Community rules & banner update

It’s somehow been three months since @[email protected] and I agreed to take over moderation of this community, and we’ve not really had to do anything other than keep an eye out for reports. It’s not exactly been a taxing job, so firstly thank you stitchers for being so undramatic!

But that all happened while I was still super ill and to be honest most of November and December is like a weird fever dream. So I kind of did not do the one thing I said I’d do at the time: post some prospective community rules.

Basically what I’m thinking is we want to have something written down that we can point to just on the off-chance of misbehaviour, but at the same time we don’t need anything draconian or super specific while we’re so small.

Since I’ve already been through this process with [email protected] and there are even quite a lot of people here who are in there too, I think it makes sense to maybe start off with similar rules to the ones the knitters agreed and then diverge if we need to.

Main concerns over there were:

• encouraging people to add pattern info to their posts and
• making sure we have a rule in place to allow removal of ads

On that second point, it was generally agreed that active members of the community should be free to advertise their shops and products in context, but a complete stranger barging in to post a straight-up ad and then leave should be removed. Basically kind of vibe-based, depending on if you look like a spammer or not, which works fine for a small community tbh.

I’d love to hear from community members on this. Are you ok just following the template from /c/knitting for now? Is there something more specific to us you’d also like to see included in the official rules? Or do you maybe disagree with one of those two things above and want us to rethink?

Input very much welcome, thank you!

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And for a bit more of a fun thing, we have a random community banner and icon that I guess the original owner just googled on the day and never thought about again. In /c/knitting I made a banner featuring some recent FOs that had been posted by the most active members, and that was pretty popular.

I’d be happy to knock up something similar for here, but also want to throw it open in case anyone else would like to give banner design a go! Maybe we’ll say if nobody else comes up with something by the end of March I’ll go full collage mode with our FOs, that gives time for a few entries if you fancy it?

We'll also need an icon and I did not make the knitting one so am officially looking for ideas of what we could use. Actual images, vague concepts, all assistance welcome!

Thank you for bearing with this wall of text. Now get back to stitching!