I say it in nearly every presentation I make on communities — online community is ultimately about people forming relationships with each other. It doesn’t matter if you are a technology community, a knitting community, a cancer support community, a product reviews community, or a large social network like Facebook. It is people and their growing and changing relationships to each other that drive your community forward.

Community members come and go… new people join and other people stop posting for a while. This is normal, and most people don’t really pay attention or make a big deal about it.

But when community members pass away, it deeply affects the community. Each community reacts differently, but there are a few things in common, and a few reminders and best practices for community managers.

1. Understand the pain and sorrow that your community members feel. Even if you didn’t know the person well, chances are good that at least some in your community did. Losing an online friend is just as painful, and in some ways more painful, than losing someone you knew in person. This is a large community event, and you should give it the proper care, space, and sensitivity it deserves.

2. Show your support by participating and supporting your community, but let the majority of the effort come from your community. You should support your community in whatever they want to do to memorialize or remember the person (within reason), but don’t take over. As I said, this is a community event and although you are part of your community, you are just one part of your community.

3. Create a memorial space. How you do this (and where you do this) will largely depend on the organization of your community. One community that I belong to has a dedicated Memorial forum for discussion threads about community members who have passed away. It’s not used often, but it was created because we needed a place for that discussion and it didn’t fit into any existing forum. If you have a space for general or off-topic discussion, that would be a good place for it. Work with your community members and leaders to find the best way to create this space. This dedicated space is necessary to channel everyone’s emotions and remembrances in one place. Think of it as the online version of a wake or funeral.

4. Don’t delete the person’s profile or contributions. In an online community, your profile and contributions are your identity. Deleting someone’s profile is like deleting their existence. It’s ok to edit a profile to indicate that the user has passed away, to remove the ability for people to send private messages to the user, etc. It would be a good idea to include a link to the memorial space. But don’t just delete it. You will hurt and anger the community members who were close to or appreciated that person.

Although I have dealt with this situation in the past, as you may have guessed, this entry was prompted by a recent real-life event. My good friend, former colleague, and former roommate John Wampler passed away on December 21st from cancer. John and I were also members of an online community, and it has been interesting to me to watch how the community reacted. As I mentioned earlier, we created a memorial space within our Memorial forum, and people posted photos, told stories, and posted words of kindness for his widow, who is also a part of our community. Many people who had never met him in person had strong words and memories to share about what John meant to them.

We may be more close-knit than your community, but the general reactions will be the same if it happens in your community.

Earlier in the year, Cory Doctorow had a great piece on Information Week called “How to Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community”.

Trolls are a sad fact of life, but I think that Cory’s advice and techniques for dealing with them are spot on. Learning to separate the people who are truly there to make trouble from the people who just don’t know any better can take a lot of time and experience. And, as Cory pointed out, some of it is just an innate sense.

I try to be good, and get better, at this. But I don’t always get it right. I try to assume good will whenever possible — I assume that they didn’t mean any harm by breaking the rules, calling someone a name, or making an obnoxious 50 line signature with lots of blinking images. So I will gently correct them, and invite further conversation about the issue. About 80% of the time, I get an apology, the problem is fixed, and everything is fine. Those who are there just to make trouble will make themselves known awfully fast and very obviously.

How do you deal with trolls in your communities?