Referendum on Rules and Policy no. 2

Points of Order

  • A new policy on bigotry and acceptable text content for packages posted to the Lethal Company Thunderstore Community
  • An open forum for any other questions and concerns

A suggested Policy for how to handle bigotry, hate and authors that espouse such positions

Traditionally, the Thunderstore asks communities to judge the suitability of a mod for a given community by the merits of the mod and not the actions of the Author. The Lethal Company Modding Community has made it clear that there exists a class of speech that we cannot tolerate from our mod authors and that platforming such would cause more harm both inside and outside the community. To this end, it is in the best interest of our mod authors, users and general community members to document our stance in clear and understandable terms.

The Axioms Defining This Policy Decision

Axiom 1: The community cannot tolerate bigoted or harmful speech or content.

Axiom 2: A mod author that chooses to engage in harmful speech and to do so in connection with their mod or Thunderstore/Community presence is necessarily making the Thunderstore and our Community a platform for spreading their harmful content. If a mod author includes harmful content or links to harmful content within their mod listing, it makes our community responsible for spreading that harmful content.

Axiom 3: Our community explicitly does not wish to be used as a platform for spreading harmful content

Axiom 4: An author that has used our community, against our wishes, to do the above has, by their own actions, become labelled Persona Non Grata and, depending on severity of the infraction, acceptable solutions range from permanent expulsion to forced reclassification as a “NSFW” mod.

In order to satisfy the above Axioms and keep the community safe for all users regardless of gender identity, orientation, race, nationality, gender, ethnicity, etc, our community proposes the following policy:

The Lethal Company Modding Community of the Thunderstore site defines as harmful content and prohibits the following, non-exhaustive, list of topics from appearing in the text fields of uploaded packages or links in packages:

  1. The committing or participation in committing of hate, bigotry or discrimination based on any identifiable group.

    Community members will not commit nor participate in committing hate, bigotry, or discrimination acts. Nor will community members link their work to a group or person who commits or participates in committing the same. Further, community members commit to keeping any spaces they reserve for the use of developing, maintaining or promoting their community hosted content clean of the above defined hate, bigotry or discrimination acts. The community does not wish to be associated with such acts.

    An “identifiable group” is defined for both offenses as “any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression or mental or physical disability”1

    Commission of the offense for a motive based on race, colour, birth, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, sexual orientation or disability or for another comparable motive2

  2. The support of genocide or genocidal actions1

    Community members will not commit nor participate in committing support of genocide or genocidal actions. Nor will community members link their work to a group or person who commits or participates in committing the same. Further, community members commit to keeping any spaces they reserve for the use of developing, maintaining or promoting their community hosted content clean of the above defined acts. The community does not wish to be associated with such.

Examples of Allowed and Restricted Content

These examples are non-exhaustive. Links to off-platform material may still be grounds for package removal at the discretion of site and community moderation. If you have questions or concerns about your package you may speak to any Thunderstore Volunteer on the community server

Allowed Content

  • Links to Github source code repositories
  • Links to the author’s Kofi
  • Links to an author’s social media that contain none of the prohibited content outlined above
  • Links to moderated communities where prohibited content is not tolerated (Ex: The Lethal Company Modding Community, The Unofficial Lethal Company Community)

Disallowed Content

  • Links to hate groups or extremist websites (ex: The Ku Klux Klan’s site)
  • Links to an author’s social media that contains any of the prohibited content outlined above
  • Links to communities where any of the prohibited content is allowed or encouraged (ex: un-moderated Discord servers)
  • Package descriptions or titles that contain any of the prohibited content

Open Forum for Suggestions

This feedback channel has been archived

This policy and suggested changes, were added to our community guidelines, thank you for your feedback.

Please join us for the week of June 24th to discuss the above policy and provide feedback on the status of all existing community policy. Please join the community server and navigate to the Policy-Referendum-2 channel.

Footnotes

  1. – Criminal Code, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-46 (Canada) https://lop.parl.ca/sites/PublicWebsite/default/en_CA/ResearchPublications/201825E ↩ ↩2

  2. – Ministry of Justice, Finland. Criminal Code (39/1889; amendments up to 433/2021 included). Translation from Finnish. Legally binding only in Finnish and Swedish. https://www.finlex.fi/fi/laki/kaannokset/1889/en18890039.pdf ↩