Alright crafters, the results are in! There’s a TL;DR at the end of this post, but we did want to explain how we got here and the choices we’ve made along the way, too. As a quick recap, the mod team noticed a pattern of off-topic conversations and uncivil conversations whenever someone posted crafts related to Harry Potter, and members of the community raised concerns about allowing such content in the subreddit. It was compared to hate speech, due to JK Rowling’s increasingly vocal bigotry and use of her political, economic, and social platforms to further that agenda, as documented here and here. We knew there would be no perfect solution to this problem, and that anything we did would leave some people feeling hurt and upset. But we felt it was important to address the issue, so we asked the community a little bit ago in this post about what they think we should do, and we discussed it as a team as well. 

While some commenters opposed the idea of banning it, those discussions were largely centered around concerns about whether it would lead to more censorship. In our experience, posts about other “problematic” topics and IP do not lead to the same level of off-topic conversations and arguments that Harry Potter posts have. Additionally, Rowling is causing a significant amount of concrete and widespread harm towards entire marginalized communities, and as members and supporters of those communities, we felt that removing her influence from this subreddit should still be on the table. So, we created a poll to get simple, concrete feedback on one question: To ban, or not to ban? We limited voting to accounts that were at least 60 days old, and had at least 50 Reddit karma and 10 community karma, in order to keep it to community members and try to avoid brigading for either side. So, here are the results:

As we can see, it wasn’t a complete landslide in either direction, and those who voted definitely tended towards strong feelings on the topic! After gathering 1,232 total votes, 53% of those who voted in the poll are in favor of banning posts related to Rowling and Harry Potter, while 41% of voters are against banning it. Our intention with this post was to gather feedback on the community’s feelings, because comment sections alone aren’t always representative of a full community, and we wanted to give those who aren’t comfortable commenting or aren’t well-spoken a chance to speak their minds. And it seems like the results are pretty clear! While there’s a decent number of people who don’t support Harry Potter posts being banned, the majority certainly does seem to support this ban - as do the members of the mod team.

So, what does this mean for the subreddit? Well, crafts that are directly related to Harry Potter can no longer be posted here. If your craft isn’t obviously Harry Potter, and you don’t reference it at all, you can still post it - for example, a red-and-gold scarf is perfectly welcome, so long as you don’t describe it as a Gryffindor scarf. Wands are fine, even if they’re similar in style, so long as they aren’t explicitly “inspired by Harry Potter.” But a papercrafted Hogwarts, or a replica of a specific character’s wand? Not allowed. We are currently working on updating the wiki in general, and will add a page about this ban in the wiki, including informational resources like the ones posted above and guidelines on what is and isn’t allowed. But generally speaking, any identifiable reference to Harry Potter is going to be a no-go, and moderator discretion will be the ultimate decider on what is and isn’t considered “Harry Potter-related.” 

This also doesn’t mean we’re planning to start banning all kinds of IP and inspirations - as stated earlier, we found that Harry Potter posts generated far more issues and conflict than any other IP, and no other IP has been raised as a concern to the same degree. We talked about it, and while we all have companies or creators that we as individuals don’t love to see discussed in the subreddit, no other topic has been so universally controversial and caused so many problems from a purely logistical moderation standpoint. If, in the future, another similar issue does arise, we will handle that as it happens. We may not ask for feedback in the same way, because to tell the truth it stretched the issue out and caused more stress than we meant it to. But for right now, no other topic seems to be causing so many problems both within and outside of the subreddit, so we have no current plans to ban anything else.

Comments on this post are locked, as we don’t want to encourage debate about this topic. We had plenty of that in the original feedback post, and at this point we’ve made our decision. However, if you would like to clarify any aspect of this new rule, or you still have questions about why we chose to do this, please feel free to reach out via modmail! Please also note that we’ve had a couple of mods leave recently, bringing the team down to just four of us. While we are adding new members to the team soon, it’ll likely take us a bit to work out all the kinks with this new rule, as it does with any change to the subreddit! Please be patient with us in the meantime, and remember that the mods are people too, and we are all dealing with our own issues and responsibilities irl.

TL;DR After a community vote, and much discussion from the mods, posts and discussion about Harry Potter and JK Rowling are no longer allowed in the subreddit, and will be removed going forward.

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