User contributions in the form of posts, comments, and votes are essential to the success of online communities. However, allowing user participation also invites undesirable behavior such as trolling. In this paper, we characterize antisocial behavior in three large online discussion communities by analyzing users who were banned from these communities. We find that such users tend to concentr...

Understanding and forecasting the health of an online community is of great value to its owners and managers who have vested interests in its longevity and success. Nevertheless, the association between community evolution and the behavioural patterns and trends of its members is not clearly understood, which hinders our ability of making accurate predictions of whether a community is flourishi...

This paper reports the findings of a study which developed a theoretical framework for studying the growth policies in a special kind of virtual communities: open online collaboration communities. The study made use of dynamic feedback modeling and simulation, and a series of interviews with the members of an open online collaboration community that specializes on instructional material develop...

There is a broad agreement, that the establishment of communities among users of online platforms can contribute significantly to the success of the platform. This provoked the demand for guidelines on how to build an online community. Currently, guidelines available in literature emphasize social and economic aspects of community building and neglect technical aspects. The main hypothesis of t...

This paper presents the results from a study on issues for sociability and usability for legitimate peripheral participation in online communities. Informal learning is considered to occur within the individual in a selforganized way and within the community as consensus knowledge building. A catalogue for usability and sociability evaluation criteria was developed, in order to identify the two...

Even though online communities enjoy a growing number of members, their success and popularity are regularly diminished by infringements of user trust. Consequently, community operators implement IT-based trust-promoting features to regain user trust. Not knowing if their efforts are effective, for community operators the question remains: how do trust-promoting IT-features contribute to user p...

Online community is having growing social and commercial impact on the Web, but what does “community” mean online? Can the level of community be measured? This article addresses these questions by articulating an evidential conceptual model of community synthesizing earlier definitions drawn from the literature and adding new conditions. It illustrates, by means of a small case study, how the l...

Online communities are changing the ways that creative professionals such as artists and designers share ideas, receive feedback, and find inspiration. While they became increasingly popular, there have been few studies so far. In this paper, we investigate Behance, an online community site for creatives to maintain relationships with others and showcase their works from various fields such as ...

High-quality review within an online review community greatly determines the survival and success of the online community. As such, it is crucial for community operators to understand which kinds of users are more likely to share publish high-quality review, a topic not yet adequately investigated in e-commerce research. We used a unique dataset from a large traveling community, and examined wh...

Virtual communities were promoted as “the” business model in eBusiness. Nowadays only a few communities are economically successful. Although revenues expected trough advertising or subscriptions are low, communities are still a perfect place to “listen to the costumer”. By integrating community members into market research and product development activities companies can get efficient support ...