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pretty sure the community would have had a bone to pick with staff's phrasing no matter what words they used on the first iteration of the rules. they were always going to need some level of clarification or rewriting.
that's not unique to flight rising though - it's just not possible to account for all the ways a passage could be misinterpreted/misunderstood before it's been published, especially in dicey situations like this one. i'm certain staff put a lot of thought into the topic of hatchling skin moderation before they presented their rules to the userbase.
that's not unique to flight rising though - it's just not possible to account for all the ways a passage could be misinterpreted/misunderstood before it's been published, especially in dicey situations like this one. i'm certain staff put a lot of thought into the topic of hatchling skin moderation before they presented their rules to the userbase.
AYRT - tbh i may have confused myself about where i was in the larger conversation - i had been reading from here, FR, and also saltminerising, and looking at it again my response seems partly to you, and partly to the general waves of argument i had been reading. so i understand your confusion.
YOUR wording wasn't oversharing in the least, but the i think the part "i find it wacky to ban light scarring (i have tons of childhood scars still)" was the connecting idea thread to what i had been seeing on the site forums, where some posters were sharing Too Much Information about their personal childhood injury stories as a way of arguing that such-and-such a scar should be allowed, or suggesting that the rules about hatchling skins were somehow also labelling human bodies with scars as imagery "not safe for children," which felt disingenuous to me. (content tangentially related to what was in your post, but not something you yourself said directly).
you also mentioned the welfare of content moderators in a cognizant way, which i was trying to agree can be a forgotten perspective in these conversations & was happy to see brought up, but i don't think i managed to get that tone across in what i actually wrote :P we can discuss FR rules on this platform just fine, so my frustration was really more about how the uproar was going on the site forums, where even a milquetoast argument about the rules like "well maybe this imagery should be fine because of this reason" defeats the purpose of staff trying to curate away from "potentially or questionably child-injury-related content" in the first place, because it's essentially setting up for a response about how the imagery in question COULD be interpreted as child-injury-related... and those kinds of back-and-forths just kept happening onsite anyway. frankly it's exhausting and i don't know how staff have kept up their patience :P
no ill will intended, peace and love on planet earth
YOUR wording wasn't oversharing in the least, but the i think the part "i find it wacky to ban light scarring (i have tons of childhood scars still)" was the connecting idea thread to what i had been seeing on the site forums, where some posters were sharing Too Much Information about their personal childhood injury stories as a way of arguing that such-and-such a scar should be allowed, or suggesting that the rules about hatchling skins were somehow also labelling human bodies with scars as imagery "not safe for children," which felt disingenuous to me. (content tangentially related to what was in your post, but not something you yourself said directly).
you also mentioned the welfare of content moderators in a cognizant way, which i was trying to agree can be a forgotten perspective in these conversations & was happy to see brought up, but i don't think i managed to get that tone across in what i actually wrote :P we can discuss FR rules on this platform just fine, so my frustration was really more about how the uproar was going on the site forums, where even a milquetoast argument about the rules like "well maybe this imagery should be fine because of this reason" defeats the purpose of staff trying to curate away from "potentially or questionably child-injury-related content" in the first place, because it's essentially setting up for a response about how the imagery in question COULD be interpreted as child-injury-related... and those kinds of back-and-forths just kept happening onsite anyway. frankly it's exhausting and i don't know how staff have kept up their patience :P
no ill will intended, peace and love on planet earth
"HOWEVER, insinuating that the word "Lolita" could ever be divorced from connotations relating it to the Nabokov book is fully obtuse."
And insinuating that anyone on the internet is going to read the word Lolita when it comes to fashion and not just think of the fashion is stupid. Because as I said: in the context of the book, what sexualised or otherwise suggestive fashion are they talking about? What kind of outfit would make someone look at it and go "ah, this is Nabokov's Lolita?" I would love to know.
But they're the ones that changed the wording because they clearly realised what they originally wrote was poorly thought out and liable to be wildly misinterpreted, so you didn't need to try defending them on it!
