ADMIN NOTICE
In the interest of full transparency, we mods are going to address what happened Jan. 23 during the Georg FQF so that we can put this behind us and move on.
The first prompts of the open prompting post of the Georg FQF were put up by a member, and the moderators took them to be jokes mocking the guidelines and suggestions that we provide each time for the fest. We saw the prompts, interpreted them as making fun of our examples and moved on with the rest of the prompts. At no time did we plan to move those prompts forward into the prompt claiming post because they were jokes and those prompts were NEVER included in the claiming.
The next day, a comm member tweeted the personal Twitter of a mod saying that she found those prompts to be “trolling and making fun of the whole thing” as well as “making fun of a writing challenge.... and, to an extent, making fun of fandom celebrating Geo.” This was tweeted at the mod’s personal Twitter.
Since we mods are all huge fans of the entire band, Georg and this writing challenge in particular, we were not upset by the joke prompts and felt they didn’t reflect on the entire comm since they were written by one member. We have never censored or policed prompts in any fest.
Another comm member simultaneously tweeted two of the mods that she was also hurt by the prompts.
We mods tweeted that the prompts were jokes and they weren’t going forward in the prompts.
We handled this on Twitter because the two comments we got were on Twitter only. We never received a comment about it in the open prompts post. We never received a comm email nor did any of the mods receive any email about it. We thought we handled it directly on Twitter with the two specific comments we got because that’s where our attention was drawn to it. We have never received any comments anywhere else.
Now, on our latest post, we’ve received comments about the way we approached the situation back in January.
We think we handled the two comments we got on Twitter promptly. We let those commenters speak their minds and their opinions, then we spoke ours. We made the decision then to not delete those prompts from the post BUT to continue our original plan to NOT move them into the claiming. We were sorry that two members took offense, but we mods did not and do not apologize for prompts that we didn’t make personally. We moved on with the fest.
Since this has been brought to our attention again, may we make some suggestions?
1. If you have a problem with the comm and want to air it publically, do it on our open post. Email the mods or email the comm. We did not receive ANY emails regarding the Georg FQF prompts.
Twitter is a terrible place for discourse of anything because of the character limits and the fact that many users have locked accounts so the number of people seeing the comments are greatly limited.
2. If you have a problem, bring it to us. We can’t say we’ll agree with you because we all have our differing opinions, but we’ll listen and take it under advisement.
3. Whether or not we thought the jokes were funny was immaterial. We have never policed prompts and we do not intend to because we will not censor. We will defend her right to prompt as much as we will defend another member’s right to express her opinion in comments.
BUT we will draw the line when an argument can’t go any further because it’s devolved into circular arguments that have no answer.
These were the first complaints we’ve ever received about the way we handled a prompts post. We don’t want to have to resort to rules outlining specifics of how to or how not to prompt. We’ve always left that to the prompter’s discretion.
It was spelled out in that prompt collecting post that “We're not going to be "policing" prompts - please do submit anything and everything that you feel will be a good prompt for the fest.” In case that is not clear enough in the body of the post, we will make that disclaimer larger or bolded in the future.
We want to keep the comm a playground where everyone who is a fan of the band can come play and have fun. We understand that emotions run high when it’s something we all love.
There is no way everyone is going to be happy about this situation. We realize that and hope you do, too. There’s been name-calling and passive-aggressive comments on Twitter. We’ve screened comments after we said we were done with the discussion that was only going in circles. We know we can all continue to learn to respect each other, and learn to handle situations more gracefully even though they are full of passion.
All we can say is this: there will be no more engaging. We have to agree to disagree about this. We think this situation has run its course and any more back-and-forth is beating a dead horse. We have heard what you’ve had to say about the situation and because everyone is repeating the same things, the discussion is done.
We hope that going on from here we can all realize that we have different opinions of things and that’s OK. We all see things differently, we have to agree to live with those differences sometimes, but I’m sure we can agree on one thing: we want the band to be happy and we’d like to make the upcoming FQF a success.
