Get to Know Our Networking Spaces

Forums, Affinity Groups, and More!

Welcome to a new year and a new look for SFWA’s discussion spaces! If some look a little sparse right now, that’s because we’re just getting started, so SFWA Members will play a significant role in how these services grow going forward.

You can help us the conversation going by introducing yourself and adding your goals, current projects, and recent wins.

We are excited to see where the conversation takes us next.

History and Logic for Change

For years, SFWA’s tool stack – the applications used to connect members to services – was scattered across websites and project management software. A mainly volunteer organization cannot rely on a tool stack that requires so much niche knowledge for longterm maintenance. When you have resources living on multiple builds, it is easy for out-of-date information to linger for years – which is what happened, and what we have been working to correct since our July 2025 website migration.

For example: The old Forums crashed in August 2025 because they were on a platform that had been deprecating for years, and the custom-code solutions supporting vital services could not adapt to the security patches that were becoming increasingly necessary for the service to function at all.

It was time to bring the Forums home, by rebuilding conversation spaces on our main website instead.

There were benefits to the sprawl, though, and we have to keep those in mind as we imagine better going forward. SFWA has a diverse membership, and different members process information and connect with community in different ways.

Over the years, our digital communications strategies have grown divided between a chat-roll model, like the one we use on SFWA Discord, and the bulletin-board style of the Forums, which were falling out of use even as the tech platform degraded.

Chat rolls have benefits! There’s a sense of play and creative energy that they excel at supporting.

But Discord is another third-party service, which raises important security questions for membership data. Using a chat roll for affinity group discussions is also non-ideal for creating resource libraries for new additions with old questions.

A searchable forum embedded on a main site, where we also house ever-updating resource pages, can help us to ensure that the most timely materials are always available to our members.

Moderation Policy

Last year, there were three moderation policies scattered across our builds. In September 2025, we synthesized the best of those policies into a document that celebrates community-building above all else. The full text for our Moderation Policy is available here. The abiding principle is: Remember the human.

Our supporting harassment policy is currently undergoing a much-needed update to reflect new procedures, and we have a wealth of Safety Committee resources to help members navigate in-person and online events with greater ease.

Learn More about Our Conversation Spaces

The new SFWA Forums do not fully replicate the structure of the old Forums. There are a few reasons for this. One is that the old Forums were hosted on a third-party platform that has now deprecated beyond repair. But the other reasons are more important for our purposes now:

1) The old Forums weren’t working as well as they needed to. Data was uploaded in static documents and long thread chains that made it harder than necessary to find the most up-to-date topical knowledge.

2) The old Forums weren’t being used as often as they once were, and there was no easy way to synthesize scattered threads to create more impactful topics that focused on the few ways that Forum discussions still produced value.

3) The system relied on a different communications apparatus with the Board and Office. As the organization creates other ways to foster connection, new strategies for knowledge-sharing become more valuable.

The new Forums now have some priority topics for asking questions of the Board and Office, and for the Board and Office to distribute information in turn. But we also have a Press Release section, a Membership Portal, routine chat dates with Board and Staff members, a responsive Board and Staff team on Discord, and a forthcoming Singularity home page right here on SFWA.org, to provide up-to-the-minute notes and news items to the membership. You can also “friend” fellow SFWA members right on SFWA.org, via their User Profile pages, and send on-site direct messages without exposing personal communications data.

In short: The organization is changing to better fulfill its mandate, so how SFWA uses its networking tools will change, too.

There is still a role for the Forums, though!

There are now topics on our new SFWA Forums for member introductions, along with creative goal-setting, project-sharing, and professional boasting. You can access Forum topics through the Top Menu, or on the righthand side in your Membership Portal, or via active conversation topics in your User Profile.

Note: At present, email reply notifications are arriving with extra code in the message. This is a glitch we will fix, but we recommend not turning on email replies for now. Instead, check your notifications in your User Profile to see what’s going on in any Forum topic where you have subscribed or been mentioned.

We will explore the addition of other sections in the Forums this year, while growing SFWA’s other conversation and networking spaces.

Affinity Groups are invite-only conversation spaces that allow participants a safe, discreet opportunity to talk about topics of deeper relevance to some writers than others. You can write to discord@sfwa.org to request access to one of these groups. We ask people to remember these are not spaces for curiosity about the topic from an outsider perspective. Moderator discretion is applied to acceptance decisions, and all conversation spaces in SFWA are subject to the same Moderation Policy.

Active Affinity Groups:

We have most recently grown this list to include a group for First-Year SFWA Members, which is a special exception to the above rule: We want first-year members to have a space to hash out their questions, and we will be including Board, Staff, and select senior volunteers to support those members with helpful answers.

More affinity groups may be added as needed, but we are also looking to rebuild special member directories. We lost our major Member Directory a few years ago for safety reasons (one member spammed everyone’s contact info), but the new structure on SFWA.org should allow us to create subtopic lists that would permit SFWA members to network among themselves on the site without ever risking the same level of data exposure. This is a work in progress, but on the horizon!

While Discord is not everyone’s preferred meeting space, the application has some features, like video and audio channels, that make it easier for many engaged members to discuss related genre interests. We also have a wealth of topical channels, including the perennial favorite #there-are-no-stupid-questions, that help many members in need.

Whenever SFWA attends an industry event or hosts a major one of its own, we also open special forums and channels on Discord to help with rideshares, on-site meetups, itinerary planning, and safety concerns. SFWA announcements on Discord now also include a channel to signal-boost members’ #crowdfunding campaigns, which is a huge multimedia boost over only promoting members’ readings and signing events in previous years.

SFWA’s volunteer committees have their own spaces on Discord, and there are affinity group channels as well, but as we go forward we are striving to keep everyday genre chats on this platform, with the more formal business of volunteering and the deeper resource-building of affinity groups on other spaces (Basecamp and SFWA.org, respectively).

If you have any trouble logging into our Discord channel, please review the related FAQ on your Membership Portal.

We have one more conversation space that is vital to the work of SFWA volunteers: Basecamp.

If you kindly donate your time and energy to support one of our project teams and committees at SFWA, you will be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, then added to our primary project management system: a repository of key project data and discussion for posterity and security.

This is a significant step up from older workflows, which took place in email threads, Discord channels, and other scattered corners of the organization. We ask that all formal committee and project business be centered around Basecamp project cards, so that we can make sure the knowledge is shared and stored appropriately.

This move is part of how SFWA is deepening its commitment to keep our many volunteer-driven projects going forward. But after years of internal diversity in project management strategies, please bear with us as full integration and onboarding of all project teams and processes continues apace in early 2026. Training programs are in the works, as well!

Thank you for helping to make our current and future communities strong!

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