Within the prompt of this week’s Process Post, I will be developing a list of community guidelines for my website, explaining why I believe them to be appropriate, and outline how I will implement them.
Here is my list of community guidelines:
- No harassment of others. I want to foster an inclusive community; any sort of hate speech or harassment is never allowed. All conversations should remain civil.
- No inappropriate content. This includes inappropriate language, curse words, illegal content, and adult content.
- No sensitive topics. Discussions on politics and religion are not appropriate for this community.
- No advertisement or self-promotion. Refrain from asking for advertisements.
- Don’t be disruptive. Do not spam. Keep comments clean.
- Remain respectful. Do not make hateful comments, perpetuate toxic ideologies, or insult other individuals.
- Administrator holds the final say. Listen and abide by the community guidelines outlined here.
When developing the guidelines, my overall goal was to foster an inclusive and welcoming space. I have no tolerance for any kind of harassment, toxicity, or inappropriate content on my blog. Therefore, the all-encompassing community guidelines I laid out above should suffice in deterring bad behaviour.
Regarding the community guidelines implementation, I thought it would be best placed on the About Me page. Anyone who visits the page will see the rules and hopefully conduct themselves accordingly.
On a personal note, I greatly value the need for a community guidelines section. Me and my friends run a gaming Discord server where we have a rules section that outlines many of the same values and guidelines I implemented here. I found that if we did not have a list of guidelines, people would act inappropriately to others. I greatly disliked people’s proclivity to conduct themselves terribly online. Whenever this would happen, we would remove the bad actor from the server, but they would often DM us asking why they got banned. Therefore, having a rules section in the server allowed us to point to the list of rules, and identify where they crossed the line. Subconsciously, I must have noticed this practice by other websites since it seems very common for other outlets to include a community guidelines section. These areas have proved important to protecting vulnerable communities and staving off unwanted behaviour.
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