You're right on the site guidelines, but I think that for a group of people who clearly seem to think there's no point in running anything by a test/sample group of users first in a way that's led to blunder after blunder, I do think they set themselves up for failure.
And insinuating that anyone on the internet is going to read the word Lolita when it comes to fashion and not just think of the fashion is stupid. Because as I said: in the context of the book, what sexualised or otherwise suggestive fashion are they talking about? What kind of outfit would make someone look at it and go "ah, this is Nabokov's Lolita?" I would love to know.
But they're the ones that changed the wording because they clearly realised what they originally wrote was poorly thought out and liable to be wildly misinterpreted, so you didn't need to try defending them on it!
You're right on the site guidelines, but I think that for a group of people who clearly seem to think there's no point in running anything by a test/sample group of users first in a way that's led to blunder after blunder, I do think they set themselves up for failure.
I feel like the moderation team just has no idea what good user feedback loops look like and it impacts everything down to rule changes like this, where if they'd run it by even a small group of users prior to publishing, their original wording would have been immediately called out as being liable to misinterpretation to anyone who can read.
+1000
FR staff and mods mostly suffer from that meme "what would a banana cost, 10$ ?" type of self-made problems.
FR staff and mods mostly suffer from that meme "what would a banana cost, 10$ ?" type of self-made problems.
I feel like there is plenty of G-rated Disney material that FR staff would consider inappropriate now. They act like they are catering to a 5 plus audience too often sometimes.
To be fair I also think there's plenty of stuff in older disney films that wouldn't fly today. What's considered acceptable content to minors has changed.
There's plenty of older Disney shit that now is either unavailable or has warnings tacked of because it's no longer suitable to kids. Disney is not a good choice for that example.
Any have an archive of their thread in FRD where they were bemoaning that a dragon they sold (for 120g) got exalted. Missed the tail end of the thread before it got deleted.
(ayrt) right, the fashion style naturally does come to mind for many people. and i'm not trying to fight you on that. but even if people know the fashion style itself has lead to a degree of removal from the original context of the name, it is still true that the name was literally sourced from the book, and "the Internet is for corn"... so it's up to staff to be vigilant in regards to what user-generated content they will or will not allow to become items on their own site that they have a duty of care to curate as appropriate for children as young as 13. and to me the intent was obvious, that it was alluding to the sexualization of minors, and also alluding to certain facets of the "~actual definition Lolita-style fashion" that would, in the context of hatchling designs and the ABDL-style eroticism they're trying to avoid, be inappropriate for on-site skin&accent designs.
i agree with others saying that the most largely recognized fashion imagery "directly from" Nabokov's Lolita would probably just be the heart-shaped sunglasses as popularized in film depiction & then on book covers. [and culturally at large, the "point" of the book is missed]. but work with me here. Japanese Lolita fashion itself may not be sexual in nature, but unfortunately-common(especially online) eroticized "adult-baby fashion" depictions often include elements of dress also popularized by, parallel to, and/or borrowed from (in part) the literal Japanese Lolita fashion subculture.
to quote the initial phrasing of the rules:
"Designs should not adultify the hatchling.
This includes but is not limited to thigh-high stockings, Lolita-inspired apparel, and content that otherwise communicates visually or through the title/name that the hatchling is an adult in a child's body, etc.
...
Designs and their titles/names should be able to pass muster out of context."
so, they gave an example of attire first. thigh-high stockings. reasonable, makes sense, known to be related to eroticism even when, yes, No article of clothing is inherently sexual. then Lolita is namedropped. this is not banning dresses and/or Japanese Lolita fashion in general. following "thigh-high stockings," one can conclude that it's an allusion to Elements of this style, not All Permutations Of this style. sure, it may not be super eloquent, but to me, listing out all the impermissible articles one-by-one and naming why they are impermissible defeats the point of trying to omit that content in the first place... like me on neopets wondering why i can't write the word cucumber, and learning a new word through that :P
so, right, content visually or lexically related to sexualizing minors is impermissible. they can't just allow "accent: lolita pretty for coatl hatchlings" or similarly-named items. so they tried to suggest an idea of what might be disallowed visually, while also specifying a naming convention that would not be allowed, NOT because Japanese Lolita fashion is inherently inappropriate or sexualized, but because they have to be extra vigilant about content that could be construed as sexual in nature, and putting the name "lolita" onto a baby dragon is obviously not without HEAVY connection to the idea of the character Dolores, a minor who was assigned the nickname "Lolita" by the adult male character who was sexualizing her. [YIKES im sorry mods]
all these statements can be true at the same time:
-"fashion-subculture Japanese Lolita-style outfits are streetwear celebrating self-expression."
