There’s been some controversy on the web in the last few days regarding the fair and reasonable enforcement by a website of their Terms Of Service (TOS).

You can read all about the Ariel Waldman vs. Twitter dust up on Ariel’s blog or in one of the many discussions going on in both Twitter and Friendfeed about the incident.

I don’t intend to chime in with my opinion on the situation. I would, however, like to make a suggestion to help social sites avoid this sort of problem in the future.

Hire a moderator.

Forums and chat rooms have been around from the early days of the internet. In the beginning they were free-for-alls, flame wars were frequent and these once valuable means of communicating were nearly rendered useless. It wasn’t long before board owners began recruiting friends or frequent contributors to act as moderator, those charged with maintaining order and seeing to it that the forum or board’s rules were enforced.

Lately start-ups like Twitter and Friendfeed are causing the conversation to move from the forum to the web-based service.  There are still certain things that I believe forums can still do better than any other format I’ve yet seen.  But the services do offer one advantage impossible to equal in the average forum.  They tend to be populated by the uber-geeks and tech futurists, the people who write the blogs everyone seems to read.  They often attract the type of crowd you only wish you could entice into your forum.

They also make inviting targets for spammers, stalkers, and riff-raff that can become irritations to your regular members.

If your site is a social center of any kind and your TOS promises to provide rule enforcement, you’re going to need help with that.  A programmer shouldn’t be expected to have moderation skills.  There are people who have experience with forum and/or IRC moderation.  Most of us enjoy helping out in forums we like to visit.  It’s a way to repay the hospitality, to contribute in a positive way with the community.

Twitter is making a mistake in changing their TOS in an effort to avoid dealing with issues like these.  Your online reputation is as important as the one you have in the real world.  No social site should ever want to appear negligent.

They need to maintain their TOS, which wasn’t much more than the same agreement you agree to in joining a forum or IRC channel.  Then they need to hire some moderators.  Their members deserve a feeling of safety while using their service.  A strong TOS enforced by moderators is a far better solution than ignoring the problems and claiming no responsibility.