Hello!

There are currently four three different issues that Mycena Cave staff have been discussing for some time now, and which we have decided would be best resolved by a community-wide vote. We’ve always been extraordinarily impressed with you the Mycena Cave community, in particular for your ability to make good decisions for yourselves. So once again we’re relying on you to figure out what to do!

This means that you get to help shape several policies which will come into effect, on topics ranging from trade fees to moderation policy. I encourage everyone to please have a look at the issues and options and weigh in as you see fit. Your votes are secret, so outside of staff nobody will know what you voted for.

The deadline to vote is May 9th at 23:59 ST. You can change your mind as often as you like, but after the deadline your votes will be locked in. In order to be eligible to vote, your account must be at least two weeks old. That means that people who have registered within the last week will not be able to vote on these issues, because voting will close before your account becomes “old” enough.

Please click here to access the voting booth. For each issue, please carefully read the description and each of the two options, then select whichever one is preferable to you. If an issue does not apply to you (e.g. the chat issue you if you have zero interest in chat) then feel free to abstain, either by leaving it blank or by clicking the “Abstain” option.

Thank you for taking the time to help make Mycena Cave a better place :)

Edit: You can see the preliminary results

Neat that you are giving us the opportunity to decide how some things go around here
I voted :D

-Bounces- We make good choices yes we do.

In regards to chat atmosphere, and out of sheer curiosity, do our mods have any sort of official training in community monitoring or creating safe spaces?

glitch; Oh no, I thought you did a great job of making concise explanations of each change! I only meant that on some decisions I agreed with one half and but wasn’t sure on the other half of a single choice, if that makes sense? It doesn’t help that I struggle voicing my opinion without clarifying why I feel the way I do; but I would rather not expand on my choices here because that ruins the anonymity of my vote.

Overall I’m very happy with being given the right to vote, it makes me happy that the community can pull together to change the site how they want it to be changed, rather than it just being changed without us having a say. I love Mycena and how it’s run :D.

In number 2, for public site content, where it says:
“It should be against the rules to post anything portraying rape, incest, pedophilia, child / personal / animal abuse, necrophilia, and other similarly “distasteful” topics to be determined and codified in the rules.”

I thought it would already be a given that none of this stuff would be…portrayed on the site, as in…don’t post pictures of animal abuse, etc. However this could mean something entirely different if “portraying” here means “discussing” which I didn’t think about when I first read the sentence. Portraying something and talking about/alluding to it are two separate things. One could discuss the effects of something like animal abuse without graphically describing it, for example.

What is the intended meaning here? I may need to change my vote based on clarification.

I’m a wee bit… Unsure about #3.  Why would there be a rule about waiting to transfer sprouts/customs?
I know before, with the recreations, there was some weirdness, but I feel like that shouldn’t be an issue anymore?  I guess I just don’t see what harm there could be in buying someone a custom as a surprise or something. 
It’s hard to vote for this one because, while I don’t like the trade fee, I also don’t like the idea of a wait period for something I won/spent a lot of money on in the case of customs.  Sprouts are a little weirder to me because it’s a really personal thing to get babies, but at the same time if someone doesn’t see them as that significant then that’s their choice.  -shrug-

I think rule three is to prevent people from buying someone else’s custom slot? That way people aren’t buying slots from people close to the end of the queue to avoid the wait (which is kind of unfair to people who are further back and had to wait the two months to get their custom completed). That’s what I gathered.

I could be wrong here, though.

What is the intended meaning here? I may need to change my vote based on clarification.Phage

It would mean that, for example, you could not have an RP in which one of the characters is incestuous, regardless of whether the RP includes graphic / explicit scenes thereof or whether it is ever directly mentioned and only alluded to. It would mean that topics such as those simply “don’t exist” within Mycena Cave. It would also include discussing it, as you say.

Basically the question is, when you log on to Mycena Cave, do you want to be potentially subjected to seeing things like that in any form, or should those topics simply be off-limits on this website.

Why would there be a rule about waiting to transfer sprouts/customs?Dakota Riley

It wouldn’t so much be a rule as a physical impossibility: it would be impossible to add a custom to a trade if it was completed in the queue in the last 60 days (applying only to customs which are paid for after this policy would come into affect). This is an extension of the inability to be in the queue more than once at a time: if there’s a really wealthy user who wants 50 customs, you don’t want to have to sit and wait for them to get all 50 before you can even get one.

This policy, if it passes, would prevent such a user from e.g. paying 50 people to submit these 50 customs on their behalf and then trade them over when they’re ready, essentially working around the “can only have one order in the queue at a time” restriction. It would also not have an affect anyone who was buying a custom for themselves, as normal: customs are comparatively rarely traded, and almost never within the first couple months.

This policy would only apply to pets that go through the queue, not to premade customs / sprouts that are won in raffles, and then only to those pets which are purchased after the policy goes into effect.

Shima: aggregate counts for and against each possibility will be released at the end of the vote. There isn’t currently a “view preliminary results” page but it’s certainly something we can create :)

See the preliminary results here

“See the preliminary results here”

People want them spellstone nuggies. 

