I don't think the no rules thing is working

I figure people can use judgement for that, too. Since it varies. And context is a thing.

Also, the not telling people who reported them thing is legit. Like . . . privacy is a thing. That is not at odds with telling the reporter 'your feelings about this aren't wrong, but this looks like it's just about the two of you, do you want to try to talk it out yourself or ask them to a tchgb thread.' Since we, uh, do get context. Because the threads are right there.

 

This hasn't happened to my knowledge. We have a discussion about most posts in question before taking action so that it's usually not down to one person's judgment.

 

Personally (ie not with my mod hat on), in a non-18+ thread, I would spoiler anything more explicit than "they had sex." Any mention of genitals definitely get spoilered. I would not bother to spoil "fuck" or "dick" or whatever if they're not being used sexually (so like as insults are fine).

I think that's drawing the line really strictly, tbh? Like I am sure there is a bit more wiggle room than I'm talking about here. But, my general rule is, topics are fine, details are not. "they had sex," "I was abused," "I feel suicidal." I think all of those are okay to be left unspoilered, though I'm a little iffy on the last one. Any amount of detail, I usually spoiler because I like erring on the side of caution and I don't want anyone to be upset because they stumbled across my post, or because their parent/boss was reading over their shoulder and saw it and was like "what the hell are you talking about on there???"

If the thread is already marked 18+, ITA related, or a vent thread, I probably wouldn't bother spoilering. I might spoiler if I was going to be talking in more detail than the level the thread has been operating on. Or, I might just warn at the top of the post.

Example: I recently posted in my vent thread about something that triggered me (abuse warning for that link). Had that been out of my vent thread and not an ITA thread, I would have definitely spoilered it. I warned for it in the post because my vent thread is usually me venting about stress and not abuse related things, but I didn't spoiler it because it's my vent thread (though looking back I haven't warned for that in the tags or first post, so brb doing that).

So, that's a guideline you could use? But it's not necessarily the guideline the mods will enforce.
I have no idea if this will help anyone because it's kind of all over the place. Sorry!

Edit: "enforce" has a stronger connotation than I meant, but I'm not sure what word to use.

 

No, I know that all the mods are definitely on board with the explanations. If a person isn't satisfied with what they've been told, a mod can't necessarily read minds, and there is eventually a point where any person will run out of further answers if they kept getting asked 'why?'. But the team is on board with making a good-faith effort to explain the process, though it's not possible to guarantee that the wigglee will be on board with that explanation by the end of the conversation.

And okay. I really, really do understand the frustration with the lack of firm guidelines around sex. But. If there's the MPAA (deliberately vague) and the AO3 guidelines (also deliberately vague), and a wealth of fics and movies out there with ratings attached to reference how various situations have been rated by these other people. It feels... like it's missing the point to hammer on us pinning down a definitive LIST, right now, that people will agree to. I could write up a list, and I'm pretty sure I'd get pushback over being supposedly prudish and sex-negative because I err in the direction of playing it extra safe with people's consent and comfort. Or other people could write up a list and other people would be upset because you'd allow something that explicit to go unspoilered? And that's without even beginning to account for context.

If people have explicitly written out example lists, I'm happy to read them, even if I'm not prepared to ask for that list to be copy-pasted into the site policy. But I hear about MPAA guidelines... and AO3 guidelines... so we should be able to use those, right? Yes, except they don't really exist in the kind of detail people imply. It's frustrating from my end to understand the problem, but to also be getting this push for definite answers like other people have... when those other definite answers people have cited don't actually exist. I'm sure there are lists, that exist, on other sites with less professional oversight and reach than the MPAA, that I won't necessarily agree with. But citing lists that don't exist doesn't make me confident that people are doing their own research before demanding action.

