[Announcement] Community Rules Update: Respecting Our Volunteers
Hi book friends! 📚
We’re incredibly lucky that our sub is run by such a fantastic group of volunteers. From our heavily involved mods to our occasional read runners, there’s a whole group of people working hard behind the scenes to keep everything ticking along.
There’s a LOT that goes into running Book Club - coming up with themes for our reads, managing nominations and votes, organizing schedules, running discussions, planning all our fun extras, answering questions, and keeping up with all the day-to-day admin that comes with running a big sub. We genuinely believe that the time, effort and enthusiasm our volunteers put in is a huge part of what makes this community so successful.
With that said, we’ve unfortunately seen an uptick in some rude and entitled comments recently. While we absolutely welcome varied opinions and discussion about the books and the content we read, some of these comments have instead been directed at the people volunteering their time to run reads, organise votes, plan schedules, and keep the community going.
As a result, we’ve added a new sub rule around respectful conduct toward moderators, read runners and other volunteers.
We always welcome constructive feedback about how we do things at Book Club. If you have suggestions about things that work particularly well, or ideas for things we could do differently, please send us a Modmail. That allows us to keep track of feedback, discuss it as a team and consider whether changes would genuinely benefit the community.
What we will no longer tolerate, however, are comments targeting individual read runners, posters, moderators or other volunteers because you don't like how they've chosen to run a discussion or organise something. These comments will be removed and result in a ban from the sub.
If you see comments that cross this line, please report them so the mods can take a look. We’re usually pretty good at catching this sort of thing ourselves, but we don’t see everything (particularly on older discussion posts) so reports are really helpful in bringing things to our attention.
We also want to take this opportunity to clarify what we actually ask of our read runners, because we’ve seen some comments suggesting expectations that simply don't exist.
Our only requirement for a read runner is that they post on the scheduled day with some sort of prompt or questions to start a discussion about that week’s section. That’s it.
There is no requirement to include a summary, external links, a particular format, a certain number of questions, or anything else.
Every read runner has their own style and the freedom to run their discussion in the way that works for them. We are all human beings with our own lives, jobs, families, responsibilities and endless TBR lists to manage! We all have different amounts of time and energy available, and different preferences for how we approach a discussion.
Some weeks you might get an incredibly detailed post with links and background information. Other weeks it might be a handful of questions to get everyone talking. Both are completely fine. Volunteering to run a discussion does not mean signing up to provide a bespoke service to the sub.
You don't have to love every theme, schedule, discussion format or decision we make. You are absolutely welcome to disagree with ideas and suggest improvements. But there is a difference between constructive feedback and feeling entitled to someone else's time, and we expect everyone to know the difference.
Our volunteers give their time because they love books and want to make this community a great place to be. Please help us make sure volunteering remains something people want to do. ❤️📚
Thanks to everyone who contributes, participates, runs reads, answers questions, helps behind the scenes, and generally makes this such a brilliant community. We couldn't do it without you!