Speculative Short Fiction Deserves Love discussion

I didn't want the private vs. public group question to detail the anthology question, so I'm throwing it over here.

My thought in starting this group was to gather people interested in short fiction - readers and writers alike. Obviously, it's easier to gather people to a public group, but with that come spammers and trolls. We can just keep the moderator mallet handy in that case, if that's the way people want to go.
I did want to keep it private - welcoming everyone interested, but still using the filter of a join request - for the first couple of weeks, to set a tone and establish threads.
Feel free to voice your opinions here.

I agree that it would be best to set a tone before throwing the gates open (if we decide to throw the gates open). Also offering malleting services if needed.

Oh also if we are going to do general admission it would be good to have some ground rules to point to when malleting. And or booting over the horizon.

Thank you for offering your mallet! If we go public, I'll likely take you up on that.

I know nothing about how this sort of group works, but in principle I agree re: tone and ground rules.

I assume there are no limits on how the private group can be publicized?

Matthew wrote: "I assume there are no limits on how the private group can be publicized?"

Nope - publicize away! I mentioned it on Twitter, and I think Charlotte put it out to her Facebook friends. I've let in everyone but one person so far. Invite anyone.

The only limitation is that there may be a gap between when I get the request and when I can let them in if I'm sleeping or offline. Deborah Walker has kindly offered to serve as backup, but I haven't had a chance to ask her if the requests are coming to her email as well.

Yep. I've approved quite a few (4?). Some of the reasons for joining have been great.

Deborah wrote: "Yep. I've approved quite a few (4?). Some of the reasons for joining have been great."

I know! Y'all are very entertaining.

A few weeks to establish tone wouldn't be a bad thing. And perhaps get some threads going for recent anthologies / collections, so there are places people can jump in once it's public.

Also, you will get authors spamming you, so the rules need to be tight on self-promotion. A common way for groups to do that is to have a self-promotion folder, and delete any promotion messages posted outside of it (and make that very clear in the opening guidelines). It's easier to direct people to a specific place than a complete ban (because they'll always try to find ways around it).

That is one common way. Another common way is to make egregious self promotion a booting offense.

A self-promotion folder is probably a good idea. Not just to divert the spammers, but also for the fact that there are some phenomenal short story writers in our ranks.

I like that idea. Its fairly easy to check by just clicking on a member's name on any of their posts and then looking at the comment history that comes up. I would say a certain number of non promotional posts (50?) and also a fair number of those posts have to have some actual content. Posting "yep" and "oh" and "well then" and "LOL" all about the place until you get to 50 and can go spam wild would count as unacceptable rules lawyering.

Bunny wrote: "I like that idea. Its fairly easy to check by just clicking on a member's name on any of their posts and then looking at the comment history that comes up. I would say a certain number of non pro..."

I like the idea. Makes sense to me.

Are there any objections to making this public? I think otherwise it may stagnate.

Go for it

Works for me.

It'll save me some time that I can then spend improving the group. If it turns out badly, we can go back to the moderator-approval method.

Saving of mod time for other purposes always a good idea.