Writing community guidelines with AI

Most community guidelines are either copied from a big social network or dashed off the night before launch. Neither works well. Copied rules do not fit a small, specialist community, and rushed ones leave gaps that turn into arguments the first time something awkward happens. Then the owner is making up policy in the middle of a heated thread, which is the worst possible moment.

AI is a genuinely useful partner here, not because it knows your community, but because it is good at asking questions, drafting plain language and imagining the messy situations you have not thought of yet. The values have to come from you. The drafting, and much of the stress-testing, can be shared.

Start with your values, not a template

If you ask an assistant to “write community guidelines,” you will get a generic list that could belong to any forum on the internet. Start instead by letting it interview you. This pulls out what you actually care about.

I run [describe your membership: who the members are, what they are working on, how the community is used]. I want to write community guidelines. Interview me one question at a time to find out what this community is for, what behavior I want more of, what has gone wrong before or worries me, and where the gray areas are, such as selling, sharing client work, giving advice or talking about competitors. After about ten questions, summarize my answers as a list of values and concerns. Do not write the guidelines yet.

Picture Lingua Guild, a professional association for freelance translators. The interview surfaces things a template never would: members must not post client documents, even anonymized; rate discussions are welcome but naming and shaming agencies is not; and newcomers asking basic questions should be treated generously, because many members remember being ignored elsewhere.

Turn your answers into a short, positive draft

With the summary in hand, ask for a first draft with some firm constraints:

• Six to ten guidelines, each a short line followed by one sentence explaining why.
• Phrased as what to do where possible: “Share what worked for you” rather than “Do not give bad advice.”
• Plain language a tired member can scan on a phone.
• A short section on how to report a problem, what happens when a guideline is broken, and how to ask for a decision to be reviewed.

If you already have a voice guide, paste it in so the draft sounds like the rest of your site. A style sheet for your brand voice is worth building for exactly this reason.

Stress-test with scenarios from your niche

This is the step that makes the biggest difference, and it is where AI earns its place. Ask it to play the awkward member:

Here are my draft community guidelines: [paste the draft]. Our community is [one-sentence description]. Write 15 realistic gray-area situations that could happen here, specific to our niche, including a few where a well-meaning member causes a problem. For each one, say which guideline applies, or say that none clearly does. Then list the guidelines that are vague, overlapping or likely to be applied inconsistently.

A useful result looks like this: “A member asks for help with a tricky phrase and pastes two paragraphs from a client's contract. Guideline 2 covers client documents, but it is unclear whether short excerpts count.” Now you know where to add a sentence. Work through the list, decide how you would handle each situation, and tighten the wording until the answer is obvious from the guideline alone.

Scenarios also make good training material for volunteer moderators later. The thinking behind consistent enforcement is covered in moderating your community fairly with AI help.

Edit for your voice and your members

Now the draft is yours to finish. Read it aloud. Cut anything that sounds like legal boilerplate or like it was written for a million strangers. Check each rule with one question: will I actually enforce this, every time, for everyone? If not, remove it or rewrite it. A rule you ignore teaches members that none of the rules matter.

Then show the draft to two or three trusted members or moderators before it goes live. Ask what is unclear, what feels unfair and what is missing. Their answers are worth more than any further prompt.

Guidelines sit alongside your terms of service, not in place of them. Where you are touching legal matters such as liability, privacy or professional rules in your field, keep the guidelines general and check the details with a qualified professional.

Keep them alive after launch

Guidelines age. New features arrive, the community grows, and situations come up that nobody imagined. When something new happens, describe it, anonymized, to your assistant along with the current guidelines and ask whether the guidelines cover it and, if not, what the smallest change would be. You decide whether to make it.

When you do change a guideline, tell members what changed and why in a short post. Pin the guidelines where new members see them, mention them in your welcome messages and link to them from your report button so they are never more than a click away.

Many owners find it helps to try the interview and scenario prompts in two different assistants, such as ChatGPT and Claude, and compare what each asks. They tend to notice different gaps.

Your first steps

1. Run the interview prompt and save the summary of your values and concerns.
2. Ask for a short, positive draft with explanations and a reporting section.
3. Stress-test it with at least fifteen scenarios from your niche and fix the vague spots.
4. Read it aloud, cut what you will not enforce and share it with a few trusted members.
5. Publish, pin it and link it from your welcome and reporting flow.
6. For more on the non-AI side, read about writing community guidelines people will follow.