!salt
OP
OP
Webmistress

The !salt Rules Discussion Thread

Hello Boobies, Webmaster here (yes, my "can post as myself" kingdom is expanding).


As you might have heard, now that we can have sidebars (and now that our user base is growing), it's time to start discussing both which "official categories" every board should have, and also get more specific about rules and stuff.


I wanted to begin with !salt because... well, it's The Most Dangerous board we have. From great salt comes great responsibility, and so (without calling anyone out, because this is not what we're here for and also, no one knows who you are anyway), I wanted to start proposing and discussing guidelines.


More inside!

»I know I know we survived without rules for so long
»and I don't want to be overly prescriptive, ofc
»but I think !salt most of all has the potential to really hurt people and feelings and we should strive to set some boundaries to maintain the culture here one that doesn't make people feel alienated
OP

So, here's some things that we had discussed in the past:


  1. Unless someone is a reasonably-known figure, avoid discussing people by name and putting their posts/tweets on blasts. This is the one board where screenshotting (with blocked out names) rather than embedding is preferable. If you're using a tweet to illustrate a generic situation/behavior rather than discussing a specific person, use your best judgement.
  2. When a post is discussing a situation that happened within the community, you have two options:
    • Let enough time pass that other community-members won't feel "vagued" about, and then discuss the behavior more generally.

Explicitly acknowledge what happened, and word your comment carefully, with the full expectation that the person might see it and react. While it might not be in the spirit of !salt, the Situation/Behavior/Impact framework above can be useful to discuss the topic in terms of the impact the discussion had on you, as opposed to associating ill intent to the person doing the behavior.

»Please remind me if we had come up with other guidelines
»and as always feel free to disagree
»or expand
»or improve
»don't forget we're building culture together here
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    Speaking of point 2, and acknowledging things that happen within the community, part of what prompted Finally Doing This was someone reaching out to me about this thread explicitly linking to a fanfic being described as "mediocre".


    The Anonymous Anon felt that, while discussing mediocre fics is time-tested tradition and something we have all done, explicitly linking to the story and putting it on blast in a public forum (even a semi-public one like Boba) creates an environment where people fear their fanfic might be the next one to be publicly lambasted. And, of course, there's always the possibility that OP themselves might with time end up stumbling upon the thread.


    Because of this, I'd also like to propose a rule about not discussing specific instances of fanworks. Of course, before setting this in stone (though nothing ever is), I'd like to crowdsource better heuristic and guidelines for it: are there situation/cases where you feel a public discussion is warranted? What should the guidelines on discussing a specific work be like?

    »person doing the linking/blogging, please don't feel like you've done anything wrong
    »there was no rule against this, and it's something most of us have done one way or the other
    »it's just that the culture in an anonymous space is a very delicate thing, and we must be careful in setting good boundaries to keep it one that feels safe
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