Community Guidelines

What these rooms are for

Patrika Portal is a research archive. The rooms are here so that questions about the material have somewhere to go: a difficult passage, a date that does not agree with another source, an author nobody has been able to identify, a scan that is missing a page.

• The common room is open to every member. Most conversation belongs here.
• Announcements is read by everyone and written by the trust.
• Your thread with the trust is where you write to us directly — a correction, a complaint, a request. One thread, answered by whichever moderator or administrator is available.

Members cannot message one another. That is deliberate: an archive used by students and by scholars should not come with a private channel for strangers to reach them.

What we ask of you

• Write in Hindi or English, whichever you think in. Both are equally at home here, and nobody should apologise for either.
• Say where a claim comes from. This is a research archive; a date, an attribution or a quotation is far more useful with its source attached.
• Disagree with the argument. Scholarly disagreement is the point of a room like this. It stays scholarly as long as it stays about the work.
• Assume the person is asking in good faith. Someone reading a 1938 patrika for the first time will ask things a specialist finds obvious. That is exactly who the archive is for.

What is not allowed

• Abuse of a person — insults, harassment, or anything aimed at who someone is rather than what they said.
• Contempt for a community or a tradition. This archive holds the literature of a living religious tradition and is read by people from several. Criticism of an idea is welcome; contempt for the people who hold it is not.
• Advertising and solicitation, including repeated promotion of your own work where it was not asked for.
• Other people’s private information — an address, a phone number, a document — posted without their consent.
• Anything unlawful in India, or anything that puts the trust in breach of its obligations as an intermediary.

Sharing from the archive

Quoting a passage to discuss it is ordinary scholarly practice and is welcome. Re-publishing the scans is not.

Much of this material is still in copyright and reaches this portal under arrangements the trust is answerable for. Redistributing it puts the archive itself at risk, which is why it is the one rule here that is not about manners.

How moderation works

Messages appear immediately. Nothing you write is held for approval, so moderation here is a response to something rather than a barrier in front of everything.

• You may always delete your own message. Withdrawing something you regret is not a moderator’s power, it is yours.
• A removed message is hidden, not erased. A report about a message would be unanswerable if the message had vanished, and removing something must not destroy the record of why.
• One notice can be pinned per room. A list of pinned notices is a second room nobody reads.
• Suspension stops posting, never reading. The archive is why you are here, and cutting a researcher off from scholarship over a message in a room would be a heavier penalty than the offence. Only an administrator can suspend an account.

What moderators cannot do

The limits below are enforced by the portal itself, not left to judgement:

• Nobody can act on someone at or above their own rank. A moderator can remove a member’s message and never an administrator’s. Otherwise “moderator” would become a route to overruling the trust.
• A moderator cannot suspend anyone. Removing a message and silencing a person for a month are different decisions, and only the second needs an administrator.
• Your thread with the trust cannot be quietly closed. Rooms can be archived from the settings screen; a member’s own thread cannot, so a complaint has nowhere to be filed away to.

Reporting something

Every message has a report action. A report goes to the moderation queue with the message attached, and it stays answerable even if the message is removed first.

If the matter concerns a moderator, or you would rather it were not seen by the whole staff, write in your thread with the trust and say so.

Contact

These guidelines sit alongside the Terms & Conditions and the Privacy Policy, which explains who can read what you write here.

Anything else, including a grievance you want recorded formally, reaches us through the contact page.

Samyakgyan Prachar-Prasar Trust
Jaipur, Rajasthan, India