Registration Terms
Welcome! We are glad that you are here!
The hope for this site is to provide a place for constructive and positive discussion about the journey for all those involved in the pursuit of ballet. By joining this group you are agreeing to our Community Guidelines:
1. Please be kind. It's not that hard. 😊
2. Please avoid posting things that are speculative or might be misleading. If you focus your posts from the perspective of your firsthand experiences, it can help others understand what you are sharing. Firsthand experience is subjective and that is something we can all understand when it is framed that way.
3. Trolling will not be allowed. Disinformation will not be allowed. These points are non-negotiable and relate directly to guidelines 1 and 2 above.
4. Anonymity is highly encouraged on this site because ballet is a very small world. Even if you don't see the need for anonymity today, that doesn't mean you (or your dancer) might not wish in the future that you had been anonymous here in the past. The hope is that anonymity here can facilitate the honest sharing of [kind, constructive, accurate] firsthand experiences. All members aged high school or younger should choose an anonymous user name. We hope all other members will also use anonymous screen names with the one exception being BT4D members whose screen names in that group were not anonymous. (We hope BT4D members will choose to use their same screen names here so that we can continue to build on the relationships that were formed in the old group.)
5. Discussions will be moderated as needed but the hope is that by leading by positive example we can all show how we collectively want this community to operate.
6. All forums will welcome comments from all members that are made in a constructive and kind manner. There are no restricted areas, but there are a few specialty areas to help members categorize discussion topics and to facilitate connections among members of those groups such as adult ballet students, men, parents of boys, and teachers. These areas are not restricted, but are intended to be of benefit to the members of those specialty groups.
7. We ask adult members of the group to not send private messages to minors in the group. We welcome discussions between adult members and our high school-aged and younger members in the public forums on the site. We also want to let our younger members know that they can reach out to an Admin or Moderator at any time for help if they are receiving private messages from an adult member of the group.
8. Comparisons of training programs and other experiences will not be strictly forbidden as long as members' frame their assessments according to their personal experiences and include enough substantive detail to make their assessments understandable and useful to others. So, for example, it would be okay for someone to post, "My dancer attended both program A and program B and found that in the summers she attended, program A offered many more opportunities for _______ while Program B excelled at _______, which was important to her need to focus on ______ ." However, statements like "Program A is better than Program B" or vice versa are not factual and not useful because what is "best" depends entirely on an individual's needs. So let's experiment with allowing members the opportunity to provide analysis of the programs with which they have firsthand experience including allowing more than one program at a time in their analysis. However, again, please make sure your statements are substantively detailed enough to be useful to whoever later reads what you've written and so they can take into account those details of your experience that were unique to it being your subjective, firsthand experience. *If this all gets too tricky in practice we can always further limit comparisons, but for now let's see how this works!
9. Advertising of services or by business or commercial interests is not allowed. Postings that violate this rule are removed.
10. This community exists for those involved in the pursuit of ballet and is intended to be apolitical and areligious.
11. Links to outside sources must be limited only to providing information directly relevant to the topic at hand within the category of the pursuit of ballet or to professional ballet news and performances. Outside links may not serve as advertising (please see point 9 above) nor be about politics or religion (please see point 10 above). Please do not link to individuals' social media accounts, and please do not share what members post here outside of this community. No information on this site may be used for commercial purposes at any time. Alas, this site does not have the bandwidth to host photos or images so they are not allowed.
12. Please write your posts using full sentences with standard grammar and punctuation to the best of your ability. This is really helpful since we may be lucky enough to have international members who are not native English speakers and abbreviations, text-talk, lack of punctuation, etc. can make it harder to understand someone's meaning.
13. If you would like to share something with the group that meets all of the above guidelines but requires true anonymity, please feel free to send your post to a group Admin who can post it anonymously for you in the appropriate forum, provided it meets the Community Guidelines listed here.