-"the Lolita name was sourced from THE book about babycrimes."
-"the Lolita name is therefore connected to both a very particular crime and a very particular fashion subtype."
-"ABDL-adjacent content intended for mature audiences does have visual commonalities with the Japanese Lolita style."
-"FR staff has, within the lifetime of the website, had to moderate out user-generated content that sexualizes minors."
-"most people will not intentionally submit inappropriate content."
-"content generated without ill intent can still be perceived as indecent when it has commonalities with popularly-eroticized content, even when it was created by an artist unfamiliar with any erotic context."
-"an outfit is just an outfit."
-"taboo fetishes do not indicate criminal proclivity."
-"people DO try to sneak inappropriate/sexualized content through the filters under the guise of plausible deniability."
-"creating/buying/selling UMAs with snuck-in erotic dogwhistles can facilitate the creation of hidden-in-plain-sight shadow communities of people who are summoned by those dogwhistles, and connect the unaware to those with ill intent."
-"virtual pet websites are popular locations for predators to seek out minors. (just because we don't like it doesn't make it not true.)"
-"it is best for people running a company to err on the side of caution when it comes to moderating content that could be construed as harmful to minors, especially in the current climate of internet sanitization and fearmongering What About The Kids (TM) rhetoric & legislation."
sure, i agree that the rewording of the rules was clearly needed based on community response. i'm not saying that the first draft was the best possible wording. but i do think that staff's wording of the rules would have needed a re-work for clarification no matter what the initial wording was (i said this somewhere else too). and what made me frustrated about the community response was the repeated insistence that "Lolita" as a word has been Completely divorced from its original context, which simply cannot be true in a 100% black-and-white either/or way.
(i'm so sorry mods, i've been trying to stay within the limits of acceptability when it comes to discussing this very dicey convo. i know we are all growing fatigued of the topic.)
i agree with others saying that the most largely recognized fashion imagery "directly from" Nabokov's Lolita would probably just be the heart-shaped sunglasses as popularized in film depiction & then on book covers. [and culturally at large, the "point" of the book is missed]. but work with me here. Japanese Lolita fashion itself may not be sexual in nature, but unfortunately-common(especially online) eroticized "adult-baby fashion" depictions often include elements of dress also popularized by, parallel to, and/or borrowed from (in part) the literal Japanese Lolita fashion subculture.
to quote the initial phrasing of the rules:
"Designs should not adultify the hatchling.
This includes but is not limited to thigh-high stockings, Lolita-inspired apparel, and content that otherwise communicates visually or through the title/name that the hatchling is an adult in a child's body, etc.
...
Designs and their titles/names should be able to pass muster out of context."
so, they gave an example of attire first. thigh-high stockings. reasonable, makes sense, known to be related to eroticism even when, yes, No article of clothing is inherently sexual. then Lolita is namedropped. this is not banning dresses and/or Japanese Lolita fashion in general. following "thigh-high stockings," one can conclude that it's an allusion to Elements of this style, not All Permutations Of this style. sure, it may not be super eloquent, but to me, listing out all the impermissible articles one-by-one and naming why they are impermissible defeats the point of trying to omit that content in the first place... like me on neopets wondering why i can't write the word cucumber, and learning a new word through that :P
so, right, content visually or lexically related to sexualizing minors is impermissible. they can't just allow "accent: lolita pretty for coatl hatchlings" or similarly-named items. so they tried to suggest an idea of what might be disallowed visually, while also specifying a naming convention that would not be allowed, NOT because Japanese Lolita fashion is inherently inappropriate or sexualized, but because they have to be extra vigilant about content that could be construed as sexual in nature, and putting the name "lolita" onto a baby dragon is obviously not without HEAVY connection to the idea of the character Dolores, a minor who was assigned the nickname "Lolita" by the adult male character who was sexualizing her. [YIKES im sorry mods]
all these statements can be true at the same time:
-"fashion-subculture Japanese Lolita-style outfits are streetwear celebrating self-expression."
