New Mod Policies / Update On Tags

[schmevil]

You may have noticed over recent months a few changes and additions to our moderating team. With that we've also been rolling out subtle changes to the way we moderate the community. This post is to outline and make official new policies. You won't be seeing any major changes, just additional clarification to the community ethos, making some existing guidelines official rules and some changes in the way mods will be going about enforcing the rules and ethos.

Ethos Clarification

First is the streamlining of the community ethos and creation of a new section listing the Rules of Conduct. This isn't a major change - we're seeking to make the ethos clearer for new, and existing, members and have clarified the existing rules for member behavior by adding more detail and giving them their own section in the community rules.

ETHOS.

Scans Daily was founded by girl geeks, and members of slash fandom but now strives to provide an atmosphere which is LGBT-friendly, anti-racist, anti-ableist, woman-friendly and otherwise discrimination and harassment free. The moderation team is always striving to make it a safer space for all fans, but this is not a safe space. Members come from all walks of life to talk about and share extracts from comics, and not all of them are on the same page regarding anti-oppression theory. Calling out other members or creators for discriminatory or oppressive behavior is encouraged for the good of the community.

Unfamiliar with terms like 'calling out' and 'anti-oppression theory'? Check out our resource page for some primers.

Note: Please contact a moderator immediately if you see another member making discriminatory remarks.

RULES OF CONDUCT.

Scans_Daily's aim is to create a safer atmosphere where members from all backgrounds can be enthusiastic about comics without feeling threatened or unsafe. When you join the community, we expect members to familiarize themselves with and follow the rules of conduct. Failure to follow these rules can result in official discipline, including warnings, suspensions or permanent bans.

1. Hate speech, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, or otherwise overtly objectionable commentary based on people's intrinsic characteristics will not be tolerated in the community. In addition, rape apologia, rape jokes and metaphors, trolling, concern trolling, misrepresentation, derailing, passive aggression, pointless belligerence, sockpuppeting, spamming, silencing tactics and/or disrespecting the mods (including ignoring them), is not acceptable.

2. Do not make personal attacks*, issue insults, threats or express wishes of bodily harm in posts or comments. This applies to comments to both other members in the community and the creators whose work is being discussed. We welcome critical opinions, but please try to concentrate on the work rather than the person. If you can't do so without resorting to personal attacks or passive aggression, then that's probably a sign that you should take a step back from the conversation. Differences of opinion are welcome; no one has ever been nor will ever be banned on a difference of opinion alone.

3. SD respects our members' rights to privacy and control over their online identities. As far as we're concerned you are your pseudonym. Trolling and attempts to dismiss other posters on the basis of their "hiding behind a fake name" will not be tolerated. Unauthorized public release of a fellow member's contact information will result in immediate banning.

If you see someone breaking any of the rules outlined above, please contact a moderator directly, or contact the mod team through dailyscans[at]gmail[dot]com immediately so action can be taken.

*Please note that calling out other members for discriminatory behavior is NOT considered a personal attack here at Scans Daily. For our specific policy on discriminatory behavior, please refer to rule #1.


Posting Rules

In addition to the clarification to the ethos, we're making a number of additions to the posting rules. These are things that have already been part of the posting guidelines, but will now be enforced officially. They are:

- Every post must include the source of the content. In the case of comic scans, that would be the title and issue number. For webcomics, a credit and link to the source. Exceptions will be made for entries tagged as "Context is for the weak."
- If you are posting scans from a source that doesn't follow the standard single issue 22-page format, please note the page count in your post. (IE: "10 pages of 30" or "7 pages from issue #6, 7 pages from issue #8" etc)
- If you are posting scans from multiple issues, please note issue breaks in your post.
- Do not link to sites hosting pirated or otherwise illegal content in full - this includes links to Torrent and Scanlation sites and posting images which are watermarked with links to such sites.

Mod Policies

1. Going forward, the mod team will issue warnings through the new sd_admin account, reserving their personal accounts for non-mod conversations, anti-oppression discussions, and mod-member policy conversations. Additionally, all mod posts will now be posted by SD-Admin.

2. Some of you may have noticed that we've been making increased use of placeholder comments and thread-freezing. This is a new strategy we've adopted to give ourselves time for consults, and to give members a cooling off period in threads which we consider are becoming problematic. Look out for the following wording in threads that have been frozen:

"THREAD FREEZE: this thread has been frozen and is being discussed by the mod team."

