Because it's about time someone did!
Thinking About Community Rules
UPDATE - Rules adapted to include a link to the official Imzy Community Policy page, which covers a lot of the stuff below. -J
As you've probably seen, our community rules are currently pretty broad. As this community grows, I'd like to get them a bit more specific, and I'm wondering what y'all would and wouldn't like to see here: what you see as defining the J&MXtX-M community, concerns, questions, and so on.
Some ideas I'm batting around so far:
- No commercial links without context or commentary
- (Or maybe no links without context or commentary, period? Even a cursory "I think this is cool" helps a lot to foment discussion!)
- Civil and inclusive language are absolute givens for me. Do you think we need to get more specific than that? My strong instinct is to feel that part out as we go, but if folks would be more comfortable with more specific language, please let me know. Likewise, "civil and inclusive" seems to me like it would also cover "no hate-speech"; but, again, if folks would be more comfortable with that rule made explicit, I can.
- Work-safe within the community; and tag any NSFW links. For the obvious reasons, but I'd also really like this to be a community that's both all-ages-friendly (within Imzy's guidelines, so, 13+) and has space for more adult-oriented conversations.
- Content warnings. This is a tough one for me, because it's such an individual issue. We don't really do trigger warnings on the podcast, but we'll occasionally add a note to the beginning of an episode that's covering something that seems likely to be particularly disturbing content--sexual violence, suicide, &c. Ideally, I'd like to leave this to the discretion of individual community members--along with strong encouragement to tag potentially upsetting material.




I think we would have to feel out the inclusive language bit as we go simply due to the fact that inclusive language is developing all the time and everyone comes at it from a different place. That said, I would hope that "no hate-speech" would be a basic ground rule.
Thanks for inviting your community. It's a great set of people, from what I can tell. These sound like good guidelines. "Civil and inclusive language" covers pretty much everything I can think of. I've been a forum and chat mod for years in different communities and I prefer the more vague rules since it's harder for someone to play with technicalities.
My experience as a mod on the IGN forums way back in the day was that some users would always play around with the specifics and technicalities. I seriously doubt that will be a problem here, but I agree with you that some vagueness to the rules is a good thing.
Yeah, that's been my experience in a number of communities I've moderated as well. It's a big part of why I tend to fall back on the combination of general language and "this is a benevolent dictatorship, not a democracy" disclaimers.
Absolutely. It's your space and you have the final say in what's okay and what's not.
How exactly would you want to delineate between the all-ages norm and the more adult bits? Would a "hello yes this is a not-all-ages thread" flag in post titles be enough? (I'm assuming this also covers swearing etc)
Nah, swearing's fine. We're an M-rated podcast; I think it's fair to assume that our community discussions will involve judicious use of colorful metaphors. =)
I'm honestly not sure how it'd play out logistically. There's a spoiler function that might be repurposeable; but, yeah, that's probably going to be more of a pain than just making the rule "Keep the board itself SFW; indicate NSFW links; and understand that teenagers might see what you post."
The age-appropriateness thing is a huge blind spot for me--I don't have kids, and I grew up reading anything and everything (and having pretty frank conversations about it with my parents)--so I think I tend to overcompensate on the side of caution. =P
Hah, I tend to avoid kids in most spaces, online and offline...
I think perhaps a general understanding that particularly NSFW conversations (should those be a thing at any point) might want some sort of visible acknowledgement right at the top of the first post somewhere would be worth having.
In other news, this "only notifying you of the first comment" thing seems a bit of an odd approach.
I'd encourage you to bring up any questions, concerns or issues with Imzy--they're actively seeking and very quick to respond to feedback!
Agree with all of these and I would +1 the "no links without commentary". It just seems like good, polite communication.
I guess the only thing I have to add about that is that I sometimes post imgur links to gifs, and the gif acts as the communication. I've wondered sometimes about non-labeled gif replies on the XPTXM site...do they seem rude, risky, bait, or just something that people don't want to click on without a hint of context?
Mm. If the gif automatically appears within the conversation, then you're really replying with an image (and I have no idea if/how this is supported in Imzy). I have no problem with this, assuming it's supported.
If it doesn't, you're kind of assuming that I care so much about your reply that I'll leave the conversation to go look at another page to see your response. That seems like poor communication to me. If the link isn't accompanied by any other text, I guess I'd assume that you're not contributing much to the conversation so I'm likely to ignore the link anyway (at which point, what's the harm?).
I suppose in the end I see allowing this not providing a lot of value and prohibiting it preventing random clickbait/malicious trolling and I'd prefer a rule against it.
I played around with the image functions here, and it seems gifs display properly without redirecting to a new tab/page. So that's good.
I'll be thoughtful of the impression that too many image only replies may give off. I do want to be a positive part of this community.
As someone who does a lot of image-only posting on social media--and has been part of forums with pretty vibrant and cool image-based discussions--I think this is more a matter of how you use images in replies than of volume.
I would, however, request that you embed 'em rather than linking, when possible.
Should we wait for the mods to post discussions for new episodes here, or is that something the community can take on?
I'd appreciate it if you'd wait.
Can we post links to our favorite panels/excerpts (anything three pages or shorter)?
Gooooood question.; and that IS something I should specify in the comm rules, considering.
If an image falls under the rules of fair use--i.e. if it is germane to a point of discussion that can be illustrated in no other way than to quote the source--and is within a reasonable volume, that's fine by me; as is use of single panels as comments/reactions.
That said: this isn't scans_daily; and I don't want it to be scans_daily. And this is also a good reminder that I need to throw in a "no full scans / no links to torrents / seriously that's not what this community is for" clause somewhere, too.
What do people generally think about "off-topic" discussions here? We're all obviously X-Men fans and fans of the podcast, but as a community do we want to discuss other things with each other as well? Or is it best to keep it generally comics related?
I'd be fine with OT threads as long as they're tagged as such in the subject line!
Can you expand on "no commercial links"? Do you mean no links that benefit from clicks or referral links?
Links to storefronts, products, &c.--anything that could reasonably be captioned "Here is a thing you can purchase."
As far as tagging spoilers, does that just include things that came out in the last few weeks or months, or should we warn for further back than that?