Greetings, Avocados! It’s been a busy few months since the last State of the Avocado. For some, like the many wonderful people we’ve seen come in from Pajiba’s comment section, this is your first time seeing a SotA; please don’t be intimidated that we have a long one this time.

New Rules and Guidelines

As a general note: Rules are non-negotiable and violations thereof may lead to official warnings or bannings. With guidelines, there’s a bit more flexibility, depending on context. Guidelines are things we’d like you to keep in mind when posting, rules are things  you need to follow to post here.

For reference, the page can be found here:  https://the-avocado.org/site-guidelines/

Guideline 15: Fundraising

We get it! Sometimes hardships hit us in life, and we find ourselves unable to pay our bills or cover a needed expense. We do allow people to link to their GoFundMe or other fundraisers here on the Avocado. However, we ask that you limit your fundraising requests: two requests per member per year are allowed. That does not mean two posts linking to requests; it just means two fundraisers are accepted. After that, we’d like you to find other avenues for assistance. Do not direct your on-site requests to specific individuals, ever. That will result in deletion and potentially a warning.

To this end, we’d like you to alert the mod team that you plan to link to a fundraiser before you do. We’ll need your Disqus username (the one in the URL) along with a link to the fundraiser. We don’t need to know any of the details. We’re not approving or denying requests based on merit; we’d just like to know that you’re planning on linking one so we can keep track of the number of requests. The previously established rule that mods will not feature or otherwise officially endorse commenters’ fundraisers will continue.

Patreons for artists/creatives are not included in this rule, as that falls under self-promotion. Just be sure not to rise to the level of spamming with links to your self-promotion.

Finally, if you are concerned about fundraising in general, please email the mods.

Guideline 16: Live-blogging

Live-blogging things in the OT and the PT can be confusing and spammy, especially when context is lost to the multitude of other discussions happening simultaneously. So we’d like to ask anyone who is live-blogging something they are watching to keep their reactions to a single top-level comment or start a new thread (good for events where many people want to give live reactions like season premiers of major shows or political debates/elections). This way we can maintain context, keep the threads from moving too fast for anyone to keep up, and make sure people who are interested can find all the related content.

NOTE ON THIS: Please keep in mind that this is a guideline, not a rule. This does not translate to “no liveblogging, ever”. As with all of our guidelines, this means that if the mentioned behavior starts to cause a problem, we as a mod team reserve the right to ask you to change something to make things easier on other Avocados.

Other Items

Major Changes to the Rules & Guidelines Page

• We’ve removed a lot of extra phrasing so that it’s more concise. Nothing removed changes the rules and guidelines as they are/will be applied.
• Removed “invasion protocol” rule entirely.
• Removed “adult content in specialized discussions” guideline entirely, moved that information under Guideline 3.
• Moved “Red Handle” guideline to “Rules”. It is now Rule 10. Note that this will mean less wiggle room for this sort of thing.
• Removed “flag abuse” guideline.
• Removed the words “PT guideline” from two of those guidelines: they apply to all threads.
• And, of course, added fundraising guideline, and the
• liveblogging guideline.

WordPress Changes

We’re going to be doing some archiving and updating with the tabs at the top of the page in the coming months, so don’t be surprised if you see some items moved to archived sections and the tabs getting a little cleaner. Don’t worry, we won’t move any active threads to the archived section, and everything will still be accessible: we won’t be removing anything.

General Reminders

We get a lot of posts caught in the queue with a fairly common slur that is both a verb (and an adjective) and a gendered insult. This has been in place for a while, but we’d like to give a quick reminder on how we deal with those posts. There is some wiggle room for women and AFAB people who are using “b!tch” as a pejorative — as we do with other marginalized people using words that derogatory toward them — but we would prefer it not to be used at all. It’s still fine as a verb or adjective; you just might have to ping a mod to have your post approved from the queue.

A reminder that while we’re open to discussing the content of the automod list with The Avocado at large, the existence of an automodded word list is not and will never be up for discussion. That has now been reflected on the Site Rules & Guidelines page.

Also, please remember that ageism is included in our Red Handle rule. We’re still seeing a lot of that happening, so please cut it out. This includes all forms of negatively generalizing about whole generations.

Yay!

• In the past 30 days, we had about 33,500 Disqus comment readers on the Avocado,
• about 1,370 engaged readers (who commented or voted), and a whopping
• 0 people who subscribed via Disqus email subscriptions!
• Of those 1,370 engaged readers, about 430 readers engaged for the first time in the past 30 days, mostly thanks to Pajiba, and about 860 regulars. And thanks to all our regulars who gave them such a warm welcome!
• Related to that: We had what will probably be our biggest Introduce Yourself thread ever, at almost 3,500 comments (more than twice the previous record holder!).

Finally, we as a mod team would just like to note how much we appreciate y’all as a community. The Avocado is full of kind, funny, great people who make this community the wonderful place it is.