READ ME: The Bar's Purpose, Policies, and Staff

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PURPOSE

The bar is for general, unfocused conversation that is NOT on topic for one of the other sections of the board.

POLICIES

All board policies apply. At minimum this means keep it generally positive, PG-13, no touchy topics, etc.

No spoilers for anything here, please! Folks should not have to feel like they need to avoid threads here in order to preserve their enjoyment of what entertains them.

RAPID EXPIRATION

Persistent wandering topics have been breeding grounds for bad feelings in the past. With this in mind, The Bar is a rapid expiration area. Any topic which is one week old will get locked automatically (feel free to start a new one as a continuation when that happens). Any topic which hasn't been posted in for one week will be deleted. This means that even an active topic thread will get deleted in two weeks -- at the end of the first week, it will get locked; at the end of the second week, it will have had no activity for a week, so it'll get deleted.

Our hope is that this will help keep things positive, persistent enough that people in different time zones can all be part of a "conversation", but ephemeral enough that the topic of conversation is always just what's happening at the bar "right now" (i.e., this week).

If you want to have longer persistent conversations, then coming up with topics that are on topic for the other community boards is the way to do it.

BARTENDERS

We're going to be starting a "Bartender" program on this board specifically. What this means is that we'll be giving this specific board a lot of moderators, drawn from the community population.

This has two primary purposes.

For one, it keeps this "undirected" area under greater supervision. We want this, because as a moderator/governance body we need to be more responsive to conversations that are going pear-shaped. Having some front-line moderators means they'll be able to see and respond to problems faster than the Senior Council (the forum-wide moderators -- currently myself, Priscellie, Mickey Finn, and Ashton) can by themselves.

For two, frankly, it's a proving ground, a chance for auditioning folks who we could bring over to moderate other boards -- both in the McAnally's area, and in the other parts of the forum.

This does mean you should consider all of our bartenders to have a big "HOW AM I DRIVING? CALL 1-800-SNR-CNCL" sticker on them. If you have concerns about a specific moderation action they've taken, please contact us directly (using email, not "report to moderator", since clicking the report button will, I believe, email the person you have concerns about too).  Make sure to provide a link directly to the post that triggered your concern -- the Sr. Council won't have a lot of time to go hunting to try to find whatever the heck it is you're talking about.

All board moderators will also be given the ability to moderate our chat system. No obligation to do so, but it means we'll have extra front-line eyeballs there as well when one of them is hanging out in the chat.

If you have someone in mind who you think might work as a bartender, let us know by emailing the feedback address: feedback@jim-butcher.com (please don't use PMs for this). Let us know the person's forum name and, importantly, why you think they'd be a good idea.  That said, please don't do this until after June 7th -- we'll want to establish some of our early picks first. No point in nominating someone if they're already on the job. It is unlikely we will extend bartending duties to every nominee, even the ones we like, but we definitely want to hear your ideas here.