For the Spellstones… why are there these strange dictionaries? I thought it would just be the Merriam Webster, like how my family plays scrabble.

it’s strange when I play because the words that work and won’t are so inconsistent. i also feel that people immediately vote to not change because they see the warning about payout decreases and immediately choose the other option.

baekhesten: a middle option means mods have to make a judgement call on whether they believe a particular piece of content violates an “I know it when I see it” badness. And then we go down the route of a mod “censoring” some content because they feel it was probably bad, there may be a world of difference between how an author writes something and how a moderator reads it, and another world of difference between how a moderator reads something and how someone reporting content reads it. We could have a middle option but the only way to make it remotely “fair” to all users is to end up codifying a huge body of text detailing exactly what is and isn’t ok in perfect detail, acceptable across all cultures that have a significant presence on Mycena Cave, and then remove anything that explicitly violates one of these statutes.

Black/white is really the only way to keep this at all feasible to be managed.

I’ve also echo’d some more stuff to you.

For the Spellstones… why are there these strange dictionaries? I thought it would just be the Merriam Webster, like how my family plays scrabble. WeyrLeader

The Merriam Webster dictionary does not exist in “wordlist” form (i.e. a file with each word in it). It is also copyrighted which means that it would be illegal for us to use even if such a list did exist.

To the thing about the mods, glitch, the only thing I have to ask is.. and?

Mods make judgement calls all the time. And I honestly see no reason as to why this should be any different. If the user in trouble feels like a specific mod treated it unfairly? Then they can have it contested. I get that the mods have lives, but this is something that absolutely shouldn’t be black and white for convenience. Both are extremes that please NONE of the users.

tl;dr, you’re doing a disservice to the community by keeping this particular issue so black and white.

I don’t know that you can honestly say that it would please NONE of the users at any given point Shima— Given we all have different minds, feelings, thoughts, etc, etc, etc.

Not that I don’t get your point— But try not to make all inclusive statements regarding what may or may not please individuals when you cannot speak for them.

To the thing about the mods, glitch, the only thing I have to ask is.. and?
[...]
Both are extremes that please NONE of the users.

tl;dr, you’re doing a disservice to the community by keeping this particular issue so black and white.Shima

The second option is what we’re generally understood to be doing right now — so it is at worst “not doing a service”, not “doing a disservice”. The vote on #2 as it is written is: would what is stated as option 1 be better than continuing to do what we are currently doing (but with the addition of a requirement to use of M spoilers where tags are not possible).

There are some other great options that people have raised in the discussion thread such as an extended tag system etc. While commendable and quite excellent ideas on the whole, they are not currently feasible with our schedule in the immediate future.

This is why they are not part of this particular vote: at this juncture it’s not so much a matter of:

What is the silver bullet that will make Mycena Cave a good and happy place for the foreseeable future?

but rather:

Do we need to make a serious change right now and disallow this stuff, or can we leave it as is for now? Over the last couple months the frequencies of borderline/edge-case reports coming in has grown drastically, and in the interest of developing events/games/features for MC it simply is no longer viable for us to drop everything and discuss the intricacies of individual RPs with the mod team every time this happens

When we were dealing with similar issues in chat, we took chat down for two months while we worked on a good solution. Obviously we can’t take the forums down for a few months, which is why we have to make a decision of what to do between where we are now and when we get to where we would like to be.

Please pardon the terseness of this post, I’m currently neck-deep in some MC code, but felt that this needed an answer sooner rather than later.

I appreciate being given the chance to vote, but I’m still a little torn on a few things. In order of importance to me:

1. Spellstones; the wording of the question makes it really obvious that the staff would prefer to go with the original dictionary, and I think the responses reflect that. My own complaints (and the others I saw) were never about allowing “scrabble words” like ‘aa’, but legitimate words that people recognize and use frequently (e.g. “biome”). I guess maybe I’m just whinging because I feel misrepresented here and the question feels like it shouldn’t have been asked at all, based on the staff’s feelings. (ie saying the expanded dictionary makes the game less satisfying because the words in it aren’t “real” and the wording surrounding lowered payouts).

2. Public site content: I voted for the M tag: I’m with the previous posters in that I would really prefer that the tag additionally requested that people give a little more detail for the M rating, if possible. I may be okay reading about incest but not animal abuse, for example, and in that case a little more detail in the “M” would be nice. Even a set of 4 or 5 broad tags would be useful. I’m not necessarily a child that can’t handle anything “mature” - there are just some things I’d really rather not read about, and swaddling myself away from ALL the boogeymen, rather than just the extra scary ones, would make my creepin on threads mycena experience less fun.

3. I am not a high-enough mycena roller to have been aware of queue-jumping before today. I voted for abolishing the 3 gem fee because it’s really prohibitive for newer members. However, I think some kind of protection against queue-jumping should be in place if it’s a problem. Is there no middle-ground where the fee is abolished but the time limit is still implemented? If the current discouragement is ineffective, then it should be fixed. But I’d also love to not have to pay $3 to switch pets with someone, especially considering that the new rules (as I understand them) mean you can’t trade your only pet away so would be spending 7-10 gems anyways just to have something to trade.