What's the purpose of local study groups?

Contributors
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As a local study group admin, I have to decide whether to approve or decline posts to the group. Is there a description of the purpose of these groups somewhere, so I can use that to help with those decisions?

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I’ve solved this now. I was having difficulty deciding whether to approve or decline posts that were about programming, but not about FreeCodeCamp or my local study group specifically. I figured that you can get this kind of information outside of FCC, so getting notifications about it from your local FCC group wouldn’t be very welcome. On the other hand, the idea of posts about programming from people in the locality getting the group talking seemed appropriate, especially if that might lead to a meeting. Taking it on faith that the poster is in the locality, I would approve these posts… except if they contain adverts! That’s a sign that the poster may not be genuine (is more interested in people seeing the adverts than engaging with the group), and would therefore lead to a degraded experience for the group’s members.

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When it comes to admining/moderating freeCodeCamp groups I follow a similar set of guidelines.

It must first abide by the freeCodeCamp Code of Conduct.

  • If a post violates any of the CoC rules then the post gets deleted and the user may be blocked depending on the severity of the violation.
  • Repeated spam, trolling, and harassment is an insta-ban/block.
  • One-off spam yields a warning, with further frequent violations falling into the rule above.

Spam is often subjective depending on the group.

For my local Chicago study group when it comes to general programming tutorials/videos/articles/events I have another set of rules if a post is not clearly related to freeCodeCamp.

  • If posts are linking to paid course materials/promotions/affiliate links/events (where paid means non-free, in terms of cost and/or personal data) they are considered spam.
  • If tutorials/videos/articles are posted without any context they are considered spam.
  • If tutorials/videos/articles are posted with some insights, questions, or relevant reason as to why they posted it to the group then I would leave that post up.
  • If a free event that is on-topic (i.e. software development/tech professional development) is posted by a local member and is a local event I’ll leave it up or actually share the official FB event created by the host.

For the freeCodeCamp Local Study Group Leaders Facebook group, when I moderate posts there I consider anything not related specifically to leading or forming a study group as off-topic. This is because there are other more relevant groups to posts things like tutorials/videos/articles/events and is not of service to our members “who are interested in leading local study groups, putting together events, and helping people in their communities learn to code.” The previously quoted part comes straight from the About section of the group and that is used as the general guiding principle to measure relevancy within that group. It looks like this particular group had been a wild west of sorts before I became a mod so I’m not sure any official rules were being enforced. I’d argue that the above is a good set of principles to abide by in moderation of the group, but would also be open to discussion of other admins/mods input on forming an official group rules policy that we all could abide by.