No appology

Hi everyone,

As a moderator and person equally invested in the heart and wellbeing of this community, I wanted to raise these points.

Poppy was a huge source of benefits advice and knowledge, selflessly dedicating much time to responding to our members queries.  Understandably her absence has left a notable gap in our benefits categories and as we transition, I’d ask you to:

• Be patient with any delays in responding to members’ benefits posts.  Where a response is needed the community team will tag posts as unanswered and take time to research, liaise with our benefits advisor and get back to the OP.  No posts will be purposefully overlooked.  Our intention is to help disabled people.

• Be patient with each other.  As we negotiate our third lockdown, many of our members have been isolated for coming up to almost a year.  This is impacting us all in myriad ways as we cope with the emotional fallout of being lonely and, for many of us, scared.  Please be kind.  Remember the one value that unites us all is wanting to support disabled people. 

• Be polite.  An increasing complaint is that posts contain ‘misinformation’.  As a community for, and largely run by disabled people, our dominant source of knowledge is experience.  Experiential knowledge has its clear benefits, however when navigating a benefits system designed by professionals, also has its limits.  Perceptions of how the benefits system works can quickly become outdated or mistakenly recalled.  Due to this, we kindly ask people to make it clear when they are speaking from experience and/or include links to back up assertions.  If this isn’t done, members should not be reprimanded.  This is against the community’s common goal of support and understanding.  Indeed, if you feel you can’t respond in a friendly manner, please report the post as containing inaccuracies and move onto another conversation so the community team can take appropriate action.

• Be mindful when constructing posts.  As a community team, we are endeavouring to respond to reported posts as quickly as possible.  Having to additionally deal with posts created with the sole purpose of complaining serves to i) increase our workload, ii) increase the number of reported posts we receive and iii) reduce the time we have available to manage the wider community.  To emphasise, we are aware of ongoing situations - your comments on this matter have been heard and actions are being taken.

Bearing in mind the above, I want to thank you all for wanting the community to be the best it can be, after what has been a difficult couple of weeks.  It is greatly appreciated and your patience and understanding is much appreciated.  Thank you. 

This thread will now be closed as it is clearly aimed at specific users which is against our online community guidelines and unhelpfully likely to induce further conflict.