Publishers Learning and Community Exchange (PLACE) Community Guidelines
We want the PLACE Forum to be a safe and productive environment for everyone.
Below you can read the community guidelines from Discourse to inform your use of this platform. We thank our participants for your help in keeping our forum welcoming, respectful, and friendly to all participants.
This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion
Please treat this discussion forum with respect. It’s a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge, and interests through ongoing conversation.
Use these guidelines to keep this a useful place for civilized public discourse.
Improve the Discussion
Help us make this a great place for discussion by always working to improve the discussion in some way, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.
The topics discussed here matter to us all. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.
Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree
You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But, remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:
- Name-calling.
- Attacking the person rather than the argument
- Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
- Knee-jerk contradiction.
Instead, help to improve the conversation.
Your Participation Counts
The conversations we have here set the tone for everyone. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.
Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: favorites, bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.
If You See a Problem, Flag It
Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not police.
When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.
In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts in any way; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.
Always Be Civil
Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:
- Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.
- Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.
- Respect each other. Don’t harass anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
- Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.
This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images professional. Safe.
Keep It Tidy
Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:
- Don’t post content which is not relevant to the community - be clear and explain why your content will be of interest to other members.
- Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
- Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
- Don’t post no-content replies.
- Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
- Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.
Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.
Post Only Your Own Stuff
You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without their permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.
Powered by You
This site is operated by your friendly PLACE admins, and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the admin page.
How to Use the Forum
If you would like more tips on how to make the most of your experience in our forum, then please refer to our How To Guide. If you have any questions about the community forum itself and how to use it, then you can post a question in our Welcome category or contact us via email.