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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Silmarien Aldalome" data-source="post: 2564368">Thank you for the responses – I recognise generosity in the views I see here and really appreciate the thoughtfulness in the voice you guys have used.  This is corrective for me in many ways – and contrasts with several other experiences I’ve had with the area of the CoC and experiences in board-moderation.  In particular, the last week has been anxiety-provoking, threatening, humiliating and alarming.  I feel like the thing I’ve worked six months to build is threatened.  The new Foundation guidelines are threatening.So, to see the word “liberal” – posted – on this board above was a huge relief.  To see your encouragement of community, kindness, well-wishes, warmth and thoughtfulness was restorative.  And (speaking now to posters at our Foundation) I also recognise that the term “liberal” should not be used as an excuse to “go too far”.What I found most encouraging was the notion that a thread has a “tone” and provided the posts are pro-social, that there is scope for being liberal.I really appreciated this.I also wish to give a commitment to a course-change at the Foundation – provided it’s a fair request that is made of us.  And that I’ve re-familiarised myself with the CoC and am doing the responsible thing here – overt discussion about my concerns with the CoC.I need to add several things–    that getting a WizO post on your thread is – a humiliating, threatening, and unpleasant thing.  It goes to all your subscribers’ in-boxes, and sends ripples through the Thread community.  Moderation posts can disrupt well-being on the thread.  It can disrupt a sense of safety in the posters, and scares people off.  So – while moderation is essential for keeping homophobia, sexism etc away - I question the overuse of moderation for controlling spam and for the sake of keeping discussions “pure” (on-topic).  After six months of this CoC presence in the background – when I work so hard to keep my posters happy at our Foundation – I’m needing to speak about the experience.–    The foundation I host – has a hit rate of 1 item of output for every 100 posts.  I think that’s a fair and reasonable statistic – and think that to pressure us to up the ante on output isn’t fair.  We keep a summary URL of our work, and use that URL to share our “goods” with WotC posters and the gen-community.  Between R&D – we spam and laugh, to keep the thread “warm” “alive” healthy and happy.  The 99 posts are about “breath for fun’s sake” – and is a good thing.  I tried to say all this at the Foundation Discussion thread – but never got a response.  No-one consulted thread-keepers and Members of Foundations directly about how we think we should work and strive to better the community here (e.g. “please post your submission for recommendations to PO Box….”).  Many of us are mature members of the community – and community workers ourselves – with expertise in the “what works” to make a community healthy.  Expertise aside, many of us young and old – have wisdom anyhowz about “what works”.  I would have loved to have made recommendations that were heard.  I don’t want to see the community I’ve worked so very hard to keep alive and happy over the last six months disrupted.  I’ve seen the thread nearly die several times when we’ve tried to force/coerce a research-pure-on-topic focus.  Posters just vanish because no-one wants to work too hard when they come to WotC – they want to have fun while they explore game stuff.–    To inspire output on the thread, I sometimes use a roleplay post – to “get people excited”.  I can assure you – it’s a huge feat to keep people actively producing work – and it takes sensitivity, humour, energy and commitment.  And there is a method to what I do.e.g. You hear a rumbling in the mountains – and the earth groans.  There is a flash of lightning and rumble of thunder.  In her sleep, Silmarien has a nightmare – and in her dream, she sees the Drow – incanting in demonic tones: they have mastered the Lore of the Dark Mythal and she sees a volcano suddenly erupt to life, and from it pours forth a living ash – that is imbued with the Living Darkness of the Dark Mythal.  This ash chokes the land – and you see the Elves and Half-Elves perish under the weight of Darkness.Silmarien wakes up screaming.Something like this – was designed to provoke the Half-Elves to “counter-produce” Foundation Output – to inspire us to create “things to save the Elves and Half-Elves”.So, how is enmeshing this second use of role-play really off-topic?  Why is it any more off-topic, than posting a question to Races about Drow and Dark Mythals?  E.g. “Do Drow have the innate capacity to use the Dark Elven equivalent of High Elven magic?”  Where should I post this?  It overlaps with Forgotten Realms stuff.  So, why should some role-play not be OK – if it is used to highlight, service, provoke, or enlighten a discussion about Players Handbook tools?  And that last comment might be useful in a revision to the CoC.So – like spam – it’s all in the definition of “roleplay” – and after many thousands of posts – my conclusion is that “it’s not the roleplay it’s how you use it”.Again, I really appreciate the overall ethos of the CoC – but do think we can use poster-experience to think about some of the issues.And again, my thanks for the thoughtful comments.Cheersstavros</blockquote>

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