Welcome everyone to our new Melbourne-flavoured slice of the internet!
I am RustyRaven one of the moderators of this community (AKA BrightFadedDog). I am working to develop some community guidelines so we can make sure that the community stays a productive and welcoming place, and would like to hear what you want.
What would you like the group to focus on? Do you like to dip into the group for a quick update on the latest local news and carrot man sightings, or do you want to spend time with deeper ongoing discussions? Would you prefer to keep the posts strictly to things concerning Melbourne, or would you prefer to be able to be able to get a local perspective on wider issues?
Suggestions for the best way to arrange posts are also welcome – particularly if we should separate some areas of discussion into separate regular or ongoing posts. We could for example have a post for restaurant recommendations or activity suggestions.
I’d also like to know whether you would value having a wiki or other reference source connected to the community.
Feel free to add any ideas, suggestions or things to aim for.
That pretty much sums up what I think the overarching rule here should be. If we adopt that as the complete community guidelines it would also allow me to remove posts with the comment "your comment was totally bogus, dude" which would be sort of fun too.
I've been doing some reading about how to develop guidelines for a forum, and definitely prefer the "values-based" approach over "rules-based". Which is basically having things like "be helpful and relevant" and tends to be more positive.
The Aussie.zone itself does have rules to be respectful, no bigotry, and "don't be a dick", so we have a good start there already.
+1 for the values based approach. Rules based tends to end in "its not explicitly spelt out in the rules! therefore I'm not breaking the rules!" arguments.
"Be excellent to each other" is a good partner to "don't be a dick".
I'm cool with this, all I really care about is that noone is being aggressive or vindictive.
most outstanding