Hello Boards Users. We are finished with our database migration. Access to all your favorites and preferences should be readily accessible now.

Thank you for your patience!
Happy Posting!

~Erin

Hello Boards Users. Wanted to give you a quick heads up that this weekend, we'll be migrating our boards database behind the scenes, which may cause strange behavior between 10PM ET on Sunday, 2/10 and mid-Monday 2/11.

This is what you can expect. Your saved preferences, favorite boards and signatures will be unavailable during the migration. You will also not be able to save any preferences changes during this time. Rest assured that they all will return as soon as the migration period is over on Monday -- at least that's what they tell me.

You will be able to read and post while all this is going on.

We're sorry for the inconvenience!

~Erin

Hey folks,

In the next several weeks, you will notice some changes as it pertains to AOL Community. Specifically, the AOLPeopleMGR mailbox will be decommissioned and all message boards will be migrated to a Member-Managed experience.

For a while now, we've informed you to write to AOLPeopleMGR for any concerns relating to AOL Community. As of February 8, we'll consolidate AOLPeopleMGR into the TOSGeneral@aol.com mailbox. Rest assured, you can still let our team know of any egregious Terms of Service violations or general questions relating to the enforcement of the Terms of Service and we'll handle it within 48 hours.

In the next several weeks, we'll no longer moderate "AOL Managed" community areas. We provide tools (like message board filters) that empower the user experience, as well as the ability to report inappropriate content to us for further review via Notify AOL.

~Joseph

My last entry promised a series of posts about items on the MESH Team's to-do-list. Let me climb over the 800 pound elephant sitting between us to say that layoffs and reorganizations have eaten up a lot of everyone's time for the last two weeks. To add to the headaches, there's been some mutating virus (of the physical kind) that slowed many of us down. But, we've rallied and we're back. So, let me give you an update on the items that lead our task list:

I knew I hadn't posted an entry here for a while; but, I completely lost track of how long it had been (shame on me). In fairness, the team and I have been pretty busy.

In August, two days after my last entry, other members of my team and I headed on a whirlwind tour to meet with two of the groups who support our moderation and enforcement activities. For those of you who do not know, we have a 24/7 operation supported by people in the Philippines, India and all over the United States. In September, the folks located in the U.S. came to Dulles. All these meetings were a way to introduce the new Moderation, Enforcement, Safety and Help (MESH) team, what we do, how we do it, and to tap the wisdom of the crowd about ways to do what we do better.

It would be hard for anyone who read, heard or watched the news during the past year to remain unaware that AOL's business strategy changed. One thing that has not changed, despite some user's comments to the contrary, is the importance of Community. It has always been and will remain core to AOL's business. Our Communities are an important part of the new strategy. Toward that end, the MESH team has three main areas of responsibility:

* Member Experience in our community spaces

* Enforcement of Terms of Service, Community Guidelines, Product Guidelines and Community Standards

* Communication with our community members about all of the above

While carrying on the day-to-day operations, we've spent considerable time this past quarter analyzing what we do and how we do it in the context of changing business strategies. Mostly, we've focused on how to make improvements. Your e-mail, instant messages, message board posts and comments in our blogs made you part of the process, too.

Curious about the first items on our to-do list? Check out just some of the things we identified and have begun to work on already:

* Smarter moderation and enforcement tools to help us move more quickly through your "Report This" or "Notify AOL" notifications. These will have more efficient features for cross-referencing and actioning "bad players" on our network

* Easy to understand community standards that lay out our policies related to community violations and the related penalties

* New training for our teams

* Clear channels for user feedback and escalations

* Frequent and ongoing communication with users

* Developing closer communication channels and relationships with product owners to whom we raise your requests for features.

This entry is the first in a series (and I hope, an ongoing discussion with you all) about all of this.

We receive a lot of e-mail and Instant Messages that contain the same or similar questions each day. I thought that broadcasting the answers here might be helpful and encourage discussion or suggestions. If readers like Community Q&A, I'll make it a regular feature. Feel free to post other questions here, too, since it is a great method for encouraging dialog about these issues.

Q. "This is a member-managed board. We've promised not to report one another, so why are you hiding posts and 'TOSing' us?"

