AOL Community Leader Program
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since December 2006. |
The AOL Community Leader Program or AOL CLP was the official name for the large group of volunteers who moderated chat rooms, message boards, and download libraries. It was established in the early 1990s, and discontinued in 2005. At the peak of the program, it is estimated that AOL had approximately 13,000 volunteers.
Community Leaders had a wide variety of responsibilities, ranging from hosting chat rooms, monitoring message boards and file libraries, providing customer service, teaching online classes, and even creating and managing forum content. (However, toward the end of the program, Community Leader duties were generally restricted to monitoring chat and message boards). In exchange for their services, AOL provided free service to their volunteers. Community Leaders also received special accounts (Price Index 77 or Overhead Accounts) that allowed them to restrict disruptive chat, hide inappropriate message board postings, and access private areas on the AOL service, such as the Community Leader Headquarters (CLHQ).
Although at times controversial, the Community Leader program arguably played a substantial role in the rapid growth and success of the America Online service in the mid-1990s. Because they were usually recruited from the more active users of a particular online forum, Community Leaders were often very passionate about the area for which they volunteered their time. This enthusiasm usually resulted in a greater sense of community and a higher level of professionalism in that forum. This in turn gave the AOL service more value over the less organized "frontier" of the Internet, at least in the eyes of users new to the online scene at the time. It also provided oversight with respect to forum content by knowledgeable individuals.
As the Internet itself became increasingly accessible, AOL could be compared to network television as opposed to the Internet's public access cable. Increasingly, however, available sites on the internet became well supervised to the extent that AOL no longer was able to retain its differentiation. Moreover, AOL stopped using RAINMAN, an internal programming language, to program its internal forums, preferring to switch to HTML. The result again was that they lost the differentiation that they had initially when RAINMAN-designed programming had a unique user interface and rapid presentation as opposed to HTML. Once AOL decided to discontinue their CL program, a major feature differentiating them from the internet as a whole was eliminated.
