News & Announcements

[Eke]

PRONOUNS

Based on a suggestion made to the staff, you are now able to set your pronouns in addition to your gender in your profile settings, under the "personal" tab.



Your set pronouns will show up on both your user profile page and your mini-profile.

As this is a serious topic for many people, please don't take this opportunity to set troll pronouns for yourself. It may seem funny to you, but it might make some people feel uneasy to see this topic get treated as a joke, so please only use it for your real pronouns you wish to use, whatever they may be.

[kev]

INTERNAL STAFF CHANGES

After Jess's retirement from the administration, the staff has announced internal changes.

1.) Aliya, Dylan and Oisín have been promoted to the Moderator position, as they have proven themselves to be active and reliable staff members in their position as Discord Moderators. We will not be adding any new Discord Moderators, the position will remain vacant for now.

2.) From now on, every staff decision, such as giving out a warning, has to be agreed upon by at least 51% of the staff, currently 6 of the 11 members. This is to ensure that a majority of the staff stands behind the decisions we make. To avoid any wrong assumptions: We've decided to implement this rule for more transparency, but every important decision has already been backed by the majority of the staff in the past.

3.) From now on, Daniel and Blandine are specialized for technical support on the forum. This means that they will primarily work on technical issues, such as board & thread regulation, rather than conflict management.
If you have questions and requests regarding technical topics, please tag one of the two members. Other staff members can still be asked about technical issues too, in case you need urgent help and neither Daniel nor Blandine are online.
If you want to contact the staff regarding conflict management, e.g. when a conflict is happening on the Discord server or you have potential rule breaches to report, please use the @staff role on Discord to tag the 11 non-technical members or privately message one of those 11 staff members (or use the report function on the forum, if you think a specific forum post breaks the rules). The Tech Staff members can also contribute to decisions regarding these issues, but will not be included in the 51% rule, which means that 6 of the non-technical staff members will have to agree on those decisions, instead of 7, like we mentioned on Discord earlier this evening.

[kev]

ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING BULLYING

It probably hasn’t gone unnoticed that Alexa has decided to distance themselves from the community for reasons that caused further discussions on the forum and on the #vent channel on Discord. That is why the staff team has decided to publish a statement as we were publicly criticized and asked to take further action.

For a longer period of time tension raised between Alexa and several other members of this forum. As we don’t want to put people into groups, it is better if anyone who knows they were involved in such a situation knows we are talking about them. This ultimately led to escalations and verbal arguments, to the point that it can be considered as people trolling or even bullying, which we don’t think has to be explained further. The latest argument, which happened in #music, led to a 5% warning to Alexa, which was given for an accumulation of rule breaking such as flame baiting and racist/xenophobic comments. Other members of that argument received a verbal warning for this specific argument only. Alexa perceived this, as well as other staff treatment in the past, as unfair and decided to take a break from the discord server and ultimately announced their distancing from the community as whole. Inappropriate comments made under Alexa’s post were deleted by the staff and individual members were warned verbally. Alexa’s distancing caused further discussions in the vent channel of our discord server. This led to an argument and finally to a reevaluation process in the staff channel.

The staff has evaluated the situation again and considered the objections and concerns mentioned by other forum members. We decided to consider that the actions, that were taken against Alexa by members of our community, as bullying, something we didn’t do before and we fully regret. We apologized to alex(a)bg in a personal message and also made clear that we can’t force other people to apologize too as it’s something that has to be self-initiated. We should have acted differently back then and we promise to do better in the future. Even if some involved people viewed their behaviour as justified, we believe that it crossed the line into bullying and was unacceptable. Other than that, we decided to retroactively hand out warnings to ✦ josh ✦ and Holland for being actively involved in the actions taken against alex(a)bg. I would also like to mention that the staff is paying big respect to Lᴇꜰ for defending Alexa and making us attentive to this situation which led to the reevaluation.

Another point that we have to mention, is how one of our staff members, Eke, was treated in this situation. Marika was portrayed as the villain in this whole situation, simply for being friends with people involved in this and for giving the impression of being the forum’s head, which they aren’t, neither officially nor unofficially. The staff team as a whole is the head of this forum and not an individual person. Some accusations were thrown from people who did not have enough background knowledge on this matter and we’d like to ask everyone to be more careful in this kind of matter.

STATEMENT ON FAKE ACCOUNTS

Yesterday, the staff has made the decision to ban vaneedas, after we found out that he created multiple fake accounts and participated with them in contests, such as WWWSC. Since this is not the first time Vaneedas has been caught doing this, as older members will remember, we made the difficult decision to ban him and his duplicate accounts (antonija and eriethioesc).

Recently, there have been quite a few instances of fake accounts being discovered. We want to remind everyone again, that creating more than one account is against the forum rules and will lead to consequences, upon the discovery of said accounts. Therefore we urge you to not create any fake accounts in the future. If you are currently in possession of multiple accounts, that the staff has not discovered yet, we suggest for your own sakes that you delete those accounts before they get discovered.

[Dimitris]

HAPPY 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF THE FORUMS! 🥳

On 8 August 2011 this community began as a website for participants of the Ourvision Song Contest to congregate and then eventually expanded as a home to over a hundred different fan contests over the years! Some of the biggest contests of their time are or were at one point hosted through the forums, including Tubevision Contest, Imagine Song Contest, Own Eurovision Song Contest, North Vision Song Contest, WWW Song Contest and many others, and thanks to a combination of all the different communities these contests have created, we have built up the Song Contest Forums community that we have today.