Thank you.
The first prompts of the open prompting post of the Georg FQF were put up by a member, and the moderators took them to be jokes mocking the guidelines and suggestions that we provide each time for the fest. We saw the prompts, interpreted them as making fun of our examples and moved on with the rest of the prompts. At no time did we plan to move those prompts forward into the prompt claiming post because they were jokes and those prompts were NEVER included in the claiming.
The next day, a comm member tweeted the personal Twitter of a mod saying that she found those prompts to be “trolling and making fun of the whole thing” as well as “making fun of a writing challenge.... and, to an extent, making fun of fandom celebrating Geo.” This was tweeted at the mod’s personal Twitter.
Since we mods are all huge fans of the entire band, Georg and this writing challenge in particular, we were not upset by the joke prompts and felt they didn’t reflect on the entire comm since they were written by one member. We have never censored or policed prompts in any fest.
Another comm member simultaneously tweeted two of the mods that she was also hurt by the prompts.
We mods tweeted that the prompts were jokes and they weren’t going forward in the prompts.
We handled this on Twitter because the two comments we got were on Twitter only. We never received a comment about it in the open prompts post. We never received a comm email nor did any of the mods receive any email about it. We thought we handled it directly on Twitter with the two specific comments we got because that’s where our attention was drawn to it. We have never received any comments anywhere else.
Now, on our latest post, we’ve received comments about the way we approached the situation back in January.
We think we handled the two comments we got on Twitter promptly. We let those commenters speak their minds and their opinions, then we spoke ours. We made the decision then to not delete those prompts from the post BUT to continue our original plan to NOT move them into the claiming. We were sorry that two members took offense, but we mods did not and do not apologize for prompts that we didn’t make personally. We moved on with the fest.
Since this has been brought to our attention again, may we make some suggestions?
1. If you have a problem with the comm and want to air it publically, do it on our open post. Email the mods or email the comm. We did not receive ANY emails regarding the Georg FQF prompts.
Twitter is a terrible place for discourse of anything because of the character limits and the fact that many users have locked accounts so the number of people seeing the comments are greatly limited.
2. If you have a problem, bring it to us. We can’t say we’ll agree with you because we all have our differing opinions, but we’ll listen and take it under advisement.
3. Whether or not we thought the jokes were funny was immaterial. We have never policed prompts and we do not intend to because we will not censor. We will defend her right to prompt as much as we will defend another member’s right to express her opinion in comments.
BUT we will draw the line when an argument can’t go any further because it’s devolved into circular arguments that have no answer.
These were the first complaints we’ve ever received about the way we handled a prompts post. We don’t want to have to resort to rules outlining specifics of how to or how not to prompt. We’ve always left that to the prompter’s discretion.
It was spelled out in that prompt collecting post that “We're not going to be "policing" prompts - please do submit anything and everything that you feel will be a good prompt for the fest.” In case that is not clear enough in the body of the post, we will make that disclaimer larger or bolded in the future.
We want to keep the comm a playground where everyone who is a fan of the band can come play and have fun. We understand that emotions run high when it’s something we all love.
There is no way everyone is going to be happy about this situation. We realize that and hope you do, too. There’s been name-calling and passive-aggressive comments on Twitter. We’ve screened comments after we said we were done with the discussion that was only going in circles. We know we can all continue to learn to respect each other, and learn to handle situations more gracefully even though they are full of passion.
All we can say is this: there will be no more engaging. We have to agree to disagree about this. We think this situation has run its course and any more back-and-forth is beating a dead horse. We have heard what you’ve had to say about the situation and because everyone is repeating the same things, the discussion is done.
We hope that going on from here we can all realize that we have different opinions of things and that’s OK. We all see things differently, we have to agree to live with those differences sometimes, but I’m sure we can agree on one thing: we want the band to be happy and we’d like to make the upcoming FQF a success.
Thank you.