A. Anyone using our network has agreed to abide by the Terms of Service (TOS). There are no TOS-free zones on AOL or AIM. Just because a board is member-managed doesn't mean that TOS or Community Standards do not apply. Member-managed means that we do not proactively moderate an area (as we do in AOL-managed boards). So, no matter where you are on our network, we expect you to:

* Understand the Terms of Service and the community standards for that area

* Abide by the rules and manage your own behavior

* Use the empowerment tools we provide (like filters) to control your experience

* Notify us if you feel standards or TOS have been violated (see methods below)

Member-managed does not mean that you can violate the rules just because people agree that they won't report one another.

[Click Read More for more Community Q&A.]

Some of you noticed the new sighature lines that Joe M (not to be confused with Joe L) and I have been sporting in our e-mail and message board posts. This prompted questions.

Where's COMET? What's MESH? Well, here are the answers:

The Community Operations, Management & Experience Team (COMET) has evolved into the Moderation, Enforcement, Safety & Help team (MESH). We have a new home inside the Safety & Engagement group. And, we have new additions, too. The team formally known as CAT (Community Action Team) is part of our group now.

We've worked so closely with the CAT people for so long, it just made sense to finally align the moderation and enforcement teams so that we could leverage processes, experience, expertise, technologies and information. The COMET-CAT Mashup puts everyone on the same page where community moderation, enforcement, safety and help are concerned. This will enable us provide better experiences for everyone. Stay tuned for entries about what we're doing and why.

You had other questions, too. For instance:

Where is the COMET blog? Why a Social Media Blog? Where will we get answers to our questions about community features?

The COMET blog, or Community Info Blog has a new look and URL, but Joe is still here to answer your question or to track down the people who can. That leads us to the answer for why we started the Social Media Blog.

Think of the Social Media Blog as an aggregator of blogs related to AOL products and features (or a interactive table of contents for AOL and AIM blogs). Here you'll be able to mingle directly with product developers and managers. You'll see the list of contributors grow day by day. In the meantime, we're still here to answer questions and provide support.

If you subscribe to the Social Media Blog, you will receive the updates from all of those who blog here, so you won't miss anything.

Joe Loong wrote Oh, Look -- Yet Another Social Media Blog and About This Social Media Mess as introductions. Then each of the leads wrote one to explain their individual blogs. Check these out:

• AIM BuddyBlog Gets a Facelift
• Welcome to Our Madness
• Introducing Community Info Blog 2.0

If you want to read my intro again, it's First Post Is the Deepest.

The whole point of this is foster a direct relationships with you and give you a way to interact directly with us to ask questions, make comments and present ideas, which should encourage a great deal of "socializing" around our communities.

Imagine: It's 1:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. My cell phone rings. On the other end a member of one of our communities informs me that there is a problem in the message boards. Since no child endangerment, illegal activity or threat to national security is involved, I respond, "Uh, hi... I'm on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike in the middle of a blizzard. I'm chaperoning hungry, tired, and rebellious teenagers weary from a competition who are too silly to sleep. There's some questionable activity taking place in the back of the bus I need to handle. Can this wait till morning?" (It could. It did.)

Many community managers would consider that a "worst case scenario;" but it's my life here. And, it isn't that bad.

I understand when employees worry at the prospect of becoming more transparent and accessible to customers. They are concerned about personal info traveling the Web, intrusions into their personal lives, retribution for community actions taken, and mountains of e-mail or Instant Messages to answer.

You have to be thick-skinned, good at setting boundaries and expectations, aware of who the audience is, and the different ways they might interpret your words and behavior. Most of all, you have to maintain the right balance of professional distance to be effective, while you remain approachable. And finally, you also have to give people the benefit of the doubt and trust that most people are reasonable.

Transparency has had its downside. I get my share of drive-by death threats via Instant Message and e-mail. It comes with the territory.

But, the upside is huge. People who contact me start out as individual customers with comments or complaints. Soon they become part of a special community. I hear about their children, the passing of other members, their jobs, and all the life events that human beings have in common. They tell me what they like and don't like about our features and products. They share ideas for improving them. They are brutally honest about what they think of us and give me the opportunity to clarify, reset expectations and stay on top of what we do well and what we need to improve upon. They validate every day why what we do here is important.

I just think of it as all of us working together to build the best online experiences we can.