For the new year, we have decided to start a couple of new initiatives at Asian Sirens. First of all, you may have noticed a new Technical Support link in our lefthand column. We have added this because some people weren’t receiving our confirmation email when they tried to join, and because they weren’t yet members, they weren’t able to contact us about it! However, this support form works for non-members too.

Secondly, after the furore generated by NorthMan’s Helen Su post a few weeks ago – which ultimately resulted in NorthMan’s departure from Asian Sirens – we have undertaken a review of Asian Sirens’ editorial policy. However, we have decided not to make any major changes to our posting rules, as we believe we already have the best balance between free and open discussion while simultaneously blocking offensive posts – it is simply impossible for a moderator to satisfy all of the people all of the time. Still, on the other hand…Helen’s post is a good example of something that we did identify as being an issue: sometimes a thread will ‘touch a nerve’, resulting in a lot of discussion about a particular issue that isn’t necessarily specifically about the post it is being discussed in. For example, Helen’s post touched off a discussion about the seemingly endless parade of ‘SoCal’ import models these days, many of whom set up non-nude pay sites. This made it look as though our readers were negative toward Helen, whereas they were actually complaining about a much wider issue.

So from now on, we will be setting up discussion posts so that people can talk about these issues independently of the discussion about the women themsleves. This will keep our posts more focused, while simultaneously allowing people to get things off their chest without appearing to target a particular model. When we set up such a post, we will let people know about it, and deem any further discussion of the topic outside the discussion post off-topic. I will be putting up the first such post very shortly, about exactly the issue raised in Helen’s post.