Means that we might be hitting you with a reminder or warning after we've consulted.

"THREAD FREEZE: this thread has been frozen."

Means that it's time for you to take a breather, but that no further mod action is forthcoming.


What does this mean for you?

Not a whole lot actually. Instead of individual mod accounts issuing you warnings and some formal mod notes, SD-Admin will now be taking care of all of those. ie. All standardized modly duties will be performed through the joint SD-Admin account.

Policy conversations and anti-oppression discussions will continue to be conducted through personal mod accounts.

Why are you doing this?

The mod team is looking to depersonalize day to day modding so that individual mods aren't identified with discipline as a whole, or other modly duties. Warnings will increasingly make use of the boilerplate in the userinfo. (We are mod-bot!) We hope that this will reduce member confusion as to when they are receiving official modly attention, and make it easier for mods to play in the comms as regular members in their downtime.

How will I know which mod I'm talking to?

You won't. But to put your minds at rest, we'll give you a behind the scenes on the mod team:

Mod posts and warnings are all collaborative efforts. To ensure fairness, moderators don't act independently in matters of discipline, and all potential warnings and bans are subject to time-limited consultation and votes. Additionally, we've adopted a policy of trying to avoid modding conversations we've participated in. In those cases, we make problem threads and posts known to the rest of the team and then let them take point. When we mod, we mod together. The policy of freezing problem threads gives us time to do so.

As always, if you'd like to dispute a warning, you can do so on comm, or through dailyscans[at]gmail[dot]com.


Tags

In addition to the problems we had with tag-trolling, leading to the tags being locked to moderators only, we're coming ever closer to our hard 5000 tag limit. As previously discussed, we're looking at a Delicious.com based solution. murklins from deliciouslymad is currently working on an import-script that will copy all of our Dreamwidth and Livejournal tags to the Scans/NoScans Delicious account. This means that on-comm tags will be revised and stripped down, and that the bulk of metadata will be found in the Delicious tags. The new Delicious tags will be far more detailed than our current system, and will organize posts to both communities.

Tag Wranglers

If you were a tag wrangler before we locked down the tags, and are interested in being a tag wrangler again, please report to the volunteer comm. Or if you're a member who is interested in becoming a member of the Delicious tag wrangler team, contact the mod team at dailyscans[at]gmail[dot]com. We'll need your help in building the new Delicious tag archive!

In future, tag wranglers will mostly be working through the Delicious.com interface. If you have no experience with Delicious, don't let that stand in your way - it's an easy system to work with. However, Afuna and Mark from Dreamwidth are working on a patch that will allow original posters to create/add/edit tags in addition to mods, and we will be taking advantage of that too when it comes through on the next code push.

We'll keep you all updated on the tags situation as and when we see developments.

Comments

[punishermax]

What in the world is a rape metaphor?

[seriousfic]

This?

[introverted_excavator]

That had me a little confused too.

[theletterfour]

A rape metaphor is when someone says "[x-thing that is not rape or like rape] is (or is like) rape."

About the most absurd rape metaphor I've come across was someone comparing milk to rape.

[galateus]

Using 'rape' as in "goshdarned fanartists are raping my childhood!!1"

Also these.

[aaron_bourque]

Remember when Bullseye stabbed Electra with her own sai?

That's a rape metaphor.

[dreamreaver]

Wait, so...how exactly does this "tag wrangling" thing work again?

[kingrockwell]

Well, we'll be moving the majority of the tags to Delicious, and when that happens, tag-wrangling will still be about the same process, only with more people available to make it happen.

Basically, the OP will list their suggested tags in the post, and the wranglers and/or mods will use those to tag the entry in Delicious. If that sounds like something you'd like to help with, we're happy to have as many volunteers as are willing!

[perletwo]

Question.

Despite what I gotta say was heroic efforts on the part of the entire comm pre-troll, we've still got some redundancies, misspellings etc. in the tag list, plus tags that may need updating (hey! Power Girl's Cat has a real name now! etc.) I know y'all were looking at phasing out some of the old jokey tags, too. Is the list going to get some kind of a manicuring before scripting it over to Delicious?

[kingrockwell]

We do our best to stay on top of redundancies and mistags, but we're bound to miss things sometimes. In some cases, like "medium: fanart" vs. "genre: fanart", we're waiting for the code-push to allow merging tags, but we can always use an extra pair of eyes if you want to join the volunteers!

