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

[amaresu]

I had another thought that really needs to be taken into consideration.

At what point does everything become too much for you to actually compile the links? Where does the newsletter become functionally impossible to do?

You're never going to please everyone. You can spend all this time hashing out rules, but then find that you don't have the time or energy to actually make this place work.

That would be sad.

So, please, take yourself into consideration. The rest of us will deal with what you can do because we've missed these newsletters as much as you did.

[falena]

+1

[morgandawn]

+10000

[thisweekmod]

Thank you. ♥ Right now it's fine, though of course I can't speak for 3-months-from-now me. Asking to link to an OP's meta post doesn't take any more time than finding the thing in the first place; what would be MORE difficult for me, long-term, would be fielding unhappy subscribers, OPs, commenters, etc. every issue because of something simple I could've tweaked.

I am totally willing to say "no" to things that I cannot do either due to time, ethics, or something else-- which may upset some people. But so far (most of) the suggestions have been easy to do and come from a good place, and the ones that suggestions that aren't either of those things are easy enough to ignore.