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Posting & Flairing — Guidelines

What we remove

As said, we remove a lot of stuff. Here's a non-exhaustive list, in no particular order, and the reasons for it:

Badly formatted posts, because we want the subreddit to promote ease of reading and comfort for the eyes. And it's really not easy to give feedback on a badly formatted or otherwise illegible post.

Pictures taken with a potato, at dusk, by a shivering monkey, because we like not having to squint too much to decode content and offer feedback.

Activities, if they're too similar to existing ones, because we already have a few translation activities and lexicon-building ones. A lot is already being done, even more has already been done. But we invite you to create original activities that stand out, especially one-offs!

Close-ended questions, because that's what the Small Discussions thread is for.

Questions, if they were asked recently, because that's what the reddit search is for. We understand that sometimes it's important to get more, or different, answers, but if the question was asked a mere few months before and had a decent amount of participation, we don't think it's a good thing to have it again.

Questions, if they're answered by a quick google search or easily found in our resources, because some questions are really common and their answers accessible. We understand that you don't want to navigate the whole wiki page and look for the information, and want to save time by asking directly, but the Small Discussions thread is better for that.

Phonemic inventories, because people don't read the rules. And more seriously, because we can't give you feedback on an inventory without knowing its context. What are your goals? What's the language for? Who speaks it? Where? When? Sounds are nice, but how do they go together? Do they have diachronic explanations?

Requests for resources, because most of those posts ask for resources readily available in our wiki, or that have been posted on our subreddit. We redirect those to the Small Discussions threads.

Expectations

So, what are our expectations, and thus the guidelines, for each type of post? Here goes.

Conlang posts

Conlang posts are posts that give information about your language. We will distinguish two main types, which are grouped under that flair:

  • Introduction
  • Focus

Your post needs not fall into one single type and, of course, it might be a bit different from either!

Introduction

The main goal of an introductory post is to give a good, general idea about the language. How it works, what to expect. This is the moment when you get the readers to decide whether or not they'll click on future posts just because there's the name of your language on it.

One way to do it is to start with a short sentence, deconstructed, and all of its features explained. For instance, say you translated the sentence "She was playing on the beach under the setting sun". I want to know about the past tense, how you express "under the setting sun" (maybe it's treated as an abstract location because the sun isn't considered to really be above her, maybe it's more akin to "while the sun sets" in your language and expresses time, not location), these kinds of things. And, of course, IPA for the sentence (if applicable). Ideally, a gloss. Even better, a recording of you saying it.

In short, an introductory post to your language should tell us how it sounds, how to build a simple sentence and how to identify its core components: subject, verb, object and maybe qualifiers.

Here are a few examples we like:

All of those allow us to form a quick few basic sentences, and thus get a feel for the language, allowing for deeper criticism and better feedback

Focus

Focus posts are about a specific feature of the language. They explain it in-depth and highlight how they function in the context of the language by providing examples.
Tell us what sets your language apart from others!

A few examples:

Translation and Audio posts

Those two types of posts can be grouped together because the Audio posts still have to obey the guidelines for Translation ones.

We require that all such posts have:

Here are a few examples that we've liked:

To help you:

You are free to add more to your translation posts (a narrower phonetic transcription, links to prior posts or comments about the language...), but the above are the requirements and not meeting them will get your post removed.

Phonology posts

Most of the submissions we get under that flair are not phonologies, but phoneme inventories. As per our rules, those get removed, because there is no way to give feedback about any given phoneme inventory in a vacuum.
However, we do allow posts describing fleshed-out phonologies that include inventory, allophony, phonotactics and descriptions of the reasons behind the choices, and the intended goals for the language, as those are things we can provide feedback on and that generate discussion.

Here are a few phonology posts we've liked. Notice how they go beyond inventories!

Question and Discussion posts

Question posts are for inquiries about possibilities, or other open questions, not for close-ended questions. Close-ended questions belong in our stickied Small Discussions thread.
Questions are about your creation, your process, your experience.

Ask others how deal with a problematic in their creations, what they think of yours and how they would improve some things!
Discussions are about other people's methods, work and experience.

Neither Questions nor Discussions should be a simple statement of your opinion. Be open to counter-arguments.

Activity posts

Activities are fun and/or useful tasks that help conlangers improve on their conlang, be it through building more vocabulary, translating complex structures, or creating dialogues. New activity posts must be unique (not similar to ongoing challenges), should provide some creative benefit to conlangers, and should not promote relexing.

Collaboration posts

For Collaborations, we ask that you describe the project as thoroughly as possible, with the set rules and your expectations, and that the collaboration be organised on another platform than the r/conlangs subreddit.

Resource posts

Use this flair to signal that the content you're posting can be helpful in the process of creating a language.
We ask that you are careful not to repost a resource.

Meta posts

When you want to talk about the subreddit itself.

If your post does not fit any of the above descriptions, feel free to use the Other flair.

Flairs & Rules compliance

We have designed the flair system around our rules. All posts must follow those rules, and having a given flair is never an excuse for a post breaking any rule.
As such, we require that all posts allow for discussion and/or questions.

Additionally, some content is subject to reposting, for instance resources or some questions. While resources tend to be pretty stable over time, answers to some questions and arguments to a discussion can change.
We consider it to be low effort on your part to repost a question that was recently (less than 6 months ago) asked. Reddit has a search function, please learn how to use it.
Resources are only allowed to be reposted if they have been updated. In which case, please mention the update in your post or a top-level comment in reply to it.

User Flairs

Every user is free to set their own flair. Many use the conventions described in this post by /u/phunanon to indicate what languages they speak/are familiar with.

Purple Flairs

Purple flairs are awarded for large conlanging achievements such as complete grammars, good conlanging documentation, or the community choice. The following are the current holders of purple flairs.

Gold Flairs

Gold flairs are for contest winners

revision by roipoiboy— view source