smellsgood | Community administration: feedback for the rules?

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community: admin

Community administration: feedback for the rules?

I wrote the first draft of the community rules (in the community profile) based on two things: my experience with being the admin for other communities (and seeing what sort of problems come up and what kind of misunderstandings are more likely than others), and my experience being on the LiveJournal Abuse Team during various previous waves of perfume-discussion revival on LJ and seeing what kinds of things came up there.

In particular, that's why I decided to completely ban all forms of selling, and restrict trading/swaps to being an incidental thing rather than a main focus of the community. Over the past decade+ of involvement both personal and professional in comms that are discussing a physical item with heavy collectability, I've definitely seen every single possible way that selling and trading could go bad, from people walking off with hundreds of dollars of other people's money to people setting up a bunch of trades, collecting the stuff sent to them, and then disappearing without sending out their half of the agreement (usually to discover later that they never had the thing they promised to send out). I'm definitely not saying that's guaranteed to happen here if that sort of thing were allowed, but all it would take would be one case of it happening for the lovely friendly vibe we've had going on in the more ad-hoc discussions to evaporate, not to mention the admin(s) of the community to have to spend a ridiculous time cleaning it up. I also don't want the community to start as a general-discussion comm and wind up full of nothing but "in search of X" and "here's my list of stuff for sale or trade" type posts.

So, I wrote the rules to be very restrictive on that sort of thing, but if people think they'd rather we be a bit more lenient, tell me! For instance, we could do a weekly post for people to post their in-search-of lists and their willing-to-swap lists in the comments, that kind of thing. I still don't think we should allow sales of any kind or put any sort of official comm stamp on money changing hands, because that's a very quick way for things to get out of hand, but as long as people understand that trading/swapping is entirely at their own risk, I am less adamant about banning it.

Likewise, if there are any rules/guidelines you think are missing and should be added, or any rules you think should be revised or rephrased, let me know. Or, if you read the list of what's allowed and not-allowed, and think something should be added, clarified, or revised, let me know that, too!

Meanwhile, I do have many many ideas on how to usefully tag posts to help build a comprehensive database, and the community itself is paid (and will remain so) so people can search for both posts and comments. (The search box is part of the community's layout, too.) Give me a few days to finalize my thoughts and I will make a bunch of tags and write up the tagging guidelines. Once I do that, I'll probably be on the lookout for somebody to help manage the tagging, but working up a tagging system is a prerequisite there.

And finally: What kind of "useful resource" type posts do you think would be a good idea to have? I'm thinking things like building a dictionary of "what we mean when we say X", "here is the master list of blogs that talk about perfume", and "here are links to places to buy all the things that people talk about", and I don't know if it will make more sense to do them as DW posts (advantage: discussion can happen right there; disadvantage: only the poster can edit them) or as Google Docs (advantage: multiple people can edit, disadvantage: reliance on third party provider) or, I don't know, a version-controlled Github repository (advantage: multiple people can submit changes, but there's still oversight and version control so there'd always be backups and we could always recover something deleted accidentally; disadvantage, harder for people to jump in and contribute without going through somebody who knows how to use version control) or something.

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Someone to help you with tagging, you say ;)

[more later when more brain]

Ha, I knew that sentence would be like kabnip :)

... this comment made my otherwise crappy day.

I admit that I'm much happier having a community that isn't about selling and trading. I can get that in several other places, and in my experience, it drowns out actual conversation.

I do think you need some kind of "consequence" list or guidelines. If a post breaks the rules, are you going to ask the writer to edit the post or delete it immediately? If someone breaks the posting rules X times, do they get banned? If someone starts PM-ing members with sales offers, what do you do? If a member claims that another member swaplifted them, what do you do?

(Your answers to many of these may be "we do nothing," but it's nice to know up front.)

Hm, good questions.

I am tempted to say use a three-strikes-and-you're-banned type system for rules violations, with slight wiggle room for me being kind of crap at recordkeeping sometimes and for the severity of the offense, and going for delete-post-or-comment over requiring edits, again to save on recordkeeping and followup. (With the provision that if the post/comment is mostly okay but with one small problem, either copying the okay text and sending it to them to repost minus the rulebreaking part, in the case of a comment, or asking for an edit, in the case of a post.)

I think my answer is that a PM with sales offers = a "strike" for the 3-strikes system, and no action in the case of swaplift claims because oh god I have too many other fucking things to do and that's always an incredibly messy thing to step into the middle of. (I think the disclaimer on the profile should be good enough there.) If swaplifting becomes a big problem, I could see maybe having a post with "these two people have had a dispute; Party A claims Party B swaplifted them, Party B claims Party A got the package and refuses to admit it, here is the evidence each party has offered to support their claims, we make no judgements as to what actually happened", but, meh. I don't think I'll decide until/unless we ever get there (probably with community input), and I'll just cross my fingers that we never do :)

Sounds good to me.