It has been a wild ten years for the forums. Throughout all these ten years a lot have changed for it – that includes a name change, several big administrational changes, new contests emerging on the forums and a continuous membership growth. But one thing remains the same: the reason this community was built upon – sharing our love for Eurovision, song contests and music.

Thank you to everyone who's had a part in all of this! Throughout the years many users have come and gone, but their legacy will remain on both the website and the community for years to come still. Whether you joined in 2011 or 2021, you are a part of the history of this community and will always be!

Here's a playlist we've put together with some SCF classics. Enjoy!

[Julian]

INTRODUCTION OF THE ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY

Over the past few months, the staff has repeatedly had to deal with a variety of problematic statements and situations, of which many were racist, xenophobic or corresponding microaggressions. Recently, we decided that we need to approach these things with a new, stricter method and a more vigilant mindset. In order to decide on our future approach, we have held talks with several people, including a Black Lives Matter (BLM) activist and an affected forum user. These talks have led us to decide the following steps:

1. The introduction of a Zero Tolerance Policy (ZTP) for the future. Any use of racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, sexism, ableism etc. and the corresponding slurs and microaggressions will be punished, either with a percentage or a verbal warning, depending on the intent and whether it's a repeat offender. Blatantly racist, homophobic, etc. statements will be punished with an immediate ban, microaggressions will be judged according to a three strike system, which gives someone, who was simply uneducated, the chance to educate themselves, while still stopping anyone from producing too many repeated microaggressions. We've been too lenient in the past and from now on it's time to be much more vigilant, especially towards repeat offenders. This rule also applies to other sites and communities, so don't live under the illusion that you can be racist, homophobic, etc. outside of this forum, without facing any consequences on here.

2. Past slur usages and other forms of discrimination will be penalised with warnings, either a percentage warning or a verbal warning. In order to do this, the staff has gone through the old Messenger chat, the Forum itself and the SCF Discord server to find incidences where slurs have been used and we archived these incidences. While we understand that many of the people, who used slurs in the past or made racist jokes, would not do the same thing again today and have grown as a person, it is still important to address the past and hand out consequences that should have and were not handed out at the time. This method was recommended by the BLM activist who we talked to and the staff agrees, that it's the right way to move forward. If you are among the people who will receive either a percentage warning or a verbal warning (which you'll find out soon, if you get a PM from us), please don't see this as us shaming you for your past behaviour. It is merely a way to remind you to never repeat those past mistakes again and for justice to happen, even if it's delayed. Two members of the staff will receive warnings for previous comments too, so we are by no means exempt from this. If you believe that you truly changed and won't do the same mistake again, you won't have to worry about the increased percentage count on your profile or a verbal warning being handed out to you.

3. Discrimination goes further than just the usage of slurs, but it's hard for us to find other instances of discrimination in the old chats. So if any of you ever felt discriminated in any way on SCF and you would like the staff to (retrospectively) take a look at the situation (if we haven't yet), feel free to PM any of the staff members.

4. As said, the ZTP also applies to behaviour outside of the forum and is a system that also deals with repeat offenders, specifically those who have not shown any genuine interest in educating themselves. For this reason, the staff has decided to permanently ban Þórir, who has already amassed a high number of warnings and decided that simply moving his problematic behaviour to the Eurovision Unofficial server was the best way to deal with the warnings. We did not make this decision lightly but banning him permanently was another recommendation made during our talks and one that the staff agreed is, unfortunately, necessary.

Please take this announcement seriously. It's a shame we even have to evaluate our methods to deal with discrimination, but unfortunately it's very necessary, as microaggressions continue to happen and certain members (like Þórir) seem to think, that they can just get by without actually changing their ways. It's a very important topic and we will treat it with the utmost seriousness.

[kev]

CHANGES IN THE FORUM'S ADMINISTRATION

Following the retirement of Callum and alexeh as staff members, we decided to promote two new moderators. After discussing this topic in the staff, we unanimously agreed to add the following people:

SPOILER: Click to show

agni

With their Moderator application back in January 2021, Agni already impressed the Staff and was considered as a possible staff member. The current staff, including the newer members, still view them as a competent addition to the staff, which is why we decided to invite them.

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ClassifiedCat

Unlike Agni, William did not apply to become a moderator during the last application process, but has proven to us that he has the skills to become a moderator on this forum, as he has cooperated with the staff before, such as during the introduction of the ZTP. Based on that, we decided to invite him to the staff and we believe that he'll do great work.

With Marika's previous demotion to the Tech Staff and Callum's retirement, there are currently only two administrators left. Due to that, we decided to promote two previous moderators to become administrators. As a result of our internal discussions, involving the question of which moderators feel up to the task and have the necessary experience, we have decided to promote Julian and Oisín to the rank of administrator.

We would once again like to thank Callum and Alex for their work and impact in the staff team and wish them the best for their future. Our door is always open for them, in case they ever want to return to the staff, which also counts for the other retired staff members.

[kev]

NEW MODERATOR ANNOUNCED

Following another round of moderator applications the staff has finally found a new member of the staff. We are glad to announce that

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Chante™

will join the staff.

We'd like to thank all other candidates for their application. We will consider them again when we need more moderators in the future.