I think it is a great time to broaden this discussion as the forum is growing. I raised the concept of netiquette when I first joined but it was before there was so much of a culture or cimmunity as there is now.
My main thoughts about this thread so far ...
1) Great topic.
I always read backwards in threads order to know who I am talking to and what had occurred.
2) I am with @Mazarita and @Sophia1 re rules and internally laughed at the idea of adding more banned words to the list. @Sophia1 you described some of the reasons and processes really well. ie Why strict rules might not actually promote civility and inclusion.
3) Personally my first social experience on the internet has been this forum. So I had to look up all the abbreviations and slang since I joined here mid 2015. I did not have much access to a laptop til then. At first my language was a bit formal and I was confronted about that on the forum (eg mocked for being too much of a teacher type), so I made an effort to catch up and get with current usage ... lol ... it was certainly not something I did without thinking ... it was work .... so gradually it slipped into my posts. I thought it might alienate less ... I was actually allergic to computers and the internet (due to long term domestic and psychological abuse) and finally making an attempt to overcome it. So funnily enough I was not really socialised into the caps means shouting thing.I had heard of it tho. At first I tried to be creative with bold or fonts or academic with my quotation marks, Sometimes my caps lock went on and it did not LOOK as intense from a purely visual pov as the bold or fonts, I started to included it into ... my expression ... to add INTENSITY ... as opposed to shouting. Shouting is often normalised at football matches and not seen as problematic. I am very wary of putting a lid on people who really need expression.
4) Diversity and uniquess have been bywords for me long before the internet or this forum was around ... I am wary of the concept of "universal rules". I am not as set against rules as perhaps Maz is, I almost have the opposite problem, my knee jerk reaction is to follow rules (orphanages will do that to you). Now I am older and better educated and have a lot of Lived Experience in many walks of life (not just mental health settings) I question more. It certainly was not my childhood or adolescent style. I did not have the luxury of that kind of cheekiness ... which is often normalised as cute.
5) I believe triggering is uniquely tied up with the individual. I am so often triggered by a huge range things and words due to extreme neglect and trauma. Also mood and level of how a person is travelling at the particular moment they are reading may have an effect on their level of triggering.
6) "Positive and negative" can be trigger words for me so I try to be very careful about using them. I am more sciencey than the average poster, and less mainstream than the average human. Trying to define positive and negative in terms of human behaviour is seriously questionable and should never be rigid or without full context. I prefer to use those words in maths and science personally, not psychology though I am aware of a whole school of psychological thought that uses a valency adjective.
7) The purpose of the forum IMHO is to give a voice to ALL those who are drawn to it with genuine need. I believe if we try and fix or define the culture too much it will be counterproductive. I have been more interested in reaching out to ouliers or those suffering more like @Sophia1's son, or my dad, or my brother and sister, than getting too cliquey, though I have also relished in some of the humour and camraderie present among members, even if I was not directly involved.
😎 Direct or vague criticism of the general forum can be interpreted in a host of ways, each to his or her own. I am not a fan of it as I have often felt manipulated by such comments. I've worked with the step away model, but also sometimes we need to step back in to do what we believe is right.
Over and out Apple
Who else ....
