Scope

MelodyChat/Harmony is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all Official MelodyChat/Harmony guilds, IRC Channels, and other spaces both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Harmony/MelodyChat.

This policy does not apply to guilds hosted by the MelodyChat/Harmony instance. Those guilds must comply with the Acceptable Use Policy .

Some MelodyChat/Harmony spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

Definitions

Harassment includes:

  1. Speech which is patently offensive; or promotes or incites racism, sexism, ableism, bigotry, hatred, or physical harm against any group or individual; or which is sexually or violently exploitative.
  2. Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
  3. Advocating against human rights for any segment of the population.
  4. Deliberate or intentional misgendering or mislabeling in any form.
  5. Harassment or advocating harassment of another person, on or off-site.
  6. Encouraging self destructive or harmful behavior.
  7. Non-consensual sexual attention and inappropriately assumed intimacy with others.
  8. Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate.
  9. Conducting or plotting illegal activity.
  10. Soliciting personal information from minors.
  11. Publicly posting private and/or personal information of other people without their expressed permission, including but not limited to: real names, addresses, phone numbers, email and instant message addresses, physical location, photographs, recordings, internet properties, businesses, places of work, or other information that may lead someone to another person
  12. Posting copyrighted work without the copyright owner’s expressed permission and credit.
  13. Phishing and other activities intended to coerce people to give up otherwise private and personal information.
  14. Spamming, Trolling, social engineering, and other forms of net-abuse. Even when meant to be “funny”.
  15. Deliberate intimidation.
  16. Stalking or following.
  17. Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
  18. Patterns of intentional disruptive or inflammatory behavior.
  19. Publication of non-harassing private communication.

MelodyChat/Harmony prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. MelodyChat/Harmony Moderation Team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

  1. ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
  2. Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.” Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
  3. Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of the MelodyChat/Harmony community, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the MelodyChat/Harmony Moderation Team. If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to MelodyChat/Harmony sponsored spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of the MelodyChat/Harmony community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by MelodyChat/Harmony community members. This includes harassment outside our spaces and harassment that took place at any point in time. The abuse team reserves the right to exclude people from the MelodyChat/Harmony community based on their past behavior, including behavior outside MelodyChat/Harmony spaces and behavior towards people who are not in the MelodyChat/Harmony community.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. The MelodyChat/Harmony Anti-Abuse Team is not here to explain power differentials or other basic social justice concepts to you. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of MelodyChat/Harmony members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Attribution

This anti-harassment policy is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community.