Special Edition: TWM Content Poll

[thisweekmod]

Hello all! After the most recent kerfuffle, I thought I would take this opportunity to ask what folks felt would be the best practices for the newsletter regarding certain sites and types of links.

I have made a Content Poll-- it's not long, and if you don't like any of the options you can totally post a comment here instead. It asks about etiquette regarding Dreamwidth/LiveJournal communities, Fanlore pages, Fanlore-found links, and what to do when an Original Poster is not available for contact.

All these questions assume the post being linked is not locked or private, and that the entity doing the linking is a newsletter.

Edit: Some further context for why linking and linking permissions is so hotly debated in fandom (Fanlore).

My own answers are currently along the lines of: community posts are probably fine to link because they were posted widely to begin with; Fanlore pages made through explicit permission of OP is best, but for certain historical meta it's okay to link anyway; linking to Fanlore to provide further context is fine; no way to ask for permission means no link; if the OP has completely disappeared from fandom and/or online, it's fine to link their stuff.

But I want to know what you think! :)

The comments here are open, and I encourage you all to discuss your thoughts with me and with each other. We've had some really good discussions in the last few days, and I'm interested in seeing what you all think about these specific linking situations.

If you can think of anything else that might be missing from either the poll or the editorial guidelines, please let me know.

Thank you! ♥

Comments

Re: fanlore issue

[batwrangler]

Your example is exactly what did happen: Fanlore recently made a page without permission of a an old LJ post the that OP wouldn’t have left public today, but which, back in the day, WAS functionally private and was ranty on account of recent grief. Fanlore was tone-deaf to pick that post rather than the OPs actual fannish-content posts.

Re: fanlore issue

[cimorene]

I hope it's not what I described in my example, which is that the link in the newsletter resulted in a wave of argumentative comments on the old post in question. Did that happen? The impression I got, reading about it later, was that all the controversy was on the newsletter post itself and concerned whether linking to old posts was acceptable.