Guidelines for The Session. Please read.

Hi everyone,

I’ve had to do a lot of cleaning up here in the discussions section, as well as the tunes section, recently.

In order to avoid having to do so in the future, I wanted to post a few guidlines here.

So, note your nearest exit row and kindly pay attention to the following…

First of all, I would like to re-iterate the one golden rule here at The Session: "be civil". No nastiness please. Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t like to be on the receiving end of. Constructive criticism is fine, but personal attacks are not.

Secondly, please think twice before posting a discussion.

Remember, the name of this section is "Discussions", not "Announcements", and certainly not "Personal Messages For One Idividual".

If you want to send somebody a message, go to their member profile and click on "send an email".

If you have a question or comment about a tune, then the place to post that is in the "Tunes" section under the relevant tune.

If you do decide to post a discussion, then please keep checking up on it. Respond to what people say and nurture the dialogue.

Every discussion you start is your responsibility. The same goes for sessions and tunes.

I’m thinking about introducing a feature whereby any comments posted to a discussion, a session, a tune or a recording will automatically be emailed to person who submitted that discussion, session, tune or recording. What do you think? Good idea? Not so good idea?

Now, on to tunes.

The Session would appear to have lost its way a bit lately. There have been a few inappropriate tune submissions.

I’m going to have to be a bit stricter about what gets posted. For the time being, I’m going to have to insist that we leave the more obscure, exotic tunes out of the tunes section.

Of course, this raises the whole question of what constitutes an appropriate tune.

Well, ask yourself this: is the tune played at your session? If the answer is yes, then it’s a session tune and you should go ahead and submit it. If the answer is no, then ask youself: would it go down well at your session? If the answer is still no, then it’s probably not a good idea to post that tune.

In light of that test, the actual country of origin of the tune becomes irrelevant.

If you have some obscure, exotic tune that you love to play alone in your room but wouldn’t dare play at a session, then thesession.org is probably not the place for it.

If, however,you have some undiscovered little gem that goes down a treat when you play it at your local session, then please, post it here.

Think of this site as being like a real session and treat the submission process like introducing a tune for the first time.

Like I said, I’ll be keeping a bit of a more watchful eye on the tune submissions. However, this isn’t something that’s entirely up to me.

The Session is *your* site.

If you’d like to see more slip-jigs, for example, post more slip-jigs.

If you’d like to see guitar chords with the tunes, post tunes with guitar chords.

If you’d like to see more discussions about how to play a certain instrument, post a discussion about it.

In short, take a more pro-active role.

This ties in with my earlier point about every discussion, session, tune and recording being the personal responsibility of whoever submits in the first place.

With that in mind, please, please, please, stop and think before starting a discussion or posting a tune.

Thank you very much for your attention and your time. I’ll let you get back to the music now.

Keep those tunes, sessions and recordings coming and remember: this is *your* site.

I like the sentiments expressed here, Jeremy, and have to agree with you 🙂

thanks, jeremy.

and i like the idea of sending messages in a thread to the person who started the discussion.

sarah

These sound like very good guidelines for the extremely good site and community you have built here. I will do my best to respect them.

Good stuff Jeremy. I’m assuming you mean Irish session when you say "session" in these guidelines? Which of course leaves the door open for tunes that aren’t strictly within the Irish tradition but that have become session standards (at least in some Irish session circles), such as Music for a Found Harmonium, lots of Shetland, Scottish, Cape Breton stuff, etc. But not so far open (this metaphorical door, that is,) that we should expect Boil Them Cabbage Down just because some "session" in Paducah accepts it and plays it. Am I on the right track?

Jeremy…thanks for clearing things up a bit. It was getting confusing to me, being new to this. I do like the idea of sending the thread along to the one who started it. It helps keep it going.

However, may I suggest something if it’s possible to do without your programming self-imploding? I don’t know how difficult this or your feelings on it.

I’ve seen some sites that let you click on a button when you visit a thread and the site emails either a notice when there’s a new post, or the new post itself to you…kind of a "Please email me any follow-up posts to this thread" or "Please send a notification email to me when there are new posts to this thread" thingie. It encourages more than just the person who started the thread…it encourages those involved in it to follow-up and interact with it. I like your idea of forwarding being built-in to the initial post, but in my humble bumbling opinion, it would be beneficial to make some similar feature available to the people who frequent the discussion board.

I don’t like another idea, but I’ll put it out there in case anyone’s interested in discussion on it. Some boards have a feature allowing you to sign up for a weekly email "digest" of all new posts. I always end up cancelling these because my mailbox gets too cluttered. I visit the boards I like on a regular basis, and so don’t need a digest to remind me to visit or make me curious enough to go to the site to see more. This said, some people like the digests and save them.

Jeremy, you are the creator and programmer…what are your thoughts?

Jeremy
You deserve an award for your patience.
Surely we can all play our part.

Sorry Jeremy.

I might have recently flaunted these guidelines in my *technical request*
Apologies.

~Cait.

Sorry Jeremy. I might have recently flaunted these guidelines in my *technical request* ~Cait.

