Introduction & general approach

  • These #ConservationOptimism Community and Moderation guidelines exist to make this community a safe, respectful and useful destination for all community members
  • By reading, posting and participating in this community, you agree to read these guidelines and act according to them
  • These guidelines may be updated at any time by the moderators of this community; any updates and the new version of the guidelines will be posted here
  • You should consider information shared on this community to be in the ‘public domain’; information shared on this community may be indexed and searchable on Google and other search engines; details of Google’s privacy policy can be found here.

Moderators and Moderation

  • This #ConservationOptimism Community is moderated by a team of volunteers; you can find a list of who they currently are by checking the About tab
  • Moderators will use their best judgement to apply these guidelines in a fair way and moderate activities appropriately to ensure the overall health of this community
  • Moderators may not have the time or inclination to explain their moderation decisions and are under no obligation to do so
  • Any activity, comments, posts or other interaction that you have with this community may be moderated by the moderators of this community, with or without explanation
  • We have automated spam detection in place to identify unusual posting patterns, duplicate, low value and thin content; from time to time, ‘false positives’ are picked up by the spam filter and may be removed. This is unfortunate but cannot be avoided
  • Moderators have the final decision on what is and isn’t acceptable use of this community
  • If you are not sure if something you want to post will breach community guidelines, please contact a moderator privately before you post it an explain your concerns; they will let you know how to proceed
  • In the event that you have a disagreement with a moderator, please contact the appropriate moderator privately and enter into a discussion with them

Moderators and Moderation

Our community needs to remain a safe, mutually beneficial and engaging place where members are treated with decency, courtesy and
respect. This means:

  • Treat others as you would wish and expect to be treated yourself
  • Be tolerant towards other’s behaviour and accept that generally, other members of this community act in good faith
  • Give other community members the benefit of the doubt unless their behaviour shows otherwise
  • Treat others online as you would treat them in real life; this means behaving with common decency, common sense, courtesy and respect; you are not anonymous here!
  • Do not make personal attacks on other members of this community
  • Do not make defamatory or false statements against others
  • Do not reveal private or personal information about other users
  • Do not make prejudiced comments, remarks or other statements about members
  • Do not bully, make ‘trolling’ remarks or otherwise start trouble with other community members

Disagreeing with other community members

Whilst we need to ensure proper behaviour towards others in this community, we do not want to stifle discussion, debate, and, occasionally,
disagreement. It is also important that members feel able to properly express their opinions on various topics when it is appropriate to do so.

If you are engaged in lively debate or disagreement with other people, please keep the following in mind:

  • In many cases, you will be arguing about ‘opinion’, and there may not be an objectively right or wrong answer
  • Remember that people are generally passionate about defending their beliefs and thoughts
  • Accept that other community members will have different thoughts and beliefs to you and respect that
  • Disagree with and discuss content and posts, not the people making them
  • Do not engage in personal attacks
  • If you are providing commentary, rebuttals or feedback please keep your comments positive and constructive
  • If you have a complaint about another community member, please initially take it up with them in a civil way via private message; if this doesn’t work, please contact a moderator via private message

Posting general content – Things to do

Our aim is to ensure the posting of high quality posts and comments in this community. You can help us to achieve this by:

Think before you post – This is the golden rule; think about your content before you post it, is it something the community is going to care about?
Stay On Topic – Please bear in mind the title and reason for this community’s existence and post with that in mind
Post content in the right subtopics – Please pay attention to the subtopic list on the right hand side of this community, underneath the picture and settings icons and post your content in the appropriate place; this helps to keep the community organised and means your content can be found more easily by others
Post content that is informative, educational, entertaining or encourages discussion – We want content posted here to be engaging. If what you are going to post does not meet that criteria, it is unlikely to be of value to our community members
Post ‘for’ the community, not ‘at’ the community – Remember your audience here; try to post content that will be relevant to them, take time to learn about the content that does (and doesn’t) do well and post with that in mind

Posting general content – Things Not to do

In addition to the guidelines above, please avoid this behaviour:

Posting questionable, obscene, illegal, confrontational or defamatory content – Please keep your postings to appropriate topics and discussions
Plagiarising, breaching copyright or failing to attribute – Please attribute content appropriately, respect copyright and do not steal other’s content
Posting invitations to other communities – Please do not post invitations to other communities unless invited to do so by a moderator; this is considered very rude!
Posting too often – Please keep your posting frequency to a reasonable level; please do not make back-to-back posts and do not post just for the sake of it
Posting from an ‘entity’ rather than your personal profile – Please engage with this community from your personal profile, rather than as a group, business, government, agency, NGO, or brand

Posting links

In addition to the guidelines above for general content, please also take the following into account when posting links to other online content.

Providing an introduction to your link and reasons that others would find it useful – Please provide a context, description and introduction to any links that you post; tell the community why you found it useful or what they will notice if they click on the link
Do not post ‘naked’ links (links without context or introductions) – Naked links are often irrelevant to the community and should be avoided; always post links that are appropriate
Do not post spam links / cross posting – Please do not post links here that you have recently shared elsewhere in other communities
Do not post purely promotional / advertising links – Avoid links that purely promote businesses, services, products or other areas; again, links must provide value to community members. Promotional links will be removed
Do not post the same link repeatedly – You generally only need to post each link once; in some cases it is acceptable to post a link again if some time has passed (at least a month)
Tell the community if you are involved with the link – Declare any interests that you have in the link that is posted

Actions that may be taken if these guidelines are breached

By taking part in this community, you agree to abide by these guidelines. If you do not do so, the following actions may be taken against you or your posts (in ascending order.) Note that in some cases, a moderator may decide to apply a higher level action against your or your posts immediately, without prior notice or warning.

  • A request from a moderator to post appropriately in the community
  • A warning from a moderator
  • Removal of your post
  • Your removal from the community (you may be able to rejoin the community later; contact a moderator to find out why you were removed before joining again)
  • Your banning from the community (you will not be able to rejoin the community without permission and approval from a moderator)
  • In some cases, activities within this community or against other members may be reported to relevant authorities

As always, if you are unsure about any part of these community guidelines, please contact a moderator before posting your content, they can advise you.

Derived from an original guidelines on HubPages by Paul Maplesden.