 

(I sure hope I'm allowed to still comment on things as Just A Person, so) without referring to the mod team or site policy, just my own personal opinions and experiences, which I only hold myself to, I feel like potential harm is minimized when sexual details (in the public threads) are conservatively spoilered. Maybe I overdo it sometimes, but considering that the spoiler function is very convenient, easy to use and easy to click through, it doesn't add a terribly significant degree of difficulty to using the site. It minimizes the likelihood that people are going to get a surprise faceful of sexual content they weren't expecting, and wouldn't have consented to if they'd had the option. Brainbent/ITA tends to be a special case, since those threads tend to be highly personal and frequently have tags or content warnings at the top end and people know what to expect (though like with triggery/suicidal/etc stuff, with some wobbly hand motions at OP posting sex things versus other people posting sex things). But in general threads I try to play it extra safe making sure that anyone who sees stuff more detailed than 'sex exists' are consenting to reading about why sex is happening, how it's happening, all sorts of arguably-but-not-universally-agreed-upon nsfw content that exists before the text becomes full-on erotica.

I spend most of my free time writing and drawing ridiculous amounts of porn, and I'm very very much not sex-negative, though I can see how an aggressive spoiler policy could be taken that way. And even with this mindset, I'm still fairly sure I've got posts in my history where if I remembered where they were, I'd go back and spoiler more aggressively. Maybe I started writing with sfw intentions and then it got unexpectedly explicit, or maybe I just wasn't thinking about it, etc., etc., etc. Even for just myself, I can't pin down a solid gold standard to live by. But it takes very little from me to spoiler tag something as 'nsfwish' or 'nsfw??', and I don't think most people on here would be upset with me for doing that, while I'd definitely understand if someone got upset with me for talking unspoilered about how to show a fictional giant robot a good time. And if I upset someone that way? Oh my god, I'd be so upset with myself, even if I thought the post wasn't that bad and even if the person wasn't all that bothered. It works out best for me if I play things safe... so I play things safe. Again, no kind of mod policy, mod policy has not been locked down for the reasons detailed above, and I'm not telling anyone to follow this approach. This is just what has worked out best emotionally for me, personally.

 

If someone were going to be able to offer a definitive list of "what do we mean by that", it would have been done by now. It hasn't. We are not especially stupid, but I do not think we are the right people to perform the fundamental and groundbreaking research in communications science that would be necessary in order to provide such a list and have it be definitely-correct.

It's heavily contextual, it's cultural, there's a lot of judgment calls and sometimes you just gotta wing it. We are aware that it's not ideal, but in practice, this has been a significant problem for fewer than two users (that have talked to any of us about it, anyway).

 

Okay, and I'm not calling out this statement specifically to pick a fight with it, but I kind of really resent this sentiment.

I was asked to be a moderator. Which I agreed to. Very reluctantly. With the initial intention responding with a hard no, and after agonizing over a maybe for a day or two. Because I don't seek out power like that, I don't take joy in holding a position of authority, and I was (still am) very, very afraid that it's going to completely torpedo the friendships I built on this site, which are some of the only friendships with regular social contact that I have at all right now.

Please don't imply that I was asking for this.

 

@unknownanonymous that is an extremely different reading of cT's post than the one I had, and the one I think Spock had.

 

Yes, that is the reason I said yes at all.

When have I not done this?

When have I done anything that says to you that I am unwilling to act in a fair and ethical manner?

Genuinely, where are you coming from. I am trying hard not to be very offended right now, but I have no idea what you are reading from the original post, given its context.

 

Possibly a useful clarification: 'it tends to make us unpopular' is a dark lampshade of the heaps of virulent verbal abuse that tend to occur (mostly to Beldaran and Seebs). It's not a natural responsibility of authority, but it's a thing that happens.

So cT's comment really, really read like 'you are asking to be abused.'

 

@unknownanonymous People not actively abusing me doesn't mean I forget about, for example, being sexually harassed because someone didn't like my "mod decisions." It's the kind of thing that tends to stick with you, and "you volunteered" in this sort of context is going to read as "the mod skirts are short and slutty."