Notice A notice about changes to the Writers' Workshop's Content Warnings system

[lisianthusakura]

Hello to all the patrons of our Library and Workshop! Thank you for taking a look at this thread, and simply for being here! I hope the start of the year has treated you well so far.

I'm here to give a quick update on some changes our section's staff team has made to the Writers' Workshop's Content Warnings system. As you know, we have for a long while required content warnings to be given before the start of a fic in order to ensure community safety and comfort. However, we recognise that it can be difficult to always remember to include content warnings before posting a story! Knowing how content warnings are important but sometimes forgotten, our Workshop staff team has looked for ways to make including them easier on our userbase, and I'm happy to say that we think we have found a good solution, and would like to present it to you all.

Starting from now, users looking to post a story in the Writers' Workshop will now be able to add in content warnings easier than ever before! Below the main body of any new post in the BulbaLibrary forum will be a series of checkboxes, which our patrons will be able to utilise to give their story content warnings! Our listed content warnings have been taken directly from our Ratings Guide, so they should hopefully be familliar to you.

Any warnings that you would like to expand upon, or do not fall under our listed warnings, can be entered in directly through a textbox! To be clear, we strongly prefer our authors do more than simply marking the correct checkboxes; please make sure you are thinking about what warnings you may need to include for your story that aren't just the obvious ones in our checkboxes.

If you forget to add in warnings before posting, you will get an automatic error message telling you to input them, and if you forget to add something specific, you can go back and edit your warnings after you've published your story. For chapterfics, since this new system only works for first posts, you'll just add in your 'base' content warnings at the start of the work, then warn for other specific things before the start of your chapter.

Here's a look at how this will work when you're trying to post a story!

Spoiler

And here's how it'll look for published fics!

Spoiler

We hope that this new system for content warnings will be simple to adjust to, make things easier for both our users and staff team, and lead to great results! (With that in mind, we do hope you give this a little bit of adjustment time if you're unsure, please!) But, in the end, we'd love to hear feedback from our patrons, if you do have any at all! We may not be able to address everything that may come up, but will definetly try to listen as best as we can.

Once more, thank you so much for being patrons of our Workshop, and making it as special as it truly is!

▽Lisia, Writers' Workshop Head

 

[Greninjaman]

So we don't have to put in the content warning stuff directly into the post when we create a thread? Should I change any of my current story threads or could I just leave them as they are and just do the checkboxes for any new ones I do?

 

[Freckles]

three things:

I was curious if the canon (pokémon battles) and/or cartoon ("Blasting off again!") violence from the show counted as "Mild Violence" or "No EVERYONE Themes Apply" since technically it's already in a rated everyone kids show, but your test fic answered that question!

in the case of series of unconnected stories (anthologies, I think?), does something like "(additional) content warnings will be elaborated on at the start of each story" work for the mandatory "Other Content Warnings" or am I supposed to write "story 2 has X, story 4 has Y and Z" and so on in that box? guts feelings says the former but I wanted to make sure

and thank you!!!

 

[lisianthusakura]

So we don't have to put in the content warning stuff directly into the post when we create a thread? Should I change any of my current story threads or could I just leave them as they are and just do the checkboxes for any new ones I do?

It'd be much too difficult of an effort to change up your current threads, so I would recommend not going back. Note that if you edit the first post in an old thread, though, you will need to add them in -- sadly, we can't change this being the case!

three things:

I was curious if the canon (pokémon battles) and/or cartoon ("Blasting off again!") violence from the show counted as "Mild Violence" or "No EVERYONE Themes Apply" since technically it's already in a rated everyone kids show, but your test fic answered that question!

I'm glad it helped! You can always ask in our Ratings Check Board if you are unsure, but yes! Canon / carton violence indeed counts as Mild Violence.

in the case of series of unconnected stories (anthologies, I think?), does something like "(additional) content warnings will be elaborated on at the start of each story" work for the mandatory "Other Content Warnings" or am I supposed to write "story 2 has X, story 4 has Y and Z" and so on in that box? guts feelings says the former but I wanted to make sure

The former is correct! Any 'big' warnings that fit most of your works in a drabble (or whatever) thread should be warned for, but anything that is specific to a particular story should be warned for before the story itself, just like how our previous system was!

 

[LightningTopaz]

I typically use ESRB-esque content descriptions (eg. "Rated E10+ for fantasy violence")--how would that work here?

 

[Welkamo]

I typically use ESRB-esque content descriptions (eg. "Rated E10+ for fantasy violence")--how would that work here?

You can check it in the Ratings Check subforum, but Mild Violence under EVERYONE should work