Subject-specific communities or clubs should be listed with the subject category. Regional communities should be listed with the regional category. Communities whose participation uses languages other than English should be listed under the World category.

Consider as well whether the site is better listed in Chat, Bulletin Boards, Mailing Lists or Message Boards.

The community must be active: a community member must have posted on the week the site is reviewed. Chat sites submissions must have member persistence, i.e., most participants are regulars and have member profiles.

In short, only active, global, persistent communities, written in English, are accepted.

We repeat: if your community has a subject, uses a foreign language, has a target or has a focus, they are listed elsewhere, not here.

Suggesting inappropriate sites to this category will only delay their review and potential listing by editors.

If your site is focused more on a geographical region than a topic, search the Regional tree for your locality. Submit your category there.

If your members almost always use a language other than English, search the World tree under that language.

If nothing above works, then submit your site to "Computers: Internet: Cyberspace: Online Communities" so that it may be categorized appropriately.

Please consider first whether the topics in the See Also links of this category are more appropriate for your site as a whole.

The hosting site must, at the minimum, provide both chat and message board facilities. The site must be hosting at least two community sites during the time it is reviewed.

These communities must be active: a community member must have posted on the week the site is reviewed.

Otherwise, the hosting site is welcome in Computers: Internet: Web_Design_and_Development: Hosting, not here. Please do not waste your time.

This category only accepts sites or pages that comprise an annotated list of online communities.

Please submit only sites that are in the English language. Sites not in English should be submitted to the appropriate category in World under the appropriate language.

We receive hundreds of submissions in this category. Only submit your site if it is a social networking site. All others will likely get lost with other non-networking sites.

Myspace related pages should be submitted to the Myspace category. They will likely be ignored if they are submitted here as there are people who submit to the correct category who will likely get listed first.

Remotely-hosted facilities and Application Service Provision (ASP) services should go to Online Communities: Community Providers, even if they require participants to install plug-ins or other software.

Please indicate the software and operating system requirements and whether the company provides remote hosting services.