Unity in Diversity: A few thoughts towards a stronger community.

Dear IL’ites,

One member has stopped participating in the site and ruffled few feathers unnecessarily before departing. If that member didn’t find himself at peace in IL, he could have graciously moved on. Instead, he chose to post an unbalanced account of his reasons for leaving. That forced us to respond with our side of the story and the resulting exchanges weren’t becoming of this site.

These unfortunate incidents happen from time to time and it reminds us to take stock of who we are as a community and reinforce some of the foundations of Indusladies.com.

• First of all, Indusladies.com is a not an “anything goes” site. Every member needs to follow the “forum etiquette” and we will strictly enforce it. Please use the following link as a refresher to the same: Forum Etiquette and Guidelines
• As obvious as it sounds, a member pulls readership and appreciation by the quality of writing. We cannot modify policies or programs in ways that are individually beneficial.
• This is a member driven site. A lot of what we do here is driven by the expressed and implied needs of our members. As such we welcome and crave suggestions and feedback and we have made innumerable improvements as a result of it. Having said that, we only implement suggestions that improve the “collective” experience of our members and NOT an “individual” member’s experience.
• IL administration will not take unsupported accusations just to be seen as “open to feedback". When a bogus accusation is made against us, we will vigorously explain the fallacy of that accusation. It is more important for the general membership to understand what this site is about than one member to feel that we are open to feedback.
• To the extent that you want to know, we strongly recommend that members read the FAQ section to familiarize themselves with the Google ad-system and the financial approach to this site. Everything is pretty straight-forward. For your convenience, the link to the FAQ section is : IL FAQs
• Quality Vs Quantity participation
  • Elite Member Status was introduced with the intention of motivating members to participate more in discussions, to share their thoughts and ideas, to provide comments and suggestions and to connect well with the community. With the games and forward messages, we are seeing that members are reaching the “Elite Status” milestones easily and this creates a dynamic that we didn’t anticipate. We will explore ways to mitigate this and will announce policy changes once we find a good solution.
  • Just as “Elite Member Status” program encourages participation, we wanted to have a program to encourage quality contributions. And that is why we introduced the “Finest Posts” program. We want to encourage both quality and quantity. Finest Posts
  • Several members enjoy participating in the games and forwarded messages forum. We request that you don’t do it for the sake of increasing post counts to reach Elite status milestones quickly. Do it only for the fun of playing games and sharing good forwards (taking care to avoid repeats).
• Some members are gifted with great English language skills and some members are not. We in IL do not want to exclude people based on the level of English proficiency or grammatical correctness. It is sufficient if the member gets the point across. We ask members to be tolerant of others who are not very comfortable with English.
• Because of their history of quality and unique contributions, some members command a loyal following and are being adored. We don’t see this as necessarily harmful. IL doesn't exist in vacuum. It’s a free world and so is IL – a tolerant web space.
• Care, Authenticity, Civility and Friendliness are critical components of this site’s DNA. If you see "politic" behavior within the site, please private message one of the moderators/administrators. We are committed to devising policies and procedures that maintain the site’s DNA.
• As we sign off on this long post, one word comes to all our minds again and again. And that is TOLERANCE. We should be tolerant of people who cannot express themselves, of those who cannot write good English, of those who will visit only one forum and not others and finally of those, whose views on life are way different from the norm.

Let’s forget the details of this incident, but let’s remember the lessons so that we grow stronger as a community!

Thanks,

Indusladies Team.