News and Current Affairs Guidelines
After careful consideration and extensive discussion, the Mod Team feel that there is a need for some defined guidelines for posting in the News and Current Affairs forum. We do not want to be censors and we believe in the right to free speech, but we feel that we do need to protect members who choose to not read, or participate in threads that may upset or distress them.
From now on, the following guidelines apply;
1. When posting a news article, ALWAYS include your source, eg Daily Telegraph, Bigpond/MSN news etc.
2. When posting articles which may be distressing, please add a warning to your thread title, as per this thread here. Please choose your wording for your title carefully. Including things like "Parent kills child" is distressing enough for some members without having to read the article itself. Consider an alternative like "Parent involved in child's death"
3. Anything that is excessively disturbing or graphic will be dealt with as per this thread here
4. At the discretion of the Moderators, some threads may have the title removed altogether and a "Warning, disturbing content" title will replace it. This is to signal to members that the article is quite distressing (provided it is not excessive as per the above guideline) and so they aren't upset by details of the article in the title. The article itself may also be replaced with a link to the article on the original news source, so that this acts as double protection for members who may decide not to read the article afterall, or who may still like to contribute to any subsequent discussion.
5, As always, please use tact when you are posting in threads of a senstive nature. Your words may seem innocuous to you, but to someone else they may be very upsetting as you just do not know who could be a member here or if a member has been through a similar situation themselves. Above all else, BellyBelly is a support network for many parents from all walks of life and it is so easy to get caught up in the heat of the moment and pass judgement. There has been a situation in the past when a past BB member was caught up in the headline of the day and it makes it very hard for anyone to come forward and seek support when they see a community that is closed minded and unsupportive of those who need a helping hand. We also do not condone violence towards anyone, so please think twice before saying you would like to kill or hurt someone for what they did.
Many great discussions have happened due to the posting of articles that can be quite upsetting for some. We feel that there are so many avenues for healthy discussion in relation to issues raised by some of the articles, such as legalities surrounding sentencing laws etc, or even about parenting support for parents suffering mental illness, and we don't want to inhibit that.
