vriddy: Cute dragon hatching from an egg (hawks)
[personal profile] vriddy posting in [community profile] fictional_fans
I'm planning to create a BNHA community since the existing ones appear to be inactive. I've been looking at the way other fandom-focused communities do code of conduct/community guidelines on Dreamwidth and have generally been impressed with how short they tend to be!! Like, the guidelines for this comm are two lines. And it seems to work? I'm very afraid of running myself into a corner by not being clear enough, haha.

Here's what I'm thinking of going with:

  • Treat people with respect.

  • Don't harsh other people's squee. Be mindful that the character you hate is someone else's favourite. Try to come here to celebrate what you love about the fanworks and canon, the characters and themes and anything BNHA-related that sparks joy. Character bashing, kink shaming, flame wars and dogpiling aren't welcome. This is a ship and let ship environment.

  • NSFW content (dark themes, mature topics, adult content, etc) should be placed under a cut and tagged appropriately, so people who want to avoid those topics can do so. Mentioning dark themes from canon (e.g. child abuse, mutilation, suicide-baiting, ...) in passing is fine but should go under a cut if digging into the details.

One of my main concerns is the negativity from Twitter and Tumblr and Discord spilling over to the comm but I'm not sure if I'm going overboard pre-emptively. I'm also not sure yet how to handle manga spoilers for the anime-only, when the anime is years behind 🤔

Do people usually create tag lists for their comms? Or is it possible to rename and manage tags as they get created? Wondering if the tag list should go into the guidelines otherwise...

Tips, advice, and links to more examples are all very welcome! This will be my first community.

Non-expert advice below.

Date: 2022-01-09 01:12 am (UTC)
megpie71: Denzel looking at Tifa with a sort of "Huh?" expression (Tifa you have weird friends)
From: [personal profile] megpie71
Okay, as someone who's been around in fandom for a while, but not moderated anything ever, I'd agree with the comment about removing the examples of "harshing other people's squee" from the rule about that. If the idea is to give the "rules lawyer" type as little as possible to grasp onto, then you need to stick with that and keep things general. Giving examples of specific behaviours means they're going to assume those particular behaviours are the only ones banned.

On an overall note, I'd strongly suggest encouraging the behaviours you want to see through things like mod responses and participation on positive seeming threads. Also, encourage the community to be self-moderating in a positive direction (sharing the "how to help" information and so on) as much as possible - if you're getting a community building that's interested in helping new members share their squee in a friendly way (and in learning how to do this as well) you're likely to have less to worry about as a mod. Certainly, part of the duties of a moderator involve discouraging unwanted behaviour - but don't forget to encourage the stuff you want as well. Positive reinforcement works better than negative.

On a purely logistical note, as the community grows you are going to need at least one co-moderator. You aren't able to stay awake 24/7/365 and you shouldn't push yourself to do so. Try to get your co-moderator from somewhere which isn't in the same group of timezones as yourself (so, for example, if you're in the USA, see if you can get a co-mod from Europe, or from Japan / Australia / New Zealand). Note that as your group of moderators grows, you're going to need to get a bit more specific about what's allowable and what's not - if only within the moderating group itself. Plan for this ahead of time, so you have the guidelines in place (maybe pull in two extra co-mods, and have a "best of three" judgement-call system for edge cases, with a rule that "everything is an edge case" for the first few months, with things loosening up as time goes on).

As a general note: if you're trying to build a community, you're going to have to accept things will go off-topic, and after a while, the off-topic posts are going to outnumber the on-topic ones. Have spaces / threads for off-topic socialisation (they have to hold to the same rules as the rest of the community - no harshing other's squee, share what you like rather than what you dislike, etc - but they're allowed to be on just about any topic). The off-topic threads will need a greater degree of moderation at first, but pay attention to the informal guidelines the community will create as it grows and develops. It may turn out that discussions on contentious topics (politics, sex, religion, etc) may need to be either banned outright, or with a rule about "six comments then take it to email" or something similar.

On the "spoilers" thing - I'd suggest a blanket rule for tagging which says "say if you're talking about the manga or the anime" and maybe some rules which take into account things like the likelihood of finding spoilers elseweb (such as wikis etc). The one I remember from back in alt.fan.pratchett back in the day was basically "no spoilers in plain text until the book has been published in the USA" (spoilers in ROT13 were okay, so were heavy allusions, and spoiler warnings). Usually the USA was about a year behind the UK (with Australia and the rest of the Commonwealth about 6 months behind in publication times), so this covered the majority of fans (and given this pre-dated wikis, we didn't have to worry about those; by the time a fandom wiki was a possibility, much less a likelihood, things were being simultaneously published world wide, so the problem was largely moot).

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