Hey all! We want to remind everyone that, as per our terms of service, our goal is to make the Constellation a safe and positive community where our users can contribute in a healthy and constructive manner. We expect our users to always, in the immortal words of Bill S. Preston, Esq, "be excellent to each other", and be respectful of others. In keeping with this, we want to explicitly reiterate a long-standing rule: harassment using the Constellation platform won't be tolerated. This has always been our policy and we have banned users for such behavior before, including some cases of known stalkers.

To a less extreme degree, but still on the topic of consensual and non-consensual interactions, it's worth nothing that as part of the technical support we provide for our site's users, we will also assist authors in moderating open threads with clearly stated rules of engagement, such as deleting replies that they consider to be in breach of these rules, and ensuring users who they don't want to engage with don't interact. If you're asked by an author of an open thread not to participate in a thread, don't participate. Try to follow rules of engagement if applicable; good faith efforts are expected.

We're planning to improve tooling around open threads to make it possible to block users from these open threads (and potentially also allowing deletion of unwanted replies). While these technical solutions aren't yet in place, we want to be clear to all that this behavior is not OK. If a user tells you not to interact, do not send them messages; if a user tells you not to participate in an open thread of theirs, do not participate in that thread. We understand that there can be grey areas around ownership in collaborative writing, but these aren't examples of that. Repeated actions in this vein will result in a warning and could result in eventual deactivation of your account.

Thank you all for helping us keep the Constellation a safe and collaborative space!