This article forms part of the Stitch Community Guidelines. If you haven’t read the overview of the Community Guidelines yet, please do so before reading this article. In particular, please make sure you are familiar with the community definitions of what constitutes encouraged, discouraged, and prohibited behavior in the community, as well as how Stitch’s member feedback system works to promote constructive behavior across the community.

An overview of the guidelines can be found here.

As outlined in the Community Guidelines, the downvote button on Stitch plays an important role in helping all community members be involved in the moderation of comments posted to the Stitch website, and encourage members to behave in ways that are consistent with the behavior that the community expects.

Downvotes on discussions, events, and activities are used by the system to flag behavior that is out of step with community expectations, and encourage the members involved to reconsider how they choose to communicate.

This system is designed to address behavior in the areas of Stitch that are visible and accessible to all members of the community. It doesn't apply to private discussions, groups, and activities in the community, where using an automated system to govern members' messages and communications doesn't make sense.

For this reason, the downvote button does not appear in private discussions, groups, and activities on Stitch. The moderator of these groups and discussions is expected to ensure that the behavior exhibited by participants is acceptable, and can remove members from the discussion if it is not.

Stitch's rules around acceptable behavior does still apply, however. Behavior that is listed as Prohibited in the Stitch Community Guidelines is prohibited everywhere, including in private discussions, so the Report button still appears in those discussions. If you see a comment that constitutes a breach of the guidelines, please hit the Report button to report it to Stitch.