Feed: Building a Web of Support

thanks your last post has cleared up what it is we are aiming to do with the feed, i worried it was to be a facebook style "now look at me eating my dinner" kind of posts, ridiculous and self absorbed. But a nice heart felt post on your page to support others is a great idea.

will they be monitored in case they do start to be facebook esq in nature?

I don't understand all the consternation. I'm absolutely not interested in the feed feature, so I won't use it. If others see the benefit, then use it. I just come here sometimes to listen to people's stories and try in my way to be a little supportive. I don't get much involved in the forums. I don't want to be a moderator, or peer support. When I was asked, I politely said I'm not interested and nobody hassled me about it. As the site adds features we can chose our own way to utilize them, or not.

Hello! Thank you for all the great information about the feeds that's already been shared in this thread. I wanted to bring up something I've become concerned about with this new feature. I mentioned it in a different thread on the follow feature, but I think I have a better chance of getting a response if I share it here as well.

I'm concerned that a common trigger for a good-size portion of 7 Cup's member and listener population has been forgotten when it comes to censorship. The eating disorder community on 7 Cups of Tea is an awesome place--we have a really great section is the forum where everyone works hard to be supportive of each other without falling into competition and I've connected with a ton of members and had some awesome eating disorder related chats. And I hate to see 7 Cups going in a direction that might cause problems for the wonderful people looking for support with their eating disorders on this site. It doesn't appear that pictures of food are being censored, even though I'd argue that for many people struggle with all different types of eating disorders, pictures of food can be as triggering as a gory picture is for a self harmer. It might sound silly if you don't have much personal experience with an eating disorder, but a harmless picture of an ice cream cone can be geniunly dangerous. That picture of an ice cream might make me think about what I've eaten so far today, and I might start feeling like it's too much, and I might start feeling like I need to restrict or purge, or binge, or feel panicked about my intake for the day...pictures of food can be triggering to people with every type of eating disorder and in every stage of relapse or recovery.

I can see that the censoring of triggering images is already working well for some of the more obvious forms of triggers--self harm, suicide, violence, etc.--because I haven't seen a single problematic image for something like that! That's really encouraging, and I really appreciate all the hard work that must have gone into implementing that program. But I ask that the censoring of triggering issues be at least included to include pictures of food. (And I also hope that any type of pictures of people are already banned, because that's another cause for concern even beyond privacy issues when it comes to the eating disorder community.) I don't mean to be a complainer or to ruin anyone's fun with these feeds--I just wanted to speak up about this because I think it's a common trigger that a lot of people might not think about, and I feel that someone needs to speak up about it while improvements and tweaks to the feed program are still being made.

Thank you to everyone who's worked on this feed feature for all your hard work and dedicated time!