Hi everyone,

I keep an eye on most news and opinion pieces about Melbourne’s public transport, and something I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of opinion pieces being posted about the SRL. Sometimes they conclude it should be built, sometimes not; but the key thing they cling onto is that it’s a very long and expensive build, and they very rarely bring up anything that hasn’t been discussed first.

I choose not to post these pieces because I think seeing a post every 3 days with somebody else’s 2 cents on the SRL is annoying and repetitive.

My proposal is that although they currently don’t cause an issue, we place a ban on opinion pieces regarding the SRL and add this to the community rules. This would not affect update news articles (including those not from the Big Build) or user generated original posts (ie: not link posts).

If you would just like to place a vote, you can stop reading here and scroll to the comment below to place your vote. Otherwise, you can continue reading for more specific information on how this would be implemented and enforced.

Implementation: This would be implemented as such: A new rule would be added to the community rules panel and a pinned post would be made explaining what posts are affected by this ban. If a prohibited post is made, I will add a comment letting OP know that their post is against the rules. If no response is received within 12 hours, the post will be removed.

As Lemmy doesn’t have many moderation tools, repeat offenders would likely be banned from the community after a certain amount of violating posts. Exactly what this number will be is most likely going to be left to moderator discretion, however there will most likely be at least 3 warnings issued. For instance, if the violations occur long periods of time apart, OP seems to have genuinely forgotten, etc, it’s very unlikely a ban will be issued. We most certainly will not ban somebody because they’ve posted 1 opinion piece, or have posted 3 but all months or years apart.

The ban, if approved by the community will be applied to the following types of posts:

Opinion videos on YouTube

Opinion articles on the web (including large media sites such as the age and small independent blogs)

Other types of media which only express an opinion on the SRL without covering anything new or taking an angle that nobody else has yet

Posts which wouldn’t be affected include:

Text only posts discussing SRL

Anything that comes from the official Big Build website regarding the SRL

Comments discussing the SRL (where relevant)

Opinion pieces written AFTER something major changes (a cancellation, cutback, or major scope change, for instance), if the primary point of the piece is to provide an opinion on the change itself

If there’s anything you’d like clarification on before voting, please leave a comment in response to this post. This voting post will be kept up and stickied until the 14th of January.

Please see comment below for instructions on how to vote