Read before participating: An update on rules and community guidelines.

Update on rules and community guidelines.

After a very civilised start, this community unfortunately took a nosedive over the last couple of weeks. The rule breaking climaxed in the comments on the Rust-shooting post, to the point where I had to lock the thread and stop posting completely to allow everyone to cool off. I’m partially to blame, I’m British and clearly underestimated how contentious a post mentioning guns would be. I apologise for that. I have no desire to be the morality/thought police and tell you what you can and can’t post or discuss, but I’m also committed to making this community enjoyable, friendly and welcoming. So I’m tightening up the rules of this community and for now I’ll try and stick to less polarising posts.

I’ve previously asked for volunteer mods and requested your feedback and suggestions on how this community is run in a stickied post but there were no takers. I’m still looking for additional moderators and I’m open to any input or suggestions you have on the way this community is run. Please post all community-related questions or suggestions to this post.

How this community is moderated.

I’m the sole moderator here but I have a couple of accounts: SomeoneElse@ lemmy.world and feddit.uk and SomeoneElseMod@feddit.uk. You can contact me on any account.

This community has quickly grown to 2.8k subscribers, 35 posts and a whopping 1.5k comments in just a month. Thank you to everyone who’s followed the rules and subscribed, voted, or commented. To ensure this community remains the friendly, entertaining and inclusive place it was intended to be, please report any comments that break the rules listed below.

If you break the rules, your comment is likely to be removed. I will also message you with either a reminder to follow the rules or a warning. You get one warning. If you break the rules again, you will be banned.

“But why did I get a warning when everyone else was breaking the rules too?”

I get it, it sucks to feel singled out but it’s not personal. You are responsible for following the rules of this community. There’s no justification for breaking the rules. I’m on Lemmy a lot, but I don’t have time to read every comment made on every community I moderate so I mainly rely on mod reports generated by you, the users. When a post is reported I act as quickly as possible. When I’m browsing and come across a rule breaking comment, I’ll delete/message/ban accordingly without a report being made. But until another there’s another moderator, I’m bound to miss some rule breaking comments. That is not an excuse for you to retaliate. If you see a comment that breaks the rules report it, then ignore it.

Posting guidelines.

This community is supposed to be entertaining. It’s focused on the schadenfreude of someone not realising who they’re talking to/what qualifications that person has.

All posts in this community have come from elsewhere, it is not original content, the poster in this community is not OP. The person who posts in this community isn’t necessarily endorsing whatever the post is talking about and they are not looking to argue with you about the content in the post.

You are welcome to discuss and debate any topic but arguments are not welcome here. I consider debate/discussions to be civil; people with different opinions participating in respectful conversations. It becomes an argument as soon as someone becomes aggressive, nasty, insulting or just plain unpleasant. Report argumentative comments, then ignore them.

There is currently no rule about how recent a post needs to be because the community is about the Don’t You Know Who I Am part, not the topic. If you’d like this or any other rule to be changed, please reply to this post with your suggestion and reasoning.

Rules.

This community follows the rules of the lemmy.world instance and the lemmy.org code of conduct. I’ve summarised them here:

Be civil, remember the human.
No insulting or harassing other members. That includes name calling.
Respect differences of opinion. Civil discussion/debate is fine, arguing is not. Criticise ideas, not people.
Keep unrequested/unstructured critique to a minimum.
Remember we have all chosen to be here voluntarily. Respect the spent time and effort people have spent creating posts in order to share something they find amusing with you.
Swearing in general is fine, swearing to insult another commenter isn’t.
No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia or any other type of bigotry.
No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.

You can find the link to Lemmy’s full Code of Conduct in the sidebar.

I was really enjoying this community until things went sideways. Again, I apologise for my part in that. I do hope we can get back on track and enjoy the posts in this community in the way they were intended.

SomeoneElse

EDIT: southsamurai@sh.itjust.works has joined the mod team! A big thank you them.

3 comments

Ouch.

It's hard to find mods. It's even harder to find experienced mods. That's partially because of the dearth of mod tools available overall, and the almost complete lack of them in the available apps. Even Summit (the only app I know of with mod tools) doesn't give notifications reliably enough to make it a primary moderation interface. That's a huge issue with lemmy moderation; if we can't get reliable and timely notifications, then you get little teacup tempests causing chaos that you have to deal with instead of being able to nip things before they get nasty

So far, lemmy has been chill enough that the kind of craziness from that post is rare. On all my accounts, with at least one C/ on it, I've had to step in exactly once. And it was for a similar reason.

Your rules are excellent. They're essentially the rules I have used myself when running a forum/subreddit (though I tend to add a no politics rule because that tends to create slapfights too often to allow it on a non political C/ or forum).

I'm on lemmy enough that if you want a hand, I can do so at least short term. There may be days where irl stuff gets crazy and I'm absent, but they're fairly rare usually. None of my current moderated C/s get enough traffic to matter, so I know I can handle playing second banana on one or two more.

As far as previous experience, I ran a few small subs on reddit under this user name, and have moderated forums in general since the nineties (though with big gaps between forums). I'm still getting used to lemmy moderation though.

So, yeah, I'm volunteering. I can follow your moderation guidelines happily, I agree with your C/ rules fully.

If you want, I'll make a lemmy.world account for when sh.itjust.works is down. The two instances tend to get targeted the most. If you'd prefer a different instance as the backup, I can sign on anywhere really.
- That’s partially because of the dearth of mod tools available overall, and the almost complete lack of them in the available apps. Even Summit (the only app I know of with mod tools) doesn’t give notifications reliably enough to make it a primary moderation interface. That’s a huge issue with lemmy moderation; if we can’t get reliable and timely notifications, then you get little teacup tempests causing chaos that you have to deal with instead of being able to nip things before they get nasty
  
  As a mod of a few small communities, I agree, hopefully this will get fixed soon.
  
  Thank you for your work moderating!
- Thank you for the support! And I’ll bite your hand off at the offer of you modding with me! Any little you can do for however long would be wonderful. I’ll DM you to sort it out.
  
  I’m on iOS and there’s no app that alerts you to mod reports afaik - although Lemmios at least offers some mod tools. I make sure to check the mod reports at least once a day, but until there’s reliable notifications modding is a slog. App development has been happening lightning fast though, hopefully it won’t be long.