Fictional Fans

Oh, interesting question! I appear to have a lot to say.

So the guidelines in this comm are deliberately very short, sweet, and simple, because the intent of this comm is to be a place where people who aren't real comfortable with Dreamwidth comms can feel comfortable jumping in, trying things, and messing up.

I'd call them "minimum viable guidelines" - you need a guideline that says some version of "we expect a minimum level of not-being-an-asshole", so that if you do get a total asshole you can ban them without guilt or handwringing, and you need a guideline that says what kind of content you want in your community, because otherwise people won't post because they're afraid it's not the kind of post you want. (Even if it seems obvious what kind of content you want! My main action as a mod on this comm lately is reassuring people 'yes, we really do mean it when we say you can post that'.) So I would add something to your example about what kind of content you want, even if it's just "anything even a little bit related to BNHA is good" or something.

We haven't really needed them much! Like honigfrosch said, DW these days seems to be mostly people who are happy to not be assholes. I think the most I've ever had to do mod-wise on any community I mod on DW is say "hey, knock it off" and freeze a few comment threads until people cool down. But you can't really count on that, especially if you're trying to pull in people who are new to DW.

And there are tradeoffs with short guidelines. f_f is meant to be newbie friendly, but I knew by limiting the guidelines to absolute minimum, there would be people I consider friends who couldn't join.

--Really short conduct guidelines put a lot of power and not a lot of accountability in the hands of the mods, so people who've had bad experiences with power-tripping mods will be chary of conduct rules that aren't well-delineated.
--Mods operating under those kinds of rules have to confident in their own ability to be fair and just without a lot of accountability.
--There are lots of people who have experienced "Don't be an asshole" guidelines to mean as long as they're polite about their racism and harassment, they're fine, but if you get angry about their racism and harassment, you're out. So they're going to avoid those kinds of spaces, and want something that specifically names kinds of conduct you don't tolerate, beyond plain assholery.
--Some people have to be able to avoid certain things: a stalker ex who's still on DW, some aspect of fandom that triggers them, etc. So they can't be in a comm that doesn't have tagging or membership rules that make it possible to avoid certain things or people.
--Some people need certain accessibility aids: text descriptions of images, transcripts of audio, warnings of flashing gifs, not messing with fonts and colors, etc. So it's good to put in, if not a requirement, than an encouragement to do those things.

So there will be people on DW who mod very active communities who would be strongly in favor of long, detailed guidelines! And my other active DW comm has guidelines a bit longer than these.

That said, I am generally in favor of short guidelines, especially for a new community that's trying to grow.
--Shorter rules are less intimidating to new people, harder to mess up accidentally, make it easier to speak up.
--Keeping things vague and broad makes it harder for assholes to rules-lawyer, which is good. It also gives you the ability to be flexible as needed for the good of the community.
--You need to commit to enforcing what's in your guidelines, so if, i.e., you put in strict tagging guidelines, you need to be willing to check every post very soon after it goes up to make sure it follows them. If you won't be able to put in the time/effort to enforce strict guidelines, you're better off not having them.
--If you try to write in things like accessibility aids or tagging common triggers or certain topics to avoid, you will have to make a ruling on what is the *correct* way to do those things, and often you're not an expert on those and can't know what the correct way is, so you risk making it worse.
--The sort of asshole who will need to be banned under a "don't be an asshole" conduct rule would probably find a way to claim they were fine under more detailed rules - those kind of people are good at that.

(I've done some professional training on "moderating" shared semi-public spaces as a library employee, and professional best practices also tend to lean hard on short but flexible rules.)

Your starter guidelines should be about setting the tone of the community, not coming up with a plan for everything that can go wrong, so think about the tone you want to set. During that phase it's not a bad idea to focus on the positive, either - phrase it as things people *should* do, not things they *shouldn't*, and people will come to your comm feeling more positive about it. You can always plan to change the rules as the community develops to meet its needs - you probably should!

When a comm gets large enough that you don't really want it to get any larger or more active, you just want to maintain it as it is - which honestly is pretty rare on DW but happened a lot on LJ - that's when I would change to longer guidelines and stricter modding. One point where that often comes up is if a community gets big enough to need to bring on more mods - you need detailed enough guidelines that the mods are all on the same page.

I think your proposed guidelines are pretty good for a new comm! I would probably add something about what kind of content you want, and something about accessibility (the "alt text" and "flashing gifs" stuff.) I might go a little less negative too but I tend to go overboard the opposite way on that.

(I don't know anything about tagging comms except that the tags on my comms are a mess and I should probably do something about that.)