RFC, round two: Commenting policy

[denise]

A few weeks ago, I solicited thoughts on an official-community commenting policy, and then (as one does) promptly got eaten by the process of getting the site into open beta. We got a lot of really useful and helpful feedback and commentary on the initial round of brainstorming, so here's round two: a summary of all the issues raised in the commentary period that I feel should be incorporated into the final version. I'm posting so that if any feedback you left on the original RFC didn't get mentioned here, and you feel it should be incorporated into the final version, you can point me to your comment again. (Or, if you want to add something else to the discussion, you can bring it up here.)

The reason I didn't incorporate everything is because I felt a bunch of comments addressed broader issues or meta-issues -- things like "identify who's moderating each individual community" and "should we have different policies for focused posts vs. generalized announcement posts", all the way up to "we need a better way of providing feedback than comments". Most of them are really good process suggestions, and I'll definitely be taking them into account as we shape our communications, but for this specific task I'm trying to focus in on the issues that will help me write up a succinct policy that will cover 99% of what we need to cover in roughly three paragraphs or less. (Without tending to my usual verbosity.)

Round three will be a proposed wording of actual policy that y'all can proceed to pick apart, find all the holes in, jump up and down on, tear into little tiny shreds, and rebuild it bigger, better, stronger, faster.

The major issues that were raised in the commentary period:

• How do we make it clear that we welcome dissent and disagreement, and are completely open to feedback of all kinds (positive or negative), without watching the comments degenerate into either people (on either side of an issue) attacking each other or an endless string of non-productive commentary or disruptive behavior?
  
  
• How, in fact, do we define 'productive' commentary? How do we define 'disruptive' behavior?
  
  
• 'Be polite' or 'be civil' is impossible to define in such a way that everyone will understand what you mean. One person's civility is another person's utter rudeness.
  
  
• We need to come up with some kind of way to identify what our definitions of all of the above are, in the context of DW official journals, without giving offense or making angry people angrier. Examples are good.
  
  
• We also need to make it clear that "stay on topic" doesn't prevent people from asking questions about DW that might not relate to the exact post. (Otherwise known as: OMG my journal is broken, I don't know where to ask about it!)
  
  
• Who gets to say that something violates these rules? How do we keep it from turning into people trying to moderate each other's behavior? (Otherwise known as: sometimes, with friends like these...) We don't want people who are really loyal to DW shouting other people down.
  
  
• Moderating with too heavy a hand will lead to resentment and backlash; moderating with too light a hand will lead to wank, trolls, "First!", and "cry moar, emo kid".

Is there anything else that you feel is important or relevant to the task of writing up a broadly-focused commenting policy for official Dreamwidth communities?