Why 30+ Campus Boards Wrote One Set of Guidelines
Every campus board used to learn its rules the hard way, one mistake at a time. The Campus Board Guidelines are our attempt to share those lessons before anyone has to repeat them.
Most campus boards are run by a handful of students in their spare time. They are good at it in the ways that matter most: they know their school, they reply quickly and they care about the people who send in posts. What they rarely have is time to think through, in advance, what to do when a post goes wrong.
The Campus Board Guidelines (《校园墙使用指南》) were written to give them that thinking ahead of time. They were drafted together with more than 30 campus boards in Fuzhou and are still being improved. This piece explains what they are for, what they cover and, just as importantly, what they do not try to do.
The cost of learning alone
Before the alliance, every board built its own rules from scratch. In practice that meant rules were written after something had already gone wrong: a post that named the wrong person, an advert that turned out to be a scam, a quarrel between two classes that spilled into the comments. Each board learned the same lessons separately, and the students affected by those lessons paid for them.
There was a second cost. Readers moving between boards, or comparing their school’s board with a friend’s, saw very different standards. One board would remove a post that another would publish without a second thought. That inconsistency made it harder for any board to explain its decisions, and easier for unhappy readers to call them arbitrary.
What the Guidelines are for
The Guidelines have three jobs. The first is reducing risk: helping operators recognise the kinds of posts that can hurt someone or get a board into trouble, and giving them a sensible default response so they can act quickly. The second is consistency: a shared baseline, so that similar posts are treated in similar ways across different schools. The third, which follows from the first two, is trust. Students, teachers and parents are more willing to rely on a board when they can predict how it will behave.
A board earns trust when its readers can predict what it will publish, what it will not, and why.
The situations they address
The Guidelines are organised around situations operators actually meet, rather than abstract rules. In principle they cover:
- Anonymous posts: how to keep senders safe while still taking responsibility for what the board publishes.
- Personal information: why names, photos, phone numbers, class details and similar information should not appear without a very good reason.
- Rumours and unverified claims: how to slow down when a post makes an accusation or spreads news nobody can check.
- Advertising: how to tell useful notices from paid promotion and scams, and how to label anything commercial clearly.
- Conflicts: what to do when a disagreement between students starts to play out on the board.
- Minors: the extra care needed when many readers and senders are under 18, as they are on most middle and high school boards.
A document that is maintained, not finished
The Guidelines are written by people who run boards, for people who run boards. New situations come up all the time as platforms change and new kinds of posts appear. When operators meet a case the Guidelines do not handle well, they bring it to the alliance’s operator exchanges, where it is discussed with other boards before any wording changes.
This slows things down, and that is deliberate. A rule that only one board has tested tends to reflect that board’s particular school and audience. A rule that several boards have argued over is more likely to hold up elsewhere.
What the Guidelines cannot do
The Guidelines are not a law and the alliance is not a regulator. Every campus board remains independent and makes its own decisions. The alliance does not review posts before they go out, and it cannot remove content from a board it does not run. Boards adapt the Guidelines to their own school, and some will set stricter rules than the baseline.
They also cannot replace judgement. No document can list every post an operator will see. What the Guidelines can do is give operators a starting point, a shared vocabulary for discussing hard cases and the confidence that comes from knowing other boards would make a similar call.
That is a modest goal. But for a student who has just inherited a board and is facing a difficult post at eleven at night, a sensible starting point is exactly what is needed.
