Safe Space and Accessibility Policy Questions

[aceeccentric]

In writing up a draft of the safe space and accessibility policies for the ace community, I've come across a few questions that I want to get some feedback on before sending the draft out for editing (and then posting it for more editing).

• Do we want to include an age note? (Not allowing in anyone under 13 or something.)
• Do we want to include suspensions? (In addition to outright banning.)
• Do we want to include freezing and deleting content? (If something violates the safe space policy, do we want to have notes about freezing threads or deleting comments and posts? What would be the conditions to decide between freezing and deleting? Do we feel there's a difference between deleting entire posts and deleting comments or comment threads? Etc.)

For the accessibility policy, so far I've got:

• Image descriptions required when including images or linking to images
• Putting flashing animations behind a cut with a warning
• Descriptions required when including videos or linking to videos (even if the video has captions)

These are the most common accessibility concerns I've seen. I'm sure I'm either overlooking or unaware of more things, so if there's another concern you're aware of or that would be important to you, please let me know.

Name poll to come soon, also. I just wanted to make them separate posts and not do one right after the other.

Comments

[virescence]

Oh, I am so glad to see this XD I've been saying to sciatrix pretty much every single day how much I was looking forward to this community getting set up XD

- I think an age note might be fair - we'll probably end up discussing sex-related things at some point, and most aces probably won't be self-aware at 12 anyway. We shouldn't have an age limit too much over that, though - we don't want to be turning away the new, lost aces who need somewhere safe to figure themselves out.

- I'm not sure how useful suspensions will be - it depends on how the community develops. But under the assumption that there will at some point be people who are usually valuable members of the community but still mess up on occasion, and who therefore need some kind of punishment but not an actual banning, I'll say yes.

- I'd say simply delete anything that breaks the safe space policy (but maybe keep copies of it somewhere just in case it becomes necessary reference in future - for example, if someone repeatedly breaks the policy in minor ways, and are eventually suspended/banned, and start protesting about how they never broke a single rule, it's good to have copies of all those things they did.) Freezing... I can imagine it being used on threads which don't break policy but are becoming heated and look like they're going to break it, if such threads ever happen.

I don't have anything to add to the accessibility policy except that they all sound like great things.

(And also I realise I never replied to that comment in the previous post - sorry! It's that annoying dissertation thing again...)

[sciatrix]

I'm conflicted on the idea of an age note and lean, I think, on the side of either not including one or not heavily enforcing any note that is included. I feel like under-13s, if they're reading, could use the safe space.

I don't think I'm in favor of suspensions--in my experience, once you've gotten to the point of suspending a member, they're not going to get any better or change with time. Ban them and have done with it.

Re: freeze vs. delete--I'm a fan of freezing for archival and transparency purposes if we're going to pick one. Deleting someone else's posts, even in terms of moderation, carries a lot more potential for drama.

[codeman38]

I think that wise use of the age tags for any remotely explicit posts (and these can be set by a mod, if the poster forgets to do it) would largely eliminate the need for an age policy. (As an extra safety measure, the 14+ rating could be used by default, and then mods could retag any post that's not explicit.)