... not that I intend to break the rules or anything. Really! I just like to know what's supposed to happen.

As someone who loves the idea of perfumes (I've been reading the posts that rydra_wong has passed on with great interest) but has bad reactions to many of them (blinding headaches, usually), I am fond of the idea of people who also have such problems tagging perfumes that didn't do that sort of thing to them.

Of course, everyone has different sensitivities, but still, it seems like such information might be useful to people.

Hmmm. I see the benefit in that, but at the same time I'm worried about phrasing it so it doesn't come across as "this perfume is safe for all migraineurs". "sensitivity: reported reaction" and "sensitivity: reported no reaction", maybe? Or "reaction: triggered" and "reaction: not triggered"? Or maybe somebody can come up with something better, because I'm looking more for something about the individual, not the perfume. Basically, I'd want to say "at least one person with scent sensitivity reported this as a problem" and "at least one person with scent sensitivity reported this as no problem", and if both tags wind up on the same scent, it's just even more of a "people's reactions are individual" thing whereas if only one winds up on an entry it only implies something about how the person/persons who did the review reacted, not an innate quality of the perfume.

If that makes any sense!

*sigh*

I hear you, and I thought of some of the same points as I was typing that.

Well, at least with your guidelines, people here shouldn't be worried about "there's no such thing as perfume allergies" dog-piling, and so there will be a bunch of reviews in one place that might mention that the writer has sensitivities and found that Eau d'Thus-and-such didn't aggravate them.

Thanks for thinking it through, anyway.

I'm not opposed to having a tag for it! Just want to make sure that it's carefully constructed so it's not promising more than we can deliver, you know?

(And, I mean, I'm likely to construct a "this is what our tags are" type post anyway, so it doesn't have to just fit into 40 characters with no clarification.)

Ah, OK ... day of disappointments had me presupposing more of the same. So, instead, yay! That sounds really encouraging, and I look forward to seeing what you develop.

"reaction: didn't set *me* off"

Heh.

"bad reaction: i had one" and "bad reaction: i didn't have one"? Although that last might be too long. "bad reaction: yes", "bad reaction: not me"? ugh, this is hard.

I will also speak up as liking the idea of a comm that is about discussion but not selling. I'd actually be happy if you put MORE restrictions on selling and swapping. It seems like now the rules will actually allow quite a bit of listings/trading, just so long as there is enough (and how much is enough?) discussion of the perfumes beforehand/during. Allowing any trading at all still opens the comm up to drama, so why not just say that "all swapping, trading, and selling should be arranged off-site, by PM or email or on another journal"? Allow someone to say "Wow, that rec sounds really awesome, do you have it and would you be wiling to swap it?" "Sure. PM me and we'll work it out." and leave it at that? It's simple and by doing that, it keeps ALL the drama-making swaps and trades off the site (rather than just the sales, as I think the rules now stand?)

As an addict, of course, I do like being able to see if folks have something that I'd like. Maybe once a week there could be a post where folks could comment with links to their wishlist/sales lists? You could decide if you'd allow a full list pasted there, including prices, etc. or if you'd just allow off-comm links to the list. Then, emphasize that folks should be PMing folks or patronizing the links to arrange sales, not commenting in the threads. By putting sales lists as comments rather than posts, this contains them, and folks can easily skip that post if they'd like.

Just a few thoughts! Sorry if I've misunderstood something in the rules!

Hm, that situation you describe as wanting, in your first paragraph, is what I intended (the "Allow someone to say "Wow, that rec sounds really awesome, do you have it and would you be wiling to swap it?" "Sure. PM me and we'll work it out." and everything else takes place off-comm). The examples about it being all right to talk about perfumes you want to try and then add a sentence or two of "does anybody have any of these" at the end/it being all right to post a huge long post of reviews (example of the type of thing I'm talking about) and include a sentence or two about "willing to swap/gift anything labeled as 'hell no'" or whatever is because otherwise I will be in the position of having to delete posts/warn people/ask them to edit their posts for an offhanded mention of trading or gifting at the tail end of a post that would otherwise be on-topic.

The way you interpreted it as allowing "quite a bit" of listing and trading is not at all what I intended; can you let me know what made you think that and how you think I could revise it so as to make it clear that's not what I intended? My basic intention with the rules-as-written was that I'm not going to come down on people for incidental stuff like just saying "hey, do you want to trade for that" in a comment to somebody else's "I hated this perfume" post or saying "I hated this perfume because [paragraphs of a perfume review], does anyone else want it", but I don't want posts that are just "I have these 30 samples I hated: [list] Make me an offer!" If that's not how the rules-as-written read to you, the rules-as-written should probably be rewritten. :)

>The examples about it being all right to talk about perfumes you want to try and then add a sentence or two of "does anybody have any of these" at the end/it being all right to post a huge long post of reviews (example of the type of thing I'm talking about) and include a sentence or two about "willing to swap/gift anything labeled as 'hell no'" or whatever is because otherwise I will be in the position of having to delete posts/warn people/ask them to edit their posts for an offhanded mention of trading or gifting at the tail end of a post that would otherwise be on-topic.

