Proposed Code of Conduct

[rho]

@cwellsx

both are hostile to the person (not the content) neither ought to be tolerable/tolerated IMO

I’m not personally opposed to that principle, but I think it’s a bit of a tangent from the main point I was trying to make. Even if you make that the policy, there can still exist users and mods who think that calling a trans man a “she” is not hostile to the person, and users and mods who think that it is. I think prospective users deserve to know which kind of mod they’re signing up to be governed by.

(But also,

@cwellsx

(except perhaps in private in a discussion between moderators)

I really hope you didn’t mean that to include the slur case!)

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@cwellsx

I see that sometimes in legal texts – for example, “ including but not limited to race, sex, gender, religion, national origin, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, marital status, socioeconomic status, or political affiliation ”.

Does that add something, does it make it more welcoming, are you saying?

I’d fear it might encourage rules lawyers again, no?

To be clear, the value (that I see missing in a CoC that doesn’t make explicit reference to specific types of harassment) is the signal to potential users that this community considers certain controversial things to be harassment at all.

The legalese you quote above sounds like it’s describing prohibited reasons for discriminating against a person, not describing prohibited behaviors considered to be harassment, but it does satisfy the value of signaling that discriminating based on those qualities is considered wrong. Perhaps it also has the effect of encouraging rules lawyers, which is something that I too would hope to avoid.

I would propose something more along the lines of:

Code of Conduct

• Be nice, y’all.
• Assume other people are trying to be nice too.
• All kinds of people are welcome here, as long as you’re trying to follow this Code of Conduct.
• No harassment, period. (For some examples of what we consider to be harassment, see the list at the bottom of this CoC.)

Examples of Harassment

Different people have different ideas of what “harassment” means. If you are concerned about a particular kind of harassment that may have happened to you in the past, here is a non-exhaustive list of things that we’ve thought about and have decided will usually count as harassment if we see it happen, or if you report it happening to you or someone else (but if someone comes up with some way to harass you that isn’t on this list, we will take that seriously too):

• Use of racial slurs
• Use of sexual orientation slurs
• Threats or intimidation
• Unwanted references to or jokes about body weight or type
• Intentional misgendering
  [and so on and so forth]

I would hope that something written along those lines would not be a breeding ground for rules lawyers, while also sending a clear signal to prospective members about specific types of harassment that may concern them.