Hi everyone! First of all, I hope all of you are staying safe during these unprecedented times. While lots of people are sheltering at home, more of our social lives are happening in online. EveryCircuit Community is just one corner of the digital space where we come together to talk about electronics and support each other.
The majority of people join our Community to share their circuit ideas, draw inspiration and get help about circuits. Nobody wants to see fights that a handful of users are having. Nobody wants to see their published circuits littered with disrespectful comments.
Now that most schools and universities are locked down, the students are studying at home. School teachers who publish home assignment circuits via our Community don't want to see the kids dealing with any hate on EveryCircuit.
In an effort to make the Community a safer place, in the past few weeks we have rolled out reporting of abusive comments in the Chrome app. Blocking and banning is still a very manual and unthorough process for our small team and we hope to automate it. It would be way easier for us to permanently ban a handful of active offenders from Community, but this goes against the spirit of openness and inclusion that we would like to foster here.
I see openness and inclusion as core values for this Community. As long as a circuit is respectful, it deserves the right to be public, no matter how silly the circuit seems to some people. If you do not like a newly published circuit just ignore it like you ignore Google search results that are irrelevant to you. The circuit may be relevant to someone else in this diverse Community.
The guideline for comments is a bit more strict. In addition to being respectful the comments must be on topic when you comment on someone else's work. It is Ok to have disagreements in technical discussions but it is never Ok to offend anyone in this Community. Please do not post discouraging comments on circuits that don't meet your expectations. Someone else might like them. The majority of people are learning here, and there are people who like to have fun with the simulator. All of you are welcome here.
With the current worldwide situation this is the time when all of us need to forget our differences and come together to support each other. And I will do what I can for this Community to be a safe place for every person and every circuit.
