Stitch's Discussion Forums are an important part of the Stitch community, and provide opportunities for members to meet and form social connections with other members from all over the community around topics they care about.
Unlike large social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Stitch has been built to enrich the lives of all its members. That means we put a lot of effort into giving our members ways to ensure that online discussions on Stitch are enjoyable for everyone.
This article outlines additional controls that a discussion owner now has to choose who can participate in their discussions, and to ensure their behavior is enjoyable and enriching for all, and free from unwelcome behavior.
Choosing who to invite
When you create a discussion, Stitch will ask you a series of questions which allow you to choose who can participate in your discussion. You can choose to allow or disallow members based on:
The countries or locations they come from
Their membership type
Their commenter rating
Each of these is explained in the sections below.
Member locations
The first question controls the countries or locations the participants in the discussion come from. By default, discussions are open to all members worldwide:
You can, however, choose to open your discussion only to members in your own country, state, or local area.
If you choose one of these options, members outside the area you choose won't see your discussion listed on the Discussions page, and they will not receive any notifications when your discussion is published.
Member types
The next question controls whether you want your discussion to be open only to Full members of Stitch, or whether you want to include Limited members as well.
Limited members have, by definition, not fully committed to being part of the community, and occasionally a new Limited member will see this as an opportunity to post inflammatory comments. If you'd like to avoid this, then choose the Full members only option.
On the other hand, if you would like to open your discussion to the widest audience possible, choose the Full and Limited members option.
Commenter rating
The third question controls what sort of member behavior you wish to allow in your discussion, based on participants' prior Commenter Rating.
Commenter Ratings are explained in this article.
The Stitch system uses advanced algorithms to generate a commenter rating for every member of Stitch, based on the comments they post in the forums, on activities, and on Stitch groups. You can find your commenter rating under Stitch Settings, on the Achievements page.
If you build a positive rating by making sure your comments are respectful and always comply with the Stitch Community Guidelines, your rating will be Excellent or Good, depending on how strongly the Stitch algorithm assesses your comments. If you have one of these ratings, congratulations!
If Stitch doesn't feel it has enough information to give someone a rating, their rating will be Undecided or Neutral. This usually isn't anything to worry about, it just means Stitch will need to see more comments before it determines their rating.
If someone has consistently behaved in ways that are not consistent with the Community Guidelines, then their rating will be Somewhat divisive, Divisive, or Significantly divisive.
You can choose whether to allow members with low commenter ratings to participate in your discussion. By default, new discussions are only open to members whose ratings are Excellent, Good, or Neutral / Undecided.
If you would like your discussion to be open to members with lower ratings, choose the Excellent, good, neutral or divisive option instead:
And if you would like your discussion to only be open to members with positive ratings, choose the Excellent or good only option:
These settings can be changed after a discussion is created, on the Settings page for the discussion, as shown below:
Members with low commenter ratings
Members who have low commenter ratings can not create or host discussions. If you want to create a discussion, you will need to improve your rating first.
You can do this by continuing to engage in discussions hosted by other members, and ensuring your comments always embody Stitch's community values, as outlined in the Community Guidelines. As long as you do this, your rating will eventually improve.