Beststori.com Community rules and Guidelines

Beststori.com is an inclusive community, one where everyone should always feel respected, safe and supported. To make sure that happens, every Beststori.com member has a role to play.

This page outlines the expectations that we hold for our Beststori.com members. We take these guidelines very seriously and require that our members do too. Please make sure you understand them thoroughly.

The guidelines below apply to all behaviour in the Beststori.com community, including: behaviour at Beststori.com events and activities; the content on your Beststori.com profile; your comments on groups and activities; posts to our social media pages; your posts on community forums; and your messages to other members.

Breaches of the guidelines below will result in profiles and/or content being removed, and in extreme cases, can lead to a membership being cancelled.

These are not actions that we take lightly, but we reserve the right to make decisions which support creating and maintaining a community consistent with Beststori.com values.

Our Core Value: Respect

Treat all other members with respect. In other words, follow the Golden Rule and always treat other members the same way as you’d like to be treated. The Beststori.com community is a supportive, inclusive environment, where all of our members deserve to feel welcome and safe. If any member exhibits behaviour that does not comply with this rule, regardless of whether that behaviour is explicitly prohibited in these guidelines or not, Beststori.com reserves the right to remove that person from the community.

Prohibited behaviour

Beststori.com does not tolerate the following:

Offensive behaviour or hate speech. This includes anything that we find to include any form of racism, sexism, homophobia, any other form of hate-speech, or contributions that could be interpreted as such.

Sexual harassment

We do not tolerate content or behaviour that can be interpreted as sexual harassment towards an individual or group of people. This includes derogatory statements, unwanted comments (positive or negative) of a sexual nature, or solicitation of other members. Note that conduct does not have to be sexual in nature to constitute harassment: it can also include demeaning a person because of that person’s gender or that person’s sexual activity. This rule also applies to in-person behaviour at events and activities, or in one-on-one communication between members, and covers not just discussions about sex, but romance more broadly. If someone tells you they are not interested in romance, that choice must be respected.

Demeaning behaviour

Any behaviour deemed to be demeaning, or includes profanity, abusive or discriminatory content.

Copyright breaches

We will remove potentially libellous or defamatory postings or material posted in potential breach of copyright.

Personal information

For safety reasons, Beststori.com does not allow the publication of personal contact details, including information like email addresses, individual names and phone numbers, to be posted on public areas of the website. If you are looking to contact another member, you can send them a secure, private, direct message using Beststori.com or Beststori.com.

Unapproved commercial activity

Any activity that is commercial or profit-making in nature, unless officially approved by Stitch. You can read more about the promotion of commercial activities in the community here.

Spam and disruptive or repetitive posts

Any content that is excessively repetitive or disruptive to the community and any content deemed as spam. This includes cross-posting of the same or similar message across multiple Beststori.com Groups.

Guidelines for Events and Activities

Beststori.com members don’t generally need much guidance about how to behave in the real world (they’ve usually had plenty of practice!), and that includes behaviour for both organizers and attendees at Beststori.com events and activities. As long as everyone sticks to the Golden Rule above, things tend to run pretty well.

Experience has taught us, however, that a community like Beststori.com– where members are always in the process of getting to know each other – is sometimes a little bit different from other communities our members may be familiar with, and a few issues seem to pop up over and again.

With that in mind, here are some guidelines to keep in mind when organizing or attending Beststori.com activities:

Everyone is welcome at “Open” events. If you are the organizer of an “Open” (i.e. public) event, please remember that everyone is welcome. That includes Basic (non-paying) members, friends of members, and unverified members who have come along to get verified. Some members can take months or even years before they decide to start coming to events and activities, so we don’t place a time limit on when someone needs to get verified after registering for Stitch. We do, however, limit unverified members to three events before they need to be verified. So if an unverified member turns up at an Open event, please do your best to help them get verified.

While “Open” events must welcome everyone, Beststori.com also recognizes that every single Beststori.com member has the right to choose who they want at their events and activities. That’s why event organizers and group owners have the ability to block other members from attending their events if they so choose. All members also have the ability to block other members from communicating with them on-line. Members are not obliged to provide a reason for why they blocked someone. If you’ve been blocked, please respect that member’s right to do so. We know it can be upsetting if this happens, but please don’t take it personally, it usually just means the member in question has different goals for what they want from the community than you do.

One of the techniques we recommend Beststori.com members use to get a community going in their area is to have a regular event on the same day once per month.If you are the organizer or a regular attendee at one of these events, please remember that it won’t always be the only event held that day. As the community grows in your area, you can expect (in fact, you should hope) there will be more and more activities posted by other members. Sooner or later, someone is going to post an event on the same day as your regular monthly event, and that’s actually a good thing. Sometimes this happens because the other member wants to attend an activity whose time or date cannot be changed, sometimes they simply don’t realize that your regular event has been happening on that night for months. No matter what the reason, you must remember that this is not a problem and in fact is something Beststori.com encourages. Beststori.com is a broad community full of a wide variety of members, and as the community grows there needs to be space in the community for multiple events on every single night, to cater to all those interests.

