Forum Welcome and Guidelines

Welcome to the BibleDocs Community forum!

The Discourse forum platform

We run on a forum platform called Discourse. If you are new to forums in general (or want to see how Discourse specifically does things), you might have a look at Discourse’s New User Guide (or the slightly shorter blog post they have, covering much the same).

If you are ever unclear on anything about the platform, you are welcome to reach out to me (steven@bibledocs.org), and I’d be happy to help. There is a bit of learning curve, but the organization that the forum allows for (relative to WhatsApp, say) is quite advantageous.

Note that Discourse supports mobile phones (narrow widths) quite well. So if you want to access the forum on your phone, simply log in to the forum in your phone’s browser, and you’ll be good to go. You can even enable notifications from the forum on your phone, if you’d like.

Our community sections

I explain our community sections (why we have them, and the specific goals of each) on the community overview page. The one-sentence version goes something like this:

We have different visibility-restricted community sections on the forum so that people who have lots in common can more easily find each other, and so that discussion among such people can stay relatively more focused, given shared sets of axioms and assumptions.

Each community section has its own categories

To have something be visibility-locked to a specific community section, it needs to be categorized under one of the appropriate categories for the given community section. Each community section has three categories:

• Topical
• Specific Passages
• Meta

Any time you wish to talk about a specific topic large or small (for example, the idea of repentance generally), that would get categorized with the community section’s Topical category. Any time you wish to talk about one or more specific passages of scripture (for example, 1 John 1:9 specifically), that would get categorized with the community section’s Specific Passages category. And finally, if you want to discuss something about how we are running a particular community section (or something about our community generally, but want to visibility-restrict it only to the members of a particular community section), that is what the Meta category is for.

Here is what the split-out categories look like for each respective community section (you can see that I have also color-coded the categories for each community section):

Protestants

Ichthys and Friends

Teachers

Debate

But we also have shared categories and threads

Here are the categories that are not visibility-restricted at all (so that all people on the forum – regardless of which community sections they belong to – can see them).

Announcements and Prayer Requests ought to be pretty straightforward to understand. There is a single primary Announcements thread, and also a single primary Prayer Requests thread, but more specific threads can be made as appropriate or useful. (So, for example, if there is a long-running prayer situation you wish to provide multiple temporally-spaced-out updates for, such as reports of God working in the recovery of a loved one hospitalized by a car accident).

Rounding out the completely-open categories, we have a category for ministry news and requests (so that individuals within our community can advertise the existence of their ministries, share news about their ministry efforts, and make known any needs they may have), a Meta category for sharing feedback about our community as a whole (here, unlike the community-section-specific Meta categories, feedback/community-related threads will be viewable by all people on the forum), and finally an Off-topic category for, well, off-topic things. (Anything not directly related to the main Christian focus of this forum).

The Uncategorized category will not normally be used, but if you ever get overwhelmed and are not sure which category to put your thread in, you can categorize something as such, and I can come behind and categorize it appropriately.

Guidelines and rules of behavior

We have a pretty strict zero-tolerance policy here. This is an overtly Christian place, and we expect people to behave in a manner living up to the standards to which we are called as believers. See Matthew 7:12 for the general idea.

Before you post anything you think might be at all questionable, briefly reflect on whether or not it brings glory to Christ or not. This ought to be a good gut-check.

If you are ever unsure about something, ask. (Myself or one of the other Mods). Asking never hurts.

If I or one of the Mods ever come across something that we feel violates the Christian standards of our community, you will hear from us. What happens after that depends upon what exactly happened. Some very egregious things will lead to immediate removal from the community with no second chances, but most of the time, we’ll probably just edit any offending post(s), and then message you to try to clearly and concisely point out what we feel the issue was, and open a conversation.

Recurring patterns of the same sorts of behavior without improvement or perceived effort to change for the better will lead to harsher consequences in an escalating fashion, leading to eventual removal in the most extreme cases.

We sincerely hope we will almost never have to worry about much of this in practice. If you act in Christian love at all times, you should have no problems.