Not sure where else to put this.

definitely read that as "buried the hatchet in beldaran"
....i should stop watching horror movies

 

I'm so tempted to edit the post to make that change. clearly, you need to be watching more horror movies

 

When Lawyers Attack: A Totally True Documentary by the makers of Trolling in the Homestuck Fandom: When Fiction Gets Too Real

 

anyways.
for my two cents
I actually generally quite like when this forum acts as a more-or-less unmoderated community a la tumblr, with mods mostly just doing housekeeping stuff.
I do think it's unreasonable to expect an unmoderated community not to develop emergent social rules, and to discuss and critique them when they aren't working well and explain them and enculturate newcomers when they are.

I'm not interested in more moderation when I complain about "no rules" I'm asking for lack of derailing when trying to have meaningful discussions of organically forming rules and lack of trying to suppress emergent rules from the top down to enforce the "no rules" rule.

 

I'd also like a thread in That's So Meta, where we can have a masterpost of social rules/guidelines so its easy for new people to find and learn.

Of course that would probably require a big discussion to agree on what social rules there are. But it would be nice to have that without a derail about what a "rule" is and how rules can be exploited and only hurt people and we can't have any ect ect

 

hey that's me! and yeah, that wasn't actually helpful, sry. while there's something to be said for derails being good for levity and for a breather, throwing snowballs at the lawyer probs doesn't count as that.

and, yes, we absolutely need some kind of guidelines discussion to happen in TSM, so that rules and not-rules can be less of a mystery. "don't put a stumbling block in front of a blind person" is a thing one of my rabbis used to say a lot about religious rules and laws and such, and the "no rules" rule has become a hell of a stumbling block for people like me who aren't particularly good at discerning social rules.

 

Something I personally also would like is if changes to the forum layout/functionality and the side being unreachable were scheduled occurences that everyone is warned about ahead of time at least when it's done on purpose and not "Because of emergency seebs broke something trying to fix emergency". Like i can get that that kind of thing cannot be warned for but I'd *really* like if the random "oh btw I'm doing a thing so you can't use the forum, no one warned about this or communicated this would happen bc why would anyone need to know about stuff like that lol" things and stuff like adding A New Thing without warning or asking if that thing is okay as it is or if it might need to be changed not to cause discomfort (the Thread Prefix thing), could not happen so much anymore.
I'm... mildly confused how they happen at all on a forum with a huge chunk of autistic members and with the admin being autistic tbh. "Strong negative reaction to sudden change" is not exactly one of the more obscure symptoms.

 

Communication about change would be nice. But then again, communication in general would be nice, I think?

I'm getting the feeling that's not happening even with the mod team though. Whenever I've been a mod of anything, anywhere, there's an officer's chat (or similar) where the mod team can ensure that they're on the same page with regards to issues, and come to a consensus behind the scenes so that it's not a case of 'Oh, well, X is online and Z is not, so _____'. Maybe there is a secret area of the forum, maybe there isn't, but just by catching up on the thread, I'm pretty sure it's an 'isn't'. And while I'm okay with the lack of rules being a rule, I would like to have a known and consistent response for when a line is stated and is crossed.

I state my lines in the second post of the vent threads, but if I were upset about a thing someone did, and was trying to handle being upset about it, and I didn't have them blocked... not knowing what would happen if they came into my thread, upset with me for being upset, makes me feel like I'm on unsteady ground and I'm not sure if I should stand up or stay prone. Because if they don't want it moved to an external thread for whatever reason, then I don't know if I'd have to deal with that or have my space back as mine. Same with screencapping my posts. Just like with Khan, the vent thread might not be in the ITA subforum but every word is linked to my experiences. I say very sweeping and uncharitable things in my vent threads that have the potential to hurt people, because I've been hurt. Should I be afraid that if I go into a thread and an argument breaks loose, someone will screencap one of those things and post it so that people who avoid the vent threads for the own safety are now a.) exposed to it, and b.) piling on me because of a thing I said that might not even be related to the argument in question?

(There's a particular thing in mind, but I don't want to state it because, again, I don't want to expose people who could be hurt by this generalization to it, when I'm certain it does not apply to them as individuals.)

(also i'm sorry for bringing up stuff from like two pages ago)

TL;DR: while i won't say that individuals explicitly stating their own rules in case of going against the norm is a must, i think (in a biased way) that it's probably the best course of action until we do get threads set up to get a general consensus so that things are effectively communicated to everyone involved. but i want to be reassured that if these lines have been communicated, that the mod team helps to ensure those lines and boundaries are respected.

 

Kinda like this? Or more of a document with "These are generally agreed upon social rules we follow."

 

More of an organized document so that people don't have to dig through an entire thread and hope that someone remembered to mention every social rule.

 

I've never seen a community try to systematize social rules like that rather than relying on general absorption and enculturation, but then again majority autistic forum so who knows how that will go.

 

yes exactly. I don't have the spoons or attention span to read whole threads most of the time. it's just not a thing I can do, but a thread like that kinda requires you to do that or else be yelled at for asking something that's already been answered twice

@Wiwaxia I'm allistic and I think it would be a good thing to try. social rules are hard for some of us, and anything to make them easier seems like something worth trying, even if it doesn't work out

 

It might work out. General absorbtion doesn't seem to be working so great. There's gonna be some stuff that's still debated like how much control OP has over non-personal threads and some stuff subject to future change like vent threads but I think we can mostly agree on some stuff

 

Most of the forum works fine. The difficulty is in how to deal with edge cases without messing up the parts that work fine.

 

yes, but in a community that's largely mentally ill, neuroatypical and traumatized, the parts that don't work fine cause serious trouble. I don't want to mention the suicides that we don't know about for sure, since a) we don't know if that's what happened and b) if they did, that was their own choice and no one else is directly responsible for that. but, in at least one of those cases the forum actively made the situation worse, and there's a chance that written guidelines could prevent such extreme cases from getting worse.

also, on a more everyday use sort of note, osmosis is a v inefficient way of absorbing social guidelines for some of us, and it would help to know what pitfalls to avoid

 

There's a chance reciting a poem to my magical rock could prevent such extreme cases, too.

 

To be clear, I'm not saying "i've never seen this" and "who knows how that will go" as "this is a bad idea," just as their literal meanings.
(with a side of "this should be interesting however it goes")

 

Great idea! You do that and we do our thing and maybe between us, we'll improve something

 

that must be one hell of a rock, if it'd be just as much help as a guideline saying "don't add to a discussion that's already 5-against-1 and the 1 is in the middle of a ptsd episode"