Here, in no particular order, are some guidelines offered for your consideration:
- THE GOLDEN RULE: Please treat others as you would like to be treated. Everything below merely expands on this.
- THE OTHER GOLDEN RULE: My gold — my rules. The proprietors of the site reserve the right etc. I hold neither you nor myself to a rigid set of rules. Things change. People change. Invitations change.
- INVITATION: This site is intended to be invite-only. This is not about being exclusive for internet cachet, but as a means to reduce the automated spam attacks and the raving of the unhinged. If you didn’t get an invite yet and are expecting one, you may not be in the initial test group. Feel free to whine gently at the service address. If you are not expecting an invite but would like to join, please be prepared to validate your identity. Which brings us to…
- PRIVACY: The proprietors of this site will respect your privacy, but cannot guarantee your privacy. Specifically, that means that we will not abuse your information, but we cannot control all of the layers of internet nonsense. The whole damned world is spying on all of us, and this system even if configured perfectly is still running on cloud hosting, and all “cloud” really means is “somebody else’s computer”. This is obviously a bone-simple WordPress install. We know how that can go.
- PRIVACY: All members are expected to respect each others’ privacy as well. If somebody logs in as <real name>, fine, but if not, please refrain. Nobody should expect to be online and retain any real privacy, but we don’t have to make the knuckleheads’ jobs easier. Egregious leaks or “doxxing” members is a hanging offense around here.
- ON-TOPIC: Comments on posts should relate to the content of the post. If it’s obviously a nonsense topic, fine. Different people have different desires for on-topic vs free-form conversation — please do try to err on the side of staying on-topic where appropriate.
- LANGUAGE: There are no language police. Heaven knows, I have used a bad word or two. Just the same, I would like your help in keeping the place nice. Well nice enough at any rate. Deal?
- ATTRIBUTION AND TERMS: There are no attribution police. Just the same, this site and its contents will default to a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. A notice will be added to the footer of each page. Until then, this is your notice. Where memes and fair use give way to substantial uncredited reproduction, a line has been crossed. Inclusion of work by others, even copyrighted work, is probably unavoidable online. This implies a willingness to take down or replace any content that runs foul of a rights-holder. This is not where to publish original material that you consider copyright under terms other than CC-BY-SA 4.0, linked above.
- More to follow…
This document is subject to change — inputs welcome! At no point should it be construed as a “Code of Conduct”, yet at every point it should be regarded warmly as part of the social underpinnings of a community. If this seems unfriendly to you, then you may be in the wrong place. This doc will eventually be moved into the “Fine Print” section, once we have one of those.