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JenniferMaker Group Rules

Our Mission Statement

Our Facebook groups are an important part of the JenniferMaker community. I created our groups to be warm and welcoming places for crafters, makers, and content creators to ask on-topic questions, share their creations, and support one another. I consider our groups to be extensions of my home and studio, places I‘ve invited you all into to sit and chat about the joy of making things, places filled with positive energy. My communities are inclusive. I do everything I can to bolster and build this up.

As our communities have grown and flourished, so have our need for clear guidelines. This page explains our rules and expectations. These are intended to help you contribute to our groups confidently, without worrying about breaking a rule or making a mis-step. Please read them carefully and reach out to us at [email protected] if you need additional clarifications. Your participation is encouraged and welcomed!

Be Kind & Courteous

We created this community to be a welcoming environment centered around our shared passions. Like a preferred crafting style, many will have different opinions or beliefs. We ask all opinions to be kind, respectful, and approached with openness to learn and grow. We love a forum of discussion. Rude, mean, or volatile comments will be removed and not tolerated.

No Hate Speech or Bullying

Our groups are a safe place for you to show self-expression through your crafts. We will not tolerate bullying towards any crafter’s personal beliefs or identity. This includes, but is not limited to, race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender, identity, or political affiliation.

Note: We allow photos of projects that contain some expletives, so long as the project otherwise adheres to the group’s rules and there is no hate speech or bullying in it.

No Promotions or Spam

We do not allow selling of any kind in the group by individuals or companies outside the JenniferMaker organization. Self-promotion, spam, and irrelevant links aren’t allowed. Live videos are not allowed to be posted without prior approval. We encourage sharing of information related to the group’s topic as long as it is free, will remain free, and is inclusive. No promotions of other groups or businesses are allowed without approval.

We understand that many of our crafters run craft-related businesses and feedback/practice-sharing is encouraged! Posts explicitly selling or trading services, designs, blanks, or materials are not allowed. Many posts may include a logo due to the nature of the design. However, we do ask that any business contact information be removed or obfuscated from photos. No live videos, affiliate links, or promoting of other Facebook groups will be allowed.

Note: We do allow product price checking, or asking “how much would you charge for this,” so long as it does not lead to selling or promotion.

No File Sharing

Inspiration is something we love to see in our group! Many crafters will ask for suggestions for a design and we encourage the sharing of links to original designs or found designs WITH attribution to the creator. Artists deserve credit for their work. Please do not share copyrighted files, images found on Google without a source credit, or solicit SVG creation in our group.We do not allow members to share files that are copyrighted, nor to ask for SVGs to be made for them or sent to them. This includes any image you found on Google or a “free” clip art site. If you created a design from scratch yourself, you may upload it to our Files section for free distribution within the group. We also allow bloggers to share links to their blogs with free files that will remain free, but no other file sharing sites such as Google Drive , Dropbox, or other Facebook groups are allowed.

Note: You also may not share links to Cricut Design Space community projects, unless they are official Cricut projects or JenniferMaker projects, as otherwise we cannot be sure the project will remain available for all to use without deletion or modification. You may share a link to a commercial design, provided you will not gain from the sales.

Respect Privacy 

We encourage our community to help each other. If a question is asked, we believe it best to answer in the group so our community can all learn the answer! If the need for a PM (private message) occurs, please ask for the crafters permission to send a PM before messaging. We discourage unsolicited PMs and the sharing of personal contact information for the safety of our community. We do not allow mass private messaging to group members.

Note: We also do not allow personal information to be shared such as your email address, home address, etc. Please do not ask others to share where they live or start “where is everybody from?” posts. This is for your safety! 

Keep Things PG-rated

Sharing crafts? Great! For the comfort of the community, we request designs be rated PG. Political, violent/gory, sexual, and socially-charged posts will not be approved. We’ve seen these devolve into arguments with lots of hurt feelings and have adopted a zero-tolerance rule for this type of content.

Keep Things On Topic

Keep posts related to the group’s topic and PG-rated. Politics and hot topics are not allowed to be shared in any of our groups. (Note that politics are not the same as support of human rights, specifically the right to life and liberty of all human beings, regardless of race, sex, nationality, ethnicity, language, religion, or any other status.) This is NOT intended to censor anyone, but rather to keep the groups topic focused rather than opinion focused. Facebook is removing groups that do not meet their community standards. Protecting the group is extremely important so any content that is not G-rated or PG-rated will be removed.

No Spoilers

Please do not share information that is being kept a mystery or confidential intentionally, such as upcoming product that has not been officially announced. Such posts will be removed. It is acceptable to post when a product is officially announced or available to purchase, but please check to see if a post already exists on it — please do not create additional posts if one already exists as multiple posts like this can overwhelm our group quickly.

Don’t Vent

We understand things get frustrating. If you need help, ask! We’d love to help. If you are bothered by a software or process change, we’d love to hear what your solution would be! We strive to rise above and offer solutions. We encourage our members to do the same. Negativity and complaints for the sake of venting will not be tolerated. If you feel the need to vent, please do so on your personal Facebook account. Instead, when you are here, think of yourself as sitting in my living room or in my craft room, where you would be kind and gracious and friendly and generous to me and one another.

I ask kindly that we check our negative energy at the door before interacting in JenniferMaker groups, but if that isn’t enough, my team and I will simply remove posts and members. We LOVE our groups and we will go to all efforts to protect them and keep them a warm and welcoming place filled with your beautiful work and helpful tips for one another.

Report, Don’t Retort

When you see an issue, PLEASE DO NOT RETORT and make a bad situation worse — instead, REPORT it to us and refrain from commenting. Please also do not start new topics talking about the issue. If you report the issue to us using Facebook’s “Report post to group admins” function, we will be notified and will investigate quickly. We will then take the appropriate action which we feel is best for our community.
 
Please keep in mind that when I or a member of my team turn off commenting on a post, it’s a peacekeeping measure in lieu of completely removing a post. We do this when the conversation has taken a negative turn and we do not have the time to constantly check for more negative comments, especially as they can sometimes come in faster than we can remove them. It’s this, or remove the post altogether. If the post is craft-related, we try to preserve the post itself whenever possible and the positive and helpful and supportive comments by turning off comments.
 
It’s VERY important to understand that we never EVER turn off commenting or remove posts because we personally or collectively disagree with your opinion, politics, religion, or stance on any non-craft controversial topic.
 
If you see us turn off commenting or removing posts, on one topic but not another, please understand that it’s not the TOPIC but the comments within them that determine what we do. If we see our group members keep our cool and discuss a topic respectfully, we can keep it open. If not, we step in to close or remove it. Again, it’s not the topic — it’s the responses to the topic.
 
If we allow these comments to run rampant and unchecked, our groups are no longer places that people feel comfortable to ask questions and share work … which is the purpose of our groups.
 
If you have an issue with a post, please do NOT comment negatively — it only breeds more issues. Please click the three dots in the upper right corner and select “Report post to group admins.” We will be alerted and investigate as soon as we can, usually quite quickly. We actively monitor all of our groups.

Again, if you have questions, please reach out to us at [email protected].

Love,
Jennifer

JenniferMaker Group Rules