What are Flairs?

At their most basic, flairs here enable you to post without having to be manually approved every time. Without them FDS would simply not be possible from all the brigading and trolling.

What they aren't?

Some weird mod conspiracy. Seriously, we do NOT have the time for that kind of thing.

How are they given out?

Manually.

Yes, someone had to sift through hundreds and thousands of comments to make sure the person who is posting here is a woman or at least a close semblance of one. Also, that someone has to go through hundreds of highly abusive comments every single day to make sure that no lady goes unnoticed and unable to post. Yes, EVEN THE PICK-ME-PROBATIONS.

It goes without saying, those are many hours of unpaid work, in addition to an already busy life, because we strongly feel that women should have a place of their very own to discuss, without male trolls downvoting their comments, cussing them out and telling them to go kill themselves.

Why are there flair rankings?

Some mods felt they should be able to tell the newbie from the seasoned poster, the valuable contributor from the yet unproven. Like all ideas, works great in theory, sucks in practice. How do you keep track of the contributions of thousands of women? How does one remember to upflair a poster who's proven to be a good contributor?

You can't.

It was simply inevitable that feelings would get hurt.

And "demoting"?

Don't get me started.

For every woman who got "demoted" by mistake, there were 5 others who should have been kicked straight away, because they were never really happy with the theme of the sub. They invariably caused much more trouble down the road and had to be kicked anyway.

But what about free speech?

It's pretty much as free as it gets here until there are unnecessary debates about the sub's major themes. Nobody here has to be in complete alignment with the sub's themes but if you find youself debating them more often than not, that's probably a sign you'd be happier somewhere else.

Also, due to the way it became popular, this sub is far more international than most. We have women from every culture, age, sexual orientation, religion, and every corner of the earth. The potential for conflict is just sky high,

so yes, some things are going to get locked, some ladies might get kicked out, feelings WILL get hurt.

Ok, but what are we going to do about this flair thing?

If this was an absolute monarchy, I'd frankly flair everyone the same and be done with it. And if I had the time, I'd be happy to flair you to whatever you like. But this is a meritocracy so there will be a discussion.

If you feel you've been flaired by mistake (particularly as a pickme) or think you've been treated unfairly, send us a message so we can review the situation.