or links to warez or keygen sites get pulled immediately. Certification exam questions likewise.

We also realize that when you publish something off our site — on another forum or your own blog — it’s out of our control. We do issue takedown notices, but I’m quite sure we don’t catch every cracked version of our software. If you complain about us and we see it, we’ll try to answer you nicely, but we don’t try to censor.

Occasionally we do ask bloggers to pull a post. We’ve done it for people who are participating in a private beta testing program and then publish information about the beta. For our private beta programs, participants agree to a strict nondisclosure agreement — if read strictly, you’re not even supposed to mention you’re participating in the beta at all, but in this Age of Social Media, we usually don’t enforce that. We do come down on you quickly if you go beyond mentioning the beta to actually posting information about the product that hasn’t been released yet.

Normally the offender in question is a fan of our company – a super fan, after all, since they’re posting information about our product on their blog! They just weren’t thinking about the legal and disclosure implications of posting some cool new news they just found out in the private beta. So all that’s normally needed is a quick note, very polite, and the person usually pulls the offending material immediately and apologizes. So far I don’t believe I’ve ever had to go to stage 2 for a blog.

Recently it wasn’t a beta leak, but it was a way to workaround our license. Our main product comes in several levels of licensing, with each level up the chain having a bigger bundle of features. This gentleman figured out a way to get at part of a licensed feature by switching an evaluation license on and then off again. He works for a partner, so he especially shouldn’t be doing this or telling his customers to do this.

Well, a product marketing manager noticed, people were emailed, and lawyers were cc’d. After reaching out to the blogger, we explained the situation and the post was pulled. Once again, just reaching out in a friendly way did the job.