Cait:
I think you mean "flouted".
-dogma

Jeremy - top man for shepherding your flock, like a true Messiah. (joking)
Keep on doing more of the same.(not joking)
Suggestion to katiebythegate - respectfully, wrt your suggestion:
"Please send a notification email.. etc, blah blah",
I’m sorry, but I don’t envisage this as the way forward. I don’t know about everyone else, but I don’t want pop-ups hitting me about the Session when I’m in the middle of something. But that may be just me. Just a thought. In general I go along with the constructive sensibilties of your suggestions though, but in practice a no-no for me. Thanks anyway.
Danny

I think sending the replies to discussions to the person who submitted the discussion is a great idea. I don’t know if it’s possible but is there a way chosing to get updates from the discussion you submit or chosing not to? Kinda like getting the newsletters or not. Personally i’d like to get email updates of a discussion i submitted but i can see that there might be some people who might not.
Anyway i want to thank you for creating such a great web site and putting so much time into it - as i’m sure you must.
cheers! 🙂

Yeah Jeremy, I also like the idea of sending messages to the person who started the discussion, posted a tune, etc.

Toni, you lurker you! It’s good to see your name on a post. How’s the whistle and flute going?

Yes, I agree it would be a good idea if there could be some notification of new submissions to a thread, particularly in tunes & recordings. The problem with those parts of the site is that few people might notice your post (eg as a comment to a tune) whereas everyone sees it on the discussions page, which makes it tempting to post there instead, especially if you have a burning question…
But anyway, full respect to you Jeremy - it’s a brilliant forum and I enjoy it a lot.

Jeremy,

It’s all good stuff. Your guidelines essentially fall into to catagories. ‘personal etiquette’ and ‘system natural’.

When you say, ‘Please think twice about posting a discussion’, ‘Be civil’ and ‘Don’t post discussion for only one person’ we are talking about ‘personal etiquette’. Unfortunately, we will be condemned to re-visit ‘personal etiquette’ issues again and again like Bill Murray in Ground Hog day. Not a lot we can do about it either.

However, creating an automated post notification email is wonderful ‘system natural’ way to assist people who post discussions to keep up with them.

I’d wouldn’t want you to burden yourself with the task of deciding which tunes are ‘session-playable’. Once again, we run into the ‘personal etiquette’ issue which forces you to be final arbitor of all things correct. Rather, add a bit more code to give a ‘session-playable’ ranking for each of the tune postings. Perhaps this ranking could simply be the number of times the tune has been added to anyones tunebook. Futher, a ‘rate this tune’ feature could be added as well. Each tune could have a four star rating that is displayed when browsing that tune.

What this would do is turn a ‘personal etiquette’ issue into a ‘system natural’ non-issue.

Well, there is my two cents!

Wow, there sure are some smart people participating in this session. Me ol’ mum always told me you can judge a lot about a man by the quality of the people around him. Jeremy? Hats off to you, sir.

Thankyou dogma! For your constructive spelling corrections.

I shall now proceed to flaunt blatent spelling mistakes.

~Cait

pay attention to musical ideas and guidance but please leave spelling alone. Who knows, C may have been sensitive and might have been afraid to post any more replies but I’m glad she isn’t and has. It so happens that I spell well, better than my efforts warrant but play banjo badly, much poorer than my efforts warrant and I am, as most others in this happy ensemble, a session reader for the music and the meaning conveyed by the words, misspelt or otherwise.

So, Jeremy, thanks for your efforts on my behalf, but, being musically illiterate, I can do very little other than encourage and let you and your many friends know that I listen and try to learn from your site. Maybe someday, someone will find something that I write in your site opens some musical door that will then remain open…..

Jeremy, I support the idea of emailing the initator of discussions and tunes, but I would prefer if the responses could be collected and sent out in batch by the end of the day or mid-day - to prevent flushing accounts.

The lifespan of a discussion seems to be a few days - maximum a week before it becomes obsolete - wheras the lifespan of the tune section is likely to last until someone pulls the plug of the internet….

This implies that the discussoin will - and should - run more freely than in the tune discussions part . In a real session, the discussions and the tunes are gone when the last musican has left the room. My point here is that in todays version the "stickieness" to the tune encourages me to select my comments with care (which is good) - but maybe to the degree that I would avoid using it (which is bad - at least if I had something of session-shattering importance to say). Another 30 years down the road, when I’m old and wise, I’ll be begging for that erase tool….

Jeremy, I have a question regarding tunes. Recently I submitted a question asking what do people play with Up Sligo. It was moved to the tunes section of the site. I don’t have a problem with that, however when the post was first submitted there was one immediate response. Once the post was moved to the tune section and placed in the comments section of the Up Sligo post there was no activity. I understand the need to restrict tune requests and agree that they should be seperated from the more conversational discussions, but I don’t think this method of seperation is the best option. Is it possible to have a section where questions such as these can be moved to a seperate category on the home page directory? Again, I realize that within the tunes section there is a search option, but is that accomplishing all that it should? Just a thought. Thanks

Seems reasonable to me. I like the idea of notifying of activity on a submission. Thanks, Jeremy for a first rate site.

Len

I like the guidelines Jeremy, as do others it seems.

However, even those who read and seeminly agree with them are still posting some personal messages here!

LIke the idea of discussions being emailed to the poster too.

Great stuff.

a) If "what’s new this week" is an opt-in feature, could emailing the poster on changes to a discussion or tune comments be one as well?

b) Could notification be sent once a day, in batches (so if someone responds to my discussion about the role of the hurdy-gurdy, someone else responds to the thread on turntable scratching and its role in ITM, and someone else comments on my posting of The Star-Spangled Banner as a session tune, I only get one message but with all three items noted)?

I would like to see these things implemented, but in inverse proportion to the amount of trouble they cause you to do it.

Thanks again for a fantastic resource and your wise moderation of it.

—-Michael B.