Also, we have no intention of phasing out any tags before the transfer, but the way the on-site tags will look afterwards is still being decided. I have my own ideas (i think we've talked about this a couple times, actually!), but we have a discussion open on the volunteer-comm now if you wanted to throw your hat into the ring.

[big_daddy_d]

What is sockpuppeting? That one honestly confused me.

[perletwo]

Sockpuppeting, as defined on Wikipedia, with examples.

[galateus]

LMGTFY.

[thokstar]

Sockpuppet=registering additional anonymous accounts to agree with you. (The idea is that the account is a puppet you control. Socks are commonly used as puppets.)

For example if we were having an argument and suddenly thoktsar and thokthok appeared and started mocking people who were on the opposite side of the argument from me. Except that if I were a professional troll, my sockpuppets wouldn't have such obvious names like thoktsar and thokthok. An IP check can sometimes but not always catch these.

[autolychus2]

I really see no sense in these additional modifications to what was a pretty clear forum set up.

One question: what is considered "trolling"?

[kingrockwell]

You might not, but given a number of recent incidents, we certainly do. This is really more a clarification than a modification, most of these have always been part of the rules, we're just re-stating it for those that don't seem to grasp that.

One answer: for starters

[mullon]

Let's say you criticize someone's work, but then that person comes on and defends their work. Do you have to backpedal and start using mroe constructive criticisms, or can you go on saying: "I don't care if you're the Pope, this was an awful piece of work!"

[angelophile]

There's no reason to backpedal if you believe in what you're saying. As per the response below, all we ask is that you criticize the work, not the creator. If you think something's crap, it's entirely your right to say so. But just don't start getting personal.

[pyrotwilight]

I'm just not understanding this ethos anymore.

If we're not a "safe space" how can we be anti-ableist, or even anti the rest of those?

If we don't like a creator and say we think that that persons work in just plain awful and always is, we get a warning for creator bashing? Isn't one of the entire points of SD pointing out what we like and hate?

[bj_l]

It used to be one of the entire points. Now it's "accept what we say, never disagree. Also, there's some comics around here".

[zemo]

I wanted to ask about a few things regarding the ethos: What are rape apologia and concern trolling?

Also, I don't get the thing with disrespecting the mods by ignoring them. I mean, if someone decides to not answer to a mod's post because it would only ride them in deeper, they aren't exactly disrespecting the mod. And if they are then forced to answer (based on that rule), aren't chances incredibly high that this will end up apologetic, something the mods seem to frown upon?

Finally: Silencing tactics. That wording seems quite subjective. I don't know if there is already, but some more clear-cut examples might be helpful.

[angelophile]

Rape apologia is basically the argument that that rapists can be provoked into raping by what the victim does or does not do. IE: "By wearing that short skirt she was asking for it." Essentially victim blaming.

Concern trolling is where someone who is on one side of the discussion pretends to be a supporter of the other side with "concerns" in order to undermine them. There's a more complete definition here.

In terms of the "disrespecting the mods by ignoring them" line, we're not talking about expecting a response to every mod comment or note. We're talking more about situations where, say, a mod has made a request for a cut, issue numbers, tags or has otherwise noted a member about a post, asking them to do something and is ignored.

"Silencing tactics" is harder to define simply because there are so many and so many ways of trying to silence opponents. For example, there's 27 listed here in the Geek Feminism Wiki alone. In short terms it's when you attempt to silence any opposition rather than offering an opposing argument.

A lot of these areas that you've asked for clarification on will be covered more fully in our new resources post (coming soon) or are already detailed within the existing resources section.

[jlbarnett]

I still don't like this calling out thing. Calling a person racist is one of the worst things you can do to them these days. How exactly does a person defend themselves from that without getting in trouble?

Also I think if you look at Barbara Gordon, one of the most talked about characters on this board, is pretty much default ableist, IMO. She's considered frdged. But a fridged character is dead by the original definition and cannot grow anymore so Oracle makes that untrue. Plus people always talk about how ridiculous it is she's still in the wheelchair, with magic and alien tech. But magic can go wrong. And all that alien tech is, well, ALIEN tech, not advanced human technology. Any use on a human being would be experimental with her being the first. Theoretically a fairly good risk(of course within the narrative not really)

[kingrockwell]

There are many things worse than being called a racist. For instance, being the victim of racism. By privileging the feelings of the accused over those of the oppressed, you'd rather we swept the whole thing under the rug so no one will have to worry if what they're saying is horribly offensive? I'm sorry, but no. Making racism a dirty word only silences attempts to combat it and allows it to thrive and fester where unchecked.

