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Per-user comment guidelines

This is kind of a weird request. What I'd like is the ability to put a plain-text note above the comment box on any of my posts to describe comments I would like people to avoid making.


For me, the purpose of this would be to sway people away from making recommendations or suggestions that I'm not asking for. It's a pet peeve of mine, and is not the kind of thing that imo should be against the Community Guidelines, but it's against my personal guidelines. (And I don't think this will stop everyone who earnestly is trying to be helpful, but it might just result in a little less friction of me using this site.) I think this would be more effective than putting a note in my bio, a pinned post, or posting every week that I don't like those kinds of comments because they just as likely might come from someone who doesn't follow me.


A design I think can be some inspiration here is Twitch's "chat rules" feature, because there's some similarity here. I can write "please don't comment on my posts to make an unsolicited suggestion" on my profile text, but I don't think that's going to be read as easily as what I'm suggesting; similarly, streamers would put chat rules in the infoboxes under the stream that would get missed. Twitch put a UI element that gets in your way the first time you try and post a chat message in a channel (I'm not sure if the "gets in your way" part is good for cohost, but it sure does make someone observe that there are rules!).


Some potential for this design to get super weird is comments on shares. Not sure that my comment guidelines should show up on someone else's share. (I don't remember if I get notified for comments on shares of my posts.)


20 people like this idea

I like this. I can think of times I've seen similar comment guideline notices on WordPress blogs or similar. Having those makes it easier for me to either feel okay commenting, or to tell that I probably don't have anything to add.

I like this idea better than the suggestions that have been previously made to completely lock replies and the current feature of locking comments. Letting others know what your intent is when you post something–such as posting fan art that is meant to be platonic or posting something without wanting people to critique it–is a good way to express yourself that does not introduce artificial barriers for others to express themselves. This is a great way to remind people to remember the human. Great idea, thanks for suggesting it!

is there a particular advantage to having this as opposed to simply adding guidelines at the bottom of the post itself? or is the intent to have guidelines that show on *every single one* of your posts?

@JackDotJS Based on what iliana wrote, it's to have the guidelines on every single post.

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