-"the Lolita name was sourced from THE book about babycrimes."
-"the Lolita name is therefore connected to both a very particular crime and a very particular fashion subtype."
-"ABDL-adjacent content intended for mature audiences does have visual commonalities with the Japanese Lolita style."
-"FR staff has, within the lifetime of the website, had to moderate out user-generated content that sexualizes minors."
-"most people will not intentionally submit inappropriate content."
-"content generated without ill intent can still be perceived as indecent when it has commonalities with popularly-eroticized content, even when it was created by an artist unfamiliar with any erotic context."
-"an outfit is just an outfit."
-"taboo fetishes do not indicate criminal proclivity."
-"people DO try to sneak inappropriate/sexualized content through the filters under the guise of plausible deniability."
-"creating/buying/selling UMAs with snuck-in erotic dogwhistles can facilitate the creation of hidden-in-plain-sight shadow communities of people who are summoned by those dogwhistles, and connect the unaware to those with ill intent."
-"virtual pet websites are popular locations for predators to seek out minors. (just because we don't like it doesn't make it not true.)"
-"it is best for people running a company to err on the side of caution when it comes to moderating content that could be construed as harmful to minors, especially in the current climate of internet sanitization and fearmongering What About The Kids (TM) rhetoric & legislation."
sure, i agree that the rewording of the rules was clearly needed based on community response. i'm not saying that the first draft was the best possible wording. but i do think that staff's wording of the rules would have needed a re-work for clarification no matter what the initial wording was (i said this somewhere else too). and what made me frustrated about the community response was the repeated insistence that "Lolita" as a word has been Completely divorced from its original context, which simply cannot be true in a 100% black-and-white either/or way.
(i'm so sorry mods, i've been trying to stay within the limits of acceptability when it comes to discussing this very dicey convo. i know we are all growing fatigued of the topic.)
Jesus Mary and Joseph anon why is this almost a thousand words long???
DA
Nonny, I think I love you.
I don't give a fuck about this conversation or the hatchling accent rules because I don't own a single EY dragon nor do I ever intend to, but you just threw me straight back over a decade to baby's first LJ wank community between the raw wordcount and the microscopic topic dissection. Absolutely incredible. It is 2009 and I am pretending I am 18 on the internet again.
Nonny, I think I love you.
I don't give a fuck about this conversation or the hatchling accent rules because I don't own a single EY dragon nor do I ever intend to, but you just threw me straight back over a decade to baby's first LJ wank community between the raw wordcount and the microscopic topic dissection. Absolutely incredible. It is 2009 and I am pretending I am 18 on the internet again.
That's a really well thought out and evenhanded take.
Gonna be honest: I have been watching this thread CAREFULLY and I've been pleasantly surprised ♥
I’ve no screenshots, but basically a few members pointed out that the thread breaks forum TOS, and then aWizard posted a 4-bullet point reply on how they were not actually upset, and were shocked that the thread ‘got so much attention’.
Also aWizard said they intended the thread to be a ‘memorial’ for dragons that got exalted by other players. a Memorial.
Also aWizard said they intended the thread to be a ‘memorial’ for dragons that got exalted by other players. a Memorial.
Y'all ever see Gravity Falls. Or Owl House. Or most other modern adventure kids shows
AYRT
I was actually able to recover the URL and saw that someone did in fact archive the last page (and the first half of the second page), but thank you. Link for context: https://web.archive.org/web/20240518185133/https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/frd/3338293/3
I was actually able to recover the URL and saw that someone did in fact archive the last page (and the first half of the second page), but thank you. Link for context: https://web.archive.org/web/20240518185133/https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/frd/3338293/3
From my experience as well, vent channels just aren't worth it, unless you're prepared to moderate it heavily and warn people/delete posts constantly etc server members WILL vent about extremely heavy topics. A set of rules asking members to keep it to simple day-to-day grievances pretty please isn't enough and also not really what people want out of a vent channel anyway. If your kitchen appliance breaks you can honestly just complain about it in the general chat and no one will care, a vent channel isn't necessary for that imo. Iirc FR staff also doesn't want you to have a dedicated vent channel in your discord servers if you're advertising it on the forums, even if you claim that the heavy stuff isn't allowed you're just better off not having one at all for the sake of yourself/the mod team, your members, and the site rules
I actually don't think that is the case.(the rules against vent channels thing.) I've never seen anything indicating such.
nayrt
as stated by aeq in september 2022, "all links posted anywhere a player can enter text on our website must adhere to [flight rising's] Terms of Use or Rules & Policies" (https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/fl8/3107585/22#post_52241377).
this means that to post discord links on the site have to follow their TOS or can be edited out or deleted by staff if they want (the discord doesn't have to get rid of the vent channel since FR staff have no say in that, but must NOT have one if they want to advertise it on FR) in accordance with this Forum Etiquette section:
"Do not post “vent,” “pet peeve,” or “unpopular opinion” threads"
as channels are technically threads (though antiquated, as threads are a function now), vent channels on a server would make them no longer advertiseable on FR.
as stated by aeq in september 2022, "all links posted anywhere a player can enter text on our website must adhere to [flight rising's] Terms of Use or Rules & Policies" (https://www1.flightrising.com/forums/fl8/3107585/22#post_52241377).
this means that to post discord links on the site have to follow their TOS or can be edited out or deleted by staff if they want (the discord doesn't have to get rid of the vent channel since FR staff have no say in that, but must NOT have one if they want to advertise it on FR) in accordance with this Forum Etiquette section:
"Do not post “vent,” “pet peeve,” or “unpopular opinion” threads"
as channels are technically threads (though antiquated, as threads are a function now), vent channels on a server would make them no longer advertiseable on FR.
ayrt
you're absolutely right that the community would find something to squawk at if they so wished, but having the examples they provided in the first place would have mitigated SOME of it where it wouldn't have been this massively explosive. sometimes it's an issue of 'players can't read/infer', but this was a case of 'staff needed to be more clear', and that's been a trend for a while. people don't want to wait to figure out if their skin won't pass because it doesn't meet "no lolita-inspired clothing" when lolita-inspired clothing is a vast fashion culture that spans dozens upon dozens of genres and sub-genres of style, and to ban it all would ban huge swaths of fashion.
you're absolutely right that the community would find something to squawk at if they so wished, but having the examples they provided in the first place would have mitigated SOME of it where it wouldn't have been this massively explosive. sometimes it's an issue of 'players can't read/infer', but this was a case of 'staff needed to be more clear', and that's been a trend for a while. people don't want to wait to figure out if their skin won't pass because it doesn't meet "no lolita-inspired clothing" when lolita-inspired clothing is a vast fashion culture that spans dozens upon dozens of genres and sub-genres of style, and to ban it all would ban huge swaths of fashion.
I think you are reading the intent of the rules wrong there. Otherwise, I could get every single FR discord I'm in that was linked on the site in trouble because they all have something not allowed on the forums, like politics and current events channels as an example.
Can you attach some subway surfers gameplay to this
da
The old Disney stuff usually has warnings for being racist af, not for whatever you think is edgy about Owl House.
The old Disney stuff usually has warnings for being racist af, not for whatever you think is edgy about Owl House.
Yea. Not familiar with it, but I uh... seriously doubt anything quite like Disney's blatant casual racist stereotyping is in Owl House.
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