We’ve had a couple of people request a new one of these, so here you go!
To the members of our community who’ve joined us in the past few months, or those of you who are just checking things out, I bid a hearty WELCOME!
To the members who’ve been here longer: Glad you’re still here! Mostly… mostly.
Anyway, let’s get down to business*: Talking about ourselves!
If you’re having trouble with that, some ideas:
- How did you get here (the Avocado)?
- Demographic information (age [range], area, gender, sexual orientation, race/ethnic identity, job, relationship status, pronouns, etc.)
- Hobbies and pets (the more wily among us tend to post pictures for
upvote farmingspreading cuteness) - Pop culture interests
- Origins of your username and/or avatar
- Which animal you were in a previous life
- Which animal(s) in a trenchcoat you are now
- Which hill you’d die on (it’s probably a pizza topping hill, isn’t it?)
Of course, you can share other things as well, and only share what you’re comfortable with!
Have fun!
*to defeat the Huns
For the new people from Pajiba (or any other new arrivals), a tiny, very much non-exhaustive primer. From what we’ve seen, our communities seem to mesh pretty well, so we’re not expecting any major issues, but a few thing might be of interest. See also the Site Guidelines in the top menu.
- There are many, many different sorts of threads here; the biggest ones are probably the Open Thread (general chit-chat) and the Politics Thread. There’s two OTs and one PT per day. Other threads are often scheduled, weekly, among the more prominent ones the Pet Thread, the Seriousness Thread, a weekly LGBT+ thread, a thread for styling and grooming talk, a mental health thread, and the Women+ thread, among others. There are many more, apologies to those omitted!
- Note about the OT: The general atmosphere tends to be snarky banter, but serious talk is by no means unwelcome (except for politics, and yes, sometimes the lines can get a bit blurry). If you do have a post in the OT to which you do not wish to get joke answers, insert /serious into your post and people ought to respect that (and mostly do). A generic example can be found here.
- There’s a list of automodded/banned words which will automatically put your comment into the waiting queue for us to have a look at. You can find a spoilered screenshot of the list of words here. OBVIOUS CONTENT WARNING FOR MANY SLURS!
- For the most part, that list doesn’t cause any issues and should be fairly obvious. The one word about which we’ve had and continue to have the occasional discussion is the b-word. Depending on who posts it (man/woman/non-binary person) and the context, we might allow it, or we might not. If you absolutely feel that it adds value to your post, censoring is appreciated. There’s also some more discussion about the topic in the thread linked where the list of banned words is.
- The Politics Thread can occasionally get a bit heated. That is the nature of politics. But it’s generally a good group of people who are supportive of each other and want more or less the same things. Keeping the tone of discussion welcoming and making sure marginalized voices in particular are heard and listened to is something which is very dear to our heart. But it’s a learning process and sometimes things don’t go perfectly. When that happens (or something else which you don’t think is quite right), please let us know by flagging posts, or sending an email to avocadomods@gmail.com, or tagging one of the mods in a discussion if you see them around. Or everything at once.
- Due to Disqus policy, we can’t have any threats of violence against people, and if we did, that could get our site into trouble. We call that the Mayor McSquirrel Rule around here.
- We’re generally pretty chill with moderation and intervention. When we do intervene, that doesn’t automatically mean you now have a warning. We will tell you very clearly that you are getting an official warning when this is the case, and tell you what for. Not that we expect many problems with y’all lovely people on that front, but just FYI.
- Any user can publish articles/Wordpress posts here (that’s actually how the site functions!), but they have to make a WordPress account and so that we can grant them publishing rights. More info about that here.
Have fun, and welcome to all newcomers!