Short common guidelines

Like any other informational tool, this forum can quickly become a nightmare: spams, trolls, infobesity… Community guidelines are cool, but a bit too long. Here are few suggestions for a sustainable and a friendly forum.

Feedbacks welcome.


As a contributor

  1. Each participation counts. Your participation counts. This forum is powered by you, the community.
  2. This is a civilized place for public discussion related to Open Food Facts: improve the discussion, be civil, be agreeable, even when you disagree; remember your messages are public.
  3. Open Food Facts is the only topic of this forum. Off-topic messages are moderated.
  4. Private information, inappropriate or commercial posts or comments are moderated.
  5. You should always stay neutral in regard of products or producers.
  6. You should not give advices related to health, but try to refer to consensual science-based facts or studies.
  7. Keep it clean and tidy. Make the effort to put things at the right place: find a good category, avoid duplication, off-topic. Don’t sign your messages (the forum do it for you ;-).

As an administrator/moderator/leader

  1. Only share few guidelines, easy to understand. Too many guidelines are not read.
  2. Follow and encourage guidelines for contributors.
  3. Keep it clean and tidy. You should keep the site architecture simple:
  • no more than 7 categories and 5 categories each;
  • create a new sub-category when a topic becomes the majority or hold more than 20 messages a week;
  • don’t create a category or a tag unless you are sure there are already many contents fitting to it.
  1. Encourage emancipation and empowerment: try to get someone to do something rather than do it yourself. Encourage people to welcome newcomers, to answer questions, to post new topics instead of keeping it lost in Slack.
  2. Last, but not least: encourage knowledge capitalization through the wiki (this is where we put stable documentation). Each closed topic should be an occasion to enhance documentation in the wiki.

I guess there are still too many guidelines: what would you remove or shorter?
What did we miss?

Should we encourage free tags or limit their number, on the contrary?

tags allow to categorize without categories and also accross categories.

I think they can really help and promoting them is a good idea because I’ve not seen them used that much on the Discourse based forum where I’m active.