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.
I think the current state of the magazine is doing well…
I was pleasantly surprised by how thoughtful, well articulated, and civilized most people’s comments were compared to what I’ve seen on reddit. It’s a nice change of pace.
Although, that could be because there’s are only a handful of users leaving comments right now. So I can see how having some community guidelines could be helpful to establish the kinds of interactions or values we want to promote as our numbers grow and attract a more diverse group of users.
Reading the Contributor Covenant (here is a more direct link), I think it has some good ideas, but I do think it could use some adjusting to fit this magazine a little better. One thing that stands out to me is that it’s a code of conduct more appropriate for a professional setting:
While these are good guidelines for a professional community, I think this type of rule could be relaxed seeing as we’re a more casual environment where you have memes and in-game jokes, such as Arche’s nickname for King Miglance’s chest. But I can see the purpose behind the rule regarding sexual language / sexual attention or advances, as certain sexist language could marginalize or push away people we’d want to welcome.
Another aspect of the Contributor Covenant I think we don’t need as much formality yet are the enforcement guidelines. Those rules sound more appropriate for an open source project where people are working on a common product, whereas we just have individual contributions on conversation topics.
Just my personal opinion… I would condense the most relevant/useful parts of those guidelines to:
Having simple rules can be beneficial sometimes, as seen in the philosophy of the Lemmy instance Beehaw, and easier to enforce rather than all of us having to adhere to keep track of more detailed guidelines that may get ignored due to complexity (which means those rules don’t serve their usefulness).
Since this is a fan-based community, I think having a guideline towards fanart could be helpful, for example:
(A direct link would be ok, right? I think the idea behind that is that artists don’t get exposure to their original post if it is reuploaded by other people.) This doesn’t have to be the exact rule, but just an example related to content sharing. Or perhaps your own suggestion with regard to cross-posting would work.
In terms of allowable content, I think the NSFW settings in user profile works well, because posts are completely gone if you have NSFW turned off.
I’m neutral on this topic for now. Though I think in addition to the NSFW tag, a content warning in the title indicating what type of content it is could be beneficial, as some people might be ok with some of these types of more graphic content but not others.
While I won’t be able to contribute in the capacity of moderating, I think this is a good opportunity to say thank you for starting this magazine as a reddit alternative, at a timely moment when a number of us were leaving the site.
Very good suggestions all-round. The Contributor covenant is actually intended for OSS communities, so the professional elements are situational. Your modifications are good ones. Mostly, I suggested it as a starting point (I find it helps discussion to start from something).
I’ll take some time to collect the suggestions and come up with something simple (another good suggestion). I’m feeling energetic and want to make hay while the sun shines. No telling when that’ll fade away. :lol: