04/16/24
March 27, 2002
The owners of SportsFilter have decided to remove "etiquette" from the Etiquette and Policy topic in the Locker Room and discourage public discussions about the subject. (more)
posted by rcade to editorial policy at 02:10 PM - 4 comments
Sounds reasonable to me. Good luck, of course :)
posted by tieguy at 09:52 PM on March 27, 2002
This seems like a massive overreaction. Why would you (and quite frankly why should you) eliminate the topic of etiquette? It seems that this would cause 2 negatives, a) it takes a measure of control over the content away from the community and puts it in the hands of the owners and b) it prevents the etiquette from evolving on it's own. Does this represent a desire to get away from the hand-wringing on Metatalk? Let me be the first to sat 'Who Cares?' I think too many people at this website bind up the identity of sportsfilter with the identity of metafilter. Maybe there's something I don't understand about this...
posted by pastepotpete at 08:15 PM on March 28, 2002
Does this represent a desire to get away from the hand-wringing on Metatalk? Completely. Metafilter's great, but no one would ever call it low-key. That's the vibe we're hoping for here, and it won't happen if we regularly offer up different people to a public flogging -- even when it is deserved. An etiquette forum encourages complaints about the allegedly rude person, complaints about the person who made the complaint, complaints about the community and complaints about the founders. If that's what people want, we can always reinstate it. But for now we wanted to try something else.
posted by rcade at 07:27 AM on March 29, 2002
When we started SportsFilter, one of our goals was to provide an easygoing and friendly place where people could discuss sports without the abuse and invective that characterizes most sports discussion sites. To make this happen, we encourage new members to treat each other with respect in the guidelines. As the site gets bigger, there are going to be times when a new member can't do that, and we may decide to put that person on waivers for the purpose of giving him his unconditional release. (Or hers.) However, we don't think this community is going to be easygoing if the etiquette of specific members comes up for complaint in the Locker Room. (Even though we have encouraged people to do that up to this point.) So we're trying a different tack: If you have a complaint about etiquette, send us an e-mail. We'll discuss it privately and decide if anything needs to be addressed. With seven founders on this site, we ought to be able to handle these things fairly ourselves without dragging the entire membership into each dispute.