Hi! It’s me, Vanessa, your community editor. I like to listen to what y’all want from this website, Autostraddle dot com, and then try my best to make it happen for you. A few months ago we tried an experiment where we got rid of the Friday Open Thread and replaced it with what we internally referred to as Pizza Party Fridays – the goal was to create a fun silly post on Fridays that might make y’all wanna chat with each other but wouldn’t specifically be an open thread because frankly, we do not have the human-power to moderate an open thread every week. However, many of you were very sad the open threads were gone, and assured me that you are adults and do not need a staff member to moderate anything – you’re pleased to be left to your own devices. To which I said: let’s give the queers what they want!
So that’s that, babes. Pizza Party Fridays are out, Friday Open Threads are back in. We’re still going to produce the fun, silly, engaging posts that were showing up on Fridays for the past few months in lieu of the open threads, our writers will just pitch them as stand-alone posts and they’ll publish on a variety of days, not just Fridays. For your purposes, we’re essentially changing nothing except restoring the Friday Open Thread (we’ve always posted fun, silly, engaging posts every single day of the week!), but since I know some of y’all like to hear behind the scenes stuff about running the site I decided to overshare. Also I haven’t hung out with another human being in 9 weeks so ya know, I’ve got a lot to say.
WHICH BRINGS US TO OUR POINT OF BEING HERE: chatting! Feel free to hang out in the comments all day / all weekend, share some details about your life if you so choose, show us your pet, just read along… we’re a community and now more than ever, it feels nice to connect, even if those connections are happening digitally. I don’t need to explain that to a bunch of Autostraddle readers, though – y’all are pro at digital connection.
One last piece of housekeeping: I think I’m going to include a cute animal photo for every Friday Open Thread moving forward. That’s what the whole post will be: just the smallest of sentences saying hi, and one large cute animal photo. However I do not have a pet so I would be most grateful if you would send me photos of your pets to potentially include as our Friday Open Thread Cute Animal Of The Week! Email pet photos to vanessa [at] autostraddle [dot] com and put FRIDAY OPEN THREAD in the subject line. You can include a little bit about your pet and their Instagram account if they have one! By emailing me a pet photo you are consenting to have your cutie published on Autostraddle dot com and on social media sites where we promote our posts.
Okay! Sincerely, thank you for telling me what you want and need out of this community. We wouldn’t be here without you, and I’m very grateful to have the communication lines open always. Love you, mean it, see you next week with another Friday Open Thread because baby, we’re back!
How To Post A Photo In The Comments:
Find a photo on the web, right click (on a Mac, control+click), hit “Copy Image URL” and then…
code it in to your comment like so:
If you need to upload the photo you love from your computer, try using imgur. To learn more about posting photos, check out A.E.’s step-by-step guide.
How To Post A Video In The Comments, Too:
Find a video on YouTube, copy the URL, and paste the link on its own separate line in your comment. You no longer need to use the “embed” code!
