I’m so excited, I can hardly work the keyboard properly.
I’m a weaver, a sometimes spinner, and a knitter and I spend a lot of time on a site for people like me called Ravelry. It’s a site for all kinds of fiber enthusiasts (we often refer to ourselves as fiberholics) and it’s a big (according to Wikipedia, by Feb 2019, it had 8 million members), popular and extremely well-run site. And it’s free!
I interact with other weavers there, we sometimes have meet-ups (sound familiar?), and I use a couple of their forums to buy and sell equipment.
And I’ve been very pleased at how supportive the site has been of LGBTQ rights (see screenshot above for an example).
Most of the rest of my online time is spent here at Daily Kos.
Today my two favorite sites came together for me in a wonderful way:
Here’s the full and formal statement of their new policy:
New Policy: Do Not Post In Support of Trump or his Administration
Sunday, June 23rd 2019
We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.
This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. If you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.
We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.
Policy notes:
- You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
- We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
- We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
- We are not banning people for past support.
- Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
- Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.
You can help by flagging any of the following items if they constitute support for Trump or his administration:
- Projects: Unacceptable projects will be provided to the member or made invisible to others.
- Patterns: Unacceptable patterns will be returned to drafts.
- Forum posts: right now, only posts written after Sunday, June 23rd at 8 AM Eastern
- Profiles: Please do not flag profiles yet if the only banned content is an avatar or avatars. There is not yet a flagging system for those.
Much of this policy was first written by a roleplaying game site, not unlike Ravelry but for RPGs, named RPG.net. We thank them for their thoughtful work. For citations/references, see this post on RPG.net: https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads/new-ban-do-not-po...
I am proud to be a member of two such wonderful sites!