As for the Oracle thing, yes, there is a lot of ableism surrounding er in fandom. There's an essay about it, even. The fact is, most of these people don't even realize how ableist what they're saying is, which is why we encourage our members to tell them so!

[deepspaceartist]

Man, it's kind of depressing that this has to be reposted so often.

And for claification, while calling out is not an insult, actual insults connected to a calling out are not protected by that clause, right? For instance "That's racist, you stupid shithead! What is wrong with you?" would be unnaceptable?

[glprime]

I would argue that kind of example is at the heart of some users disgruntled attitude toward the the "privilege the oppressed over the accused" debacle.

In past instances, anyone who'd been insulted on -ist grounds was not expected to hold civility about the situation. They'd been attacked, it's unfair to hold them to whether insults and treat their attacker respectfully when they'd been disrespected.

I'd like a ruling on this as well, because while I see the logic of the argument, I don't like an unbalanced reaction when arguments brew up.

My view is: we can do better. It isn't pleasant hearing ignorance and offensive remarks passed off in a cavalier fashion, but I don't feel it's helping the situation by giving leeway to oppressed parties to counter-attack in a tone that incites more personal remarks.

[freddylloyd]

Based on the prohibition of "rape jokes and metaphors," will "nsfw: tentacle rape" survive in the new tags system? Will the phrase "surprise butt sex" no longer be tolerated?

I'd shed no tears for the disappearance of those catch phrases, but I have wondered about their fate as the moderation guidelines have become more and more detailed.

[schmevil]

Sorry - we're discussing this and will get back to you.

[steve_dash_o]

I feel like the list in Rule of Conduct 1 is conspicuously missing nationalism and religious discrimination. Is there any particular reason for that?

[angelophile]

Good point. I'll bring this up with the rest of the mod team.

[buttler]

The problem with the Modbot is that it creates an inapproachable Alpha Lantern persona to mete out mod justice. In the past when individual mods put the smack down it at least seemed like we were dealing with people and could ask questions about why they were doing what they were doing, but with the bot it's much more like "the collective has spoken."

Maybe that's intentional. Maybe the mods don't want to be addressed individually because it's much easier to challenge a ruling as a supposed result of personal animosity. But the thing is, there are always personal feelings involved, and the faceless facade of the Modbot doesn't change any of that; it just disguises it. I've always liked threads like this where the policies and the reasoning behind them are actually discussed. It makes it much easier to sympathize with what the mods are trying to do than with

Right now I really don't get the impression that on-comm discussion of mod policies is welcome at all. It's hard to bring concerns up without being seen as "derailing," and the fact that I saw someone get banned on the comm seemingly for doing just that is worrisome. I understand that the banning was informed by past incidents that I didn't witness and that the mods may have had reason to read way more subtext into that person's comments than the text itself seemed to warrant, but in the short term it seemed to be putting the smack down for challenging mod policies.

Full disclosure: I don't know the poster who was banned and to the best of my knowledge that post was the first time he and I ever had any kind of conversation, but it's a large community and i could be wrong about that. The closest I've ever come to receiving any warning myself was just being advised by the Modbot to disengage from a conversation after I objected to being called a sycophant by someone who unbeknownst to me had a free pass to insult other posters because of who she is and what she's upset about. It was pretty clear from "advised to disengage" that questioning why I was being singled out there would not be welcome, so I just left for a while to try to work through my puzzlement and frustration in other forums where I didn't have to fear summoning the Modbot by raising my concerns.

I'm bringing up my concern about the bot in this post because I'm guessing that if there's anywhere on-comm where I can bring up these issues without being taken as derailing, it would be in a post where mod policies are in fact the rail itself.

Anyway, that's my two cents: big bad bot doesn't lend itself to an honest and open atmosphere. But it really depends on what kind of atmosphere you intend to create, and for whom. I'm just a guy who likes comics who came here three and a half years ago because I enjoy discussing comics, and I don't think I've ever clashed with anyone about politics, gender or otherwise. Any confrontations I've had have been about name-calling, and what I find hard to get a handle on are the situations in which name-calling is OK and objecting to name-calling is not.

[buttler]

Whoops, didn't finish the last sentence of the second paragraph. Maybe should have ended "... than the cold, faceless authority of the Modbot does."