Once your local community calendar becomes so full that there are multiple events on each night, instead of being concerned that there is competition for attendees at your activities, you should be jumping for joy about having such a wonderfully diverse community in your area!

Do not publish multiple instances of recurring events or activities

Recurring events play a crucial role in helping a community grow and flourish, especially a community that’s just getting started. We have seen time and time again that members who attend recurring events such as monthly ‘MeetUp’ begin to feel connected to everyone else and learn how safe and welcoming the Beststori.com community is. That’s why they are such an important aspect of Stitch.

When creating a recurring activity, please do not publish multiple instances of the activity at one time, even if they are over multiple weeks or months. For example, if you want to host a monthly Mix and Mingle, do not post it for August, September, October, November, etc. at the same time. If you do, members of your local community will receive an email for every month you post it for, which will clutter their email inbox and lead to complaints. It will also mean you get fewer attendees overall.

on-line Discussion Guidelines

While Beststori.com is very much focused on getting our members together in the real world, it’s important to recognize it’s the on-line Beststori.com platform that helps facilitate this process. And while many Beststori.com members are very accustomed to communicating on-line, not everyone is familiar with the sort of on-line etiquette that helps keep an on-line community functioning well.

To help our members get the best out of our on-line community here’s some helpful tips to keep in mind when communicating on the Beststori.com forums, or commenting on Beststori.com Groups or Activities. Always imagine when you are engaged in the on-line Beststori.com community that you are in a real conversation, in a real room, with real people. The guidelines below follow similar principles as if you were in any other real environment.

Don’t take offence where none is intended

on-line communication is missing all the non-verbal cues we use to interpret meaning when talking to someone in real life. As a result, it can be far too easy to misinterpret another comment as deliberately offensive, when that was not the author’s intent. Before taking offence at a comment, pause to think whether there could have been any other intention behind it. If so, let it go. And even if not, don’t air your grievances publicly — that’s how conflicts escalate. Send the member a private message, and sort out your grievances in private, like adults. You are far more likely to have a successful resolution if you approach someone privately than if you escalate a conflict in public.

Don’t air dirty laundry

Beststori.com contains many channels for communication with other members: one-on-one conversations, events and activities, the on-line forums, and more. Human nature being as diverse as it is, you won’t always get along with every single other member of the community. That’s generally fine; we’re all mature enough to know that not everyone is destined to be our friend. What’s not fine, however, is raising past disputes and arguments with another member in a public discussion. If a member said something you didn’t like to your privately, or in a separate discussion topic, it is not OK to then raise that in a totally separate public discussion. If you’re upset with something that somebody else has done, you need to report their behaviour when it happens, or else let it go; bringing it up in forums across the community only makes things less pleasant for everyone, including you.

Be pleasant

Demonstrate and share the intelligence, wisdom and humour we know you possess. Take some responsibility for the quality of the conversations in which you’re participating. Help make this a comfortable place for discussion and it will be.

Remain clear and concise

Things like sarcasm and humour have a tendency to get misunderstood when in written form. To avoid confusion, write clearly and expect that people may interpret your contribution differently to what was intended. One of the best ways to test your messages for clarity is to read them out loud before you send them.

Read what’s been written first

Be mindful of the other users in the conversation and take a minute to read through the whole page and other comments to make sure that you’re not reposting a recent comment, which might have already been discussed. Just as you wouldn’t interrupt a conversation in real life without checking what the discussion is about, the same rule applies here. This also applies to posts or comments about moderation, which should not be posted as comments and will be removed.

Don’t broadcast to the whole group when a direct reply will do

If you receive an invite to an event and can’t come, there is no need to broadcast to all attendees that you cannot attend. If you want to send the organizer a personal message, please send them a private direct message, rather than posting a comment on the event as this will sent a notification to all attendees.On a similar topic, if you want to reply to an individual comment in a conversation, click the “Reply” button on that comment. Your response will be sent to that person, rather than broadcasting a notification to the whole group.

Stay on topic

We know that some conversations can be wide-ranging, but if you post something which is unrelated to the original topic (“off-topic”) then it may be removed – or moved to a new conversation. Community moderators do this to help the conversation stay on track. Before starting a new discussion, take a look to see if another member has already created one covering the same topic or subject to avoid repeating the same conversations in multiple forums.

Do not broadcast your member invite code inside Beststori.com

Giving your member invite code to new members in order to convince them to join Beststori.com (and earn a discounted membership in the process) is something we actively encourage, and is the whole reason the invitation code was introduced in the first place. You must, however, refrain from broadcasting your invite code in the public areas of the community, such as on event comments, or the Beststori.com forums. The reason is simple: if everyone did so, it would make the community unworkable for everyone else; the public areas would be overwhelmed by posts with invitation codes. If you want to send someone your code to invite them to join the community, just send them a private message on Beststori.com or hand it to them in person at an Open event.On the other hand, you are actively encouraged to broadcast your invitation code as publicly as you can outside Stitch. Post it on fliers, on your blog, in your email signature, on your web site … whatever works for you! We all want as many members as we can to join the community, so please invite as many people as you can, however you see fit.