I’ve had a message off Brenna saying I can keep the flicklit.co.uk link in my Lovehoney profile.
However, she has made a special point of asking if we have a policy on sharing contact information.
I’ve said that our rules are pretty much the same as Lovehoney’s at the minute (apart from the Erotic Fiction side of things), and that we won’t be sharing any contact info here either.
Can we all please make sure that this is the case, as having a good relationship with the Lovehoney Forum will be really useful later.
I think not sharing contact information is an extremely important rule so all in favour of this. Without it you run the risk of it becoming a hook up site, similarly the no private messaging as that is far too difficult for you to police.
Obviously as creator you have our email addresses now but I’m quite sure you have no nefarious motives. I would however hate for it to be publicly available either on Lovehoney or here. I haven’t tried flagging anything here but presumably that works in the same way as it does on Lovehoney so any people trying to get or give contact information can be made aware of any rulebreaking straight away.
Just to put everybody’s mind at ease, while your sign-up emails are in the system, they are only used for the functioning of the forum (sign-up, email notifications, digest email, and if anyone contacts the admin@flicklit.co.uk email address). I have no interest in them beyond that. They’re also only visible from one particular admin screen, and the rest of the time are hidden behind a click-to-see button. Only moderators and admin have access to them, which I’m currently the only one of either.
Hopefully that makes people feel a little more comfortable? But you only need a valid email, it doesn’t have to be a personal one. And you can change it at any time from your Preferences/Account page.
The Forum also registers ip addresses as well, however I have not installed the ip lookup database, so they stay just as numbers. Once again, I have no interest in these either. If we start to attract a lot of spammers we may need to revisit this, but hopefully by then everybody will know that this is a safe and trustworthy place, and we can make any decisions about that together.
There’s also no Google Analytics, ads, or tracking cookies. I’d like to keep it as clean as possible, so it’s just the essentials to make the forum work. I’m still exploring everything, so if anyone thinks of anything I’ve missed please shout out.
And the flagging should be the same. I think Brenna has tweaked theirs a little bit, so you might find some extra automated messages than you’re used to, but the heart of it is the same.
I’ll also be checking in quite frequently, so hopefully it won’t be too long before I see any flags that need dealing with.
That is the strategy I used for my blog, and I did it because I didn’t want people to think I was trying to make money out of the blog. Also, not having all the Analytics stuff means things run quickly, which I think is a must.
This place isn’t a money-making scheme either. I’ve created it to be a genuine forum for creating/sharing/encouraging erotic fiction. There seemed to be a gap for something like it (based on using the LH forum ), and I really wanted to learn more about the Discourse forum app itself. It seemed like a good fit.
If I’ve done my maths properly, the running costs are relatively minimal, so should be completely free to use, with no ads or donation begging, for the foreseeable future. If costs start to spiral then we may need to revisit this, but I think it’d have to get a lot lot busier before that happens.
And I keep referring to making joint decisions if we want to revisit any of these sensitive subjects later on. I don’t want to open the whole thing up and make it completely democratic for every new member, but I think having a core of ‘founder members’ or regular users who weigh in on these types of decisions will be really important.
And I’m privileged to be a Founder Member. I think this will develop over time. It isn’t like a closed blog which stays static, it is a more organic thing. You/we won’t get it perfect first time.
I think this will develop over time. It isn’t like a closed blog which stays static, it is a more organic thing. You/we won’t get it perfect first time.