I can see your point here. It's only natural for those things to flow from discussion, and I'd hate for the rules to be unenforceable. :) And I do agree, I think you're clear that you don't want the lists that other comms have, which are deliberately for setting up trades and sales. That's clear.

Reading through again (I'm tired, sorry, brain might not be working 100%), maybe my impression was partially born from what looked like backtracking after the first paragraph of the profile. For instance, at the beginning it says "is for discussion of perfume and for writing about perfume, not a selling/trading/swapping community. If we allowed selling and trading, we would inevitably have to deal with [etc]". That wording to me sounds like the comm does NOT allow selling and trading, which I took to mean something like what I described (once they decide that someone has something someone else wants, they move off-site completely to complete the transaction.) Also, this wording suggests that in not allowing selling and trading, that the comm is trying to reduce drama (which is fine and good).

But then below there are examples of how the comm DOES allow trading and other exchanges:
"Incidental swapping and gifting is all right as long as it comes about naturally as part of a wider discussion..."
"if you are making a gift, and receiving nothing in return, you can ask the recipient to reimburse your shipping costs. You must both agree to reimbursement of shipping costs before you ship..."

I guess I have two suggestions to manage the change there (from "we don't allow trading" to "you can set up swapping and trading in these circumstances")
- defining "trading" and what actions about trading the comm does and doesn't allow (otherwise, folks might interpret "trading" as "discussion of trading" or "offering trading" or "exchanging addresses for trading" or something else.)

- perhaps changing the wording of the first paragraph, or qualifying that the comm does allow DISCUSSION OF trading, but all transactions should be taken off-site as soon as folks agree there is a transaction in the offing. So, I guess it would just be moving some of the clarifications higher up in the rules.

Also, setting rules for asking gift recipients for shipping seems like it clouds the water again between whether the comm is actively involved in setting such things up or not. If folks are to take such things off-site as soon as they know there's a movement of goods going on, then why not wash the comm's hands of it and let them set up the shipping situation on their own? Or is it intended that they can set up THOSE transactions on the comm? It seems like those can be just as dramaful as any others....

Again, sorry if I'm not making sense!

Just to let you know, I've seen this and am considering how to revise based on what you've said!

No prob! I really am enjoying the comm, by the way, and thanks for starting it! I didn't mean to come across as cranky (so, sorry if I did), and whatever you decide will no doubt be fine. :)

I think it's a very good idea to encourage more discussion topics than trading posts. Am I interpreting it correctly that ever community member is allowed to make a new post listing their trades and requests every week? That could get pretty messy if a lot of people sign up and want to trade here. I may have misinterpreted and I would be happy if the rule means that one trading masterpost goes up each week, on which traders can comment with their lists.

Everything looks very good! I like that any type of perfume is equally acceptable, so that people who get weird headaches from most perfumes can still get involved!

Hm, I was thinking that, but you're right that it might be a bit much. Lemme think about that. A weekly post would be a good idea, except then I'd have to remember to make one ;) Maybe "if it's been more than 7 days since *somebody* last posted a link to their list, you can post a new one; otherwise, comment in the old one", but that seems a bit unwieldy.

I've been thinking about how DW perfume fandom is mostly currently people posting in their own journals, and

rydra_wong making a linkspam of them.

Since (at least so far) I think people are going to continue to post their reviews in their own journals, perhaps we need a weekly (?) "link your perfume reviews here!" post? (Or everyone can just go on with

rydra_wong's lovely curation. *shrug*)

Yeah, given that and what other people have suggested about consolidating in-search-of and trading posts, I was thinking about doing a "Monday morning^{[ 1 ]} free-for-all" -- a weekly post for people to comment with links to perfume-related stuff they've posted elsewhere, interesting news, good deals, yadda. It's worth a try, I suppose!

^{[ 1 ]} for certain values of morning that involve "whenever the fuck I wake up"

I was just coming in to ask if it'd be good/appropriate to cross-post my link round-ups here.

i say go for it! Maybe once a week?

Awesomeness. And that's very useful guidance in giving me a frequency to aim for (I think I'll aim for "weekly at most", as my brain doesn't need another "every X day" commitment), so I'm not swamping the comm.

I can do my usual posts on my DW, then round them up into single posts every once in a while (cut for length as required).

sounds good!

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Community administration: feedback for the rules?

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