Green Heron Labs is providing conversation forums so that people can talk to each other with shared interests without fear of repercussion, suppression or censorship. Green Heron Labs also needs to protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. If you want to participate in this community, these are the rules you’ll need to follow.
It is not okay to flame, abuse, degrade or “troll” within these forums. Green Heron Labs reserves the right to edit or delete any content that does not comply with this policy without warning as well as remove you from the Mercy Program and/or remove you from the website altogether if you violate these terms. This is subject to the personal opinion of our staff, and the CEO’s word is final.
This is NOT The Place To Go To For Medical Advice
Even if someone in a forum is a doctor, they’re not your doctor! First and foremost it’s important to recognize that this is a place for discussion with anonymous community participants, it’s not your doctors’ office. Like anywhere else on the Internet you need to be appropriately critical of what you read and not take medical information as authoritative without consulting your medical practitioner.
This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion
Please treat this discussion forum with respect as if it were hosted in your own livingroom. It’s a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.
These are not hard and fast rules, just aids to the human judgment of our community. Use these guidelines to keep this a useful place for civilized public discourse.
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, write it down yourself, re-read it later and post what parts seem appropriate.
The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you and stay civil, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.
One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Please spend some time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.
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.
- Ad hominem attacks (explained here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ad%20hominem).
- Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content.
- Knee-jerk contradiction
- “trolling” (explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang) )
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. If you don’t like or appreciate certain content, simply don’t participate in that conversation.
Moderators have special authority as they are responsible for this forum, but so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or 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. 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. The moderators and site operators accept nor assume responsibility for any content posted by the community.
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 or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.
- Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.
These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of the New York Times.
This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for all ages.
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 start a topic in the wrong category.
- Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
- Don’t post empty replies with no actual content.
- Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.
- Don’t hijack a thread – if you want to start talking about a different subject, create a new conversation about that subject.
- 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.
You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images) or describe methods for breaking any other law.
You are a person, not a ‘bot. If you grab content from ChatGPT or other AI-generated response, you become less of a person and you become unable to converse with other people. Machines don’t have opinions, but you do – post that instead.
This site is operated by Green Heron Labs staff 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.