SantaClarita.com - About the Fastlane & Gray Boxes
SantaClarita.com - About the Fastlane & Gray Boxes
What Is The "Fastlane"?
Discussions marked "FastLane" on SantaClarita.com are
discussions that are separate from the other "General Chat" discussions and
may cover more controversial, inflammatory, or sensitive topics.
Members can hide Fastlane discussions by using the green toggle near the top
of the forum home page if they don't wish to read these discussions.
Fastlane Criteria
Discussions should be marked "Fastlane" for more sensitive or inflammatory or controversial or politics-adjacent discussions. Any and all discussions related politics, politicians, national laws, and hot button social issues should always be marked "Fastlane".* Please try to keep Fastlane-type replies off of General Chat discussions. * Your message may get gray-boxed if you post a Fastlane-type reply in a General Chat discussion.
Even in the Fastlane, certain things are still not allowed: No racism, bigotry, sexism, spam, calls for violence or doxxing. Members should still avoid unending feuding with other members, like: trolling, name-calling, strong insults, and other disruptive behavior.
Gray Box Moderation
The forum uses a bot to help keep the forums civil and safe.
Sometimes it will get things wrong, but mostly it tries to keeps
discussions on track and prevents excessive arguing.
A message being "gray boxed" means the bot has minimized the post, and other members will have to click a gray box with the person's username to see the message in full.
Typically, the bot will gray-box messages to de-emphasize certain content:
Fastlane Posts In Non-Fastlane:
New discussions about politics, politicians, laws, and certain hot bed social issues should always be put in the "Fastlane" category or they might be gray-boxed. Why?
Am I In Trouble?
Getting a gray box is fairly common (1-2% of all posts), and doesn't mean you’re "in trouble." If the bot really thinks you’ve crossed a line, you may get a private message about it.
However, a gray boxed message does mean that your post might be outside of the environment wanted on the forums, so please try to avoid repeatedly making posts if you know they will get gray boxed.
Disputing Moderation
Under any message that has been gray boxed is a link to dispute the gray box moderation. This will send a request to be reviewed again by a human moderator.
Trusted Disputers: If you regularly help out by disputing gray boxes correctly, you may also receive more privileges, such as being able to instantly remove gray boxes from messages after you dispute them (not having to wait for moderator review).
Enforcement:
If you get too many gray boxes in a short amount of time, your account may be put in temporary time out. If you receive two or more gray boxes in a day, you should probably slow down and make sure your posts are following forum community guidelines.
A message being "gray boxed" means the bot has minimized the post, and other members will have to click a gray box with the person's username to see the message in full.
Typically, the bot will gray-box messages to de-emphasize certain content:
- Severe name-calling. See examples
- Sex-related insults (sexual in nature, related to sexuality, or gender related). See examples
-
Abusive, mocking, insulting, condescending, or any other broad or severe
character attacks or sweeping negative generalizations, against:
- Fellow forum members. See examples
- Groups of people due to their race, ethnicity, gender/sexual identity, appearance, disability, weight, or religion ("protected groups"). See examples
Fastlane Posts In Non-Fastlane:
New discussions about politics, politicians, laws, and certain hot bed social issues should always be put in the "Fastlane" category or they might be gray-boxed. Why?
Am I In Trouble?
Getting a gray box is fairly common (1-2% of all posts), and doesn't mean you’re "in trouble." If the bot really thinks you’ve crossed a line, you may get a private message about it.
However, a gray boxed message does mean that your post might be outside of the environment wanted on the forums, so please try to avoid repeatedly making posts if you know they will get gray boxed.
Disputing Moderation
Under any message that has been gray boxed is a link to dispute the gray box moderation. This will send a request to be reviewed again by a human moderator.
Trusted Disputers: If you regularly help out by disputing gray boxes correctly, you may also receive more privileges, such as being able to instantly remove gray boxes from messages after you dispute them (not having to wait for moderator review).
Enforcement:
If you get too many gray boxes in a short amount of time, your account may be put in temporary time out. If you receive two or more gray boxes in a day, you should probably slow down and make sure your posts are following forum community guidelines.
What About Free Speech?
Although the rules on the Fastlane are more relaxed, there are still rules, and moderators have the final say in what will and won't be allowed.These forums are a private social group, operated on privately owned servers, and is privately owned and operated. Thus, there is no "free speech" protection that applies to the privately owned chat forums. The site owners have the right to moderate and control the content on these servers as they see fit to build the best community possible! By participating in the chat forums, you agree to abide by the rules created by the site owners. If you ignore moderators, fight with moderators, break forum rules, or otherwise cause problems in the group, you may be banned from the Fastlane, or from the website entirely.
