We are one month in on the Another Eden magazine, and I think that’s a good time to take a moment and check the temperature.
We are growing, with new content being posted regularly, and I have to thank all of your for your efforts. Threads, comments, upvotes; all of these contribute to the community and are important to building the sort of space we want on Kbin.
Now, a few comments have come to me about content and keeping a healthy environment (for discussion, as well as our members).
When it comes to content, as long as it is related to Another Eden in some way, it’s on topic - that includes the story, characters, head canon, fan art, fan fic, or even the state of gachas in general (if AE is reasonably referenced). That’s not an exhaustive list. As an example of off-topic or not acceptable discussion, anything that violates copyright or would open the magazine to legal repercussions, please refrain from posting here. Discussion of this content, if done tactfully, is on topic, IMO. Additionally, meta discussions about this community are always welcome.
As concerns cross-posting to or from /r/AnotherEdenGlobal, if the content is your own, by all means go to town. If it’s not yours, please get permission from the creator. If you want to encourage people visiting the magazine, that’s also cool, just be nice about it. Whatever the platform, let’s be respectful of the larger AE community.
For how we interact, I’ve been considering some options around a Code of Conduct, or community rules. For a starting point, I’m suggesting we adopt the Contributor Convenant. We can make adjustments (this was originally created for open-source development communities), but the bones are good, IMO. It puts responsibilities on us all as community members, as well on leadership to enforce the rules and represent the interests of the community.
On the note of leadership, I am calling for those interested in being mods on the magazine. I freely admit that I’m not a gregarious person, and while I’m not afraid of enforcing rules, I’m not the best candidate for building the social aspect of our community. Additionally, personal events this past week have shown me that I am not a safe choice as a single point of failure (as owner and single mod, I am very much in that position). I realize kbin currently lacks mod resources, and we’re not currently seeing situations requiring moderation. However, I’d rather have the network setup before we need it.
So I’ve done a lot of talking, and I want to hear what others think. For me, this is our community and we need to grow it based on open communication and consensus - to be clear, that doesn’t mean we all agree on everything, just that we have no clear and rational objections; I’m happy opening a separate thread on this topic.
Some specific topics we should consider:
- How do we want to handle spoilers? @niantre has a thread with a simple solution; do we want to adopt that until kbin gets spoilers working?
- Do we want to allow sensitive (pornographic, graphic violence, slash fic, etc) content? What subset of items are/are not acceptable? If yes, how do we respect everyone and their desire to avoid this content? To be clear, if we can’t find an acceptable way to balance these needs, we won’t be allowing sensitive items in the magazine - external hosting without preview is an option in that case.
- Anything else you want to see in the community.
Looks like most things have been covered pretty well. I agree with that spoiler approach working well until the platform has a proper solution in place, and definitely it’s worth having at least a basic rules framework in place before any problems actually arise.
What are the modding tools like on here? I’d be happy to assist if no more enthusiastic offers arise, but my own activity is likely to be fairly sporadic as well, since I tend to have fairly busy periods with work and other irl stuff. If there are good reporting tools for other members to alert us when there are issues that need attention, that would definitely help, especially if email notifications are an option, but I’m not sure whether Kbin’s doing email notifications for anything yet? At any rate, I’ve modded before and would prefer to be retired from that, but at the current size and with the help of the rest of the users, it would certainly be manageable.
In terms of content, it would be good to see some gameplay assistance posts. Even if not full guides, links to useful content or PSAs for easily missible things in new content would be helpful. I can generally stay on top of the news posts, since they pop up at a convenient time for me. Livestream recaps will be case by case, since they tend to be fairly late in the evening my time, so if anyone wants to pick those up, they’re very welcome to. I tend to get to game content a bit on the later side, though (although that seems common in users here anyway), so not the most helpful for anything from that side.
Mods tools are basically non-existent. I can pin tabs, and that’s about it. Editing anyone else’s post doesn’t work last I checked, nor does deleting posts. Badges and tags don’t seem to populate as expected.
I’ve been tempted to dig into the kbin source and maybe help, but I don’t particularly care for PHP as a language.