Groupthink

Let's talk about inviting new members.    Our last round of invites was developed on the fly.  Some things worked well and some things need streamlining. One thing that was clunky was presenting names to the group.  At our previous home, authorship invite posts were put up and folks could comment/put a name forward. Then people liked the comments of folks they supported and if needed, emailed a mod separately to express any concerns. This framework might work well for new commenter invites as well.  We will also need to firm up our community rules so that commenters have clear guidelines on acceptable behaviour to mitigate any potential issues.  We'll likely be putting up a post for input on that down the road.  In the mean time, I encourage all to use the tools available to you (flagging, muting/blocking a commenter, emailing a mod) for any issues you encounter. I'll post a link in the  comments on how to do these things. The floor is open. ...

  I've raised the possibility of this before; inviting selected commenters from Jezebel to join us here; people who make positive and supportive comments, who might be cast adrift if Kinja/Jezebel/SNS shuts down. People that many of us here have interacted with many times. This week, Maria Sherman, who posted the Pissing Contest on Jez was laid off, so Pissing Contest is no more, and last week SNS had less than 200 comments. This week it's just over 200 comments, and they used to get in excess of 1,000 comments. It's possible that G/O Media may pull the plug on all or part of their little online empire, with little notice. Do we, as a community want to add new members, and are the mods, and our gracious hostess, Violet B. prepared for new members?  If we would like to invite new members, we could select a random, slightly older comment ( not on the current SNS post!), to avoid attracting trolls here, and say something like;  "If at some point you are looking for a new ...