Yahoo Group "faceblind"

Our Welcome Message

Welcome to our public face blindness (prosopagnosia) discussion forum.

Face blind people, family members, friends, researchers, counselors, faculty, and students are all welcome here!

Appropriate topics here are questions about face blindness, living with face blindness, research you're doing, subjects you might be seeking, or news about face blindness research, news coverage, etc.   Some face blind people who receive posts here may respond to you directly, rather than posting here.

To assure that those of you who are subscribers receive only on-topic mail, submissions are moderated but should propagate within a few hours.

When you first post, we ask that you begin with a sentence or two introducing yourself.   Things to mention might be your name, your location or university, and your involvement with face blindness (such as you have it, you're a researcher, etc.)

How Do I View Messages?

There are two ways to view messages:

How Do I Post a Message?

First you must subscribe to the group (see immediately above). Then there are two ways to post messages:

Remember, please briefly introduce yourself in the first message you post, as we ask for in our welcome message, above.

How Fast Do Messages Show Up?

We "moderate" messages. This means one of our committee must approve it first. This is simply to keep spam or irrelevant posts out of our subscribers' mailboxes. This will delay your message some, but not necessarily that much, because we have several people checking. Sometimes it takes hours for messages to show up on a Yahoo system anyway. We have done tests without moderation turned on to verify this.

If you are a regular to the point we know who you are, moderation will be turned off for your posts. This may speed up the appearance of them somewhat, but they still will probably not appear immediately. Please do not contact us about posts not appearing unless more than 24 hours have passed.

How Do I Leave the Group?

There are two ways to leave the group:

Are There Any Other Ground Rules?

We use our names rather than handles. This is for two reasons. First, our worlds are full of anonymous, unknown people, and we do not wish to replicate that environment here. Second, this is a site involved in academic exploration of a medical condition, and the ambiance here is more one of a college classroom, where one would use one's name, rather than that of a CB channel.

If you can give additional information about yourself, such as your city or university, this also helps us, however we do not wish to discourage anyone from posting if they have fear of disclosing who they are. Use of a first name is okay then; please just balance your needs with ours. We want here to at least let you know about our needs.

To maximize the academic and support value of this resource, we ask that posts maintain the ambiance of an inquisitive college laboratory, not that of a social party. Discussion of events or feelings that illustrate our investigations here are welcome. Discussions of events or feelings not relevant should, as in the case of at any workplace, be kept to a minimum.

Other than the above, what we expect is what you would expect - that posts be polite and on-topic.

So all know the rules, they are all stated on this page and nowhere else. Complaints should be sent to faceblind-owner@yahoogroups.com rather than posted to the group. Complaints should include the message number along with what provision on this page the complainant feels was transgressed.

Be aware that group moderators have other lives, and not the time to deal with high-maintenance people. We therefore expect the spirit as well as the letter of these simple rules be adhered to, and continual testing of our limits will not be tolerated.

Are There Any Special Terms Used Here?

Face blind people, like most groups, have terminology we use specific to our field. We have compiled a list of these words and their definitions here.

Is It Okay to Ask Group Members to Take On-Line Tests?

Yes, however individual participant confidentiality must be maintained unless clearly stated otherwise. We also strongly suggest that you follow these technical guidelines:

  1. At the outset, tell people how many questions there will be, and how long the test should take. Nothing is more irritating than a questionnaire that goes on and on with no apparent end in sight.
  2. If the test is only for certain people, make that clear. Is it only for face blind people, or are the family members, researchers, students, and others who frequent this group also invited to take it?
  3. Keep the URL to 70 characters, including the http and www. Yahoo chops URLs off at that length and puts the rest on another line. Some browsers and mail programs don't pick up on the split and cause users to get errors rather than your test when they click. You can name every web page in the universe with far less than 70 characters. There is no need to ever approach that number in length.
  4. If you are going to be e-mailing people back, tell them on the same page where you ask for THEIR e-mail address what the e-mail address YOU will be e-mailing them back from is. That way, they can set their spam filters to accept mail from you before they undertake the test.

Are There Sites with More Information?

Yes! Here is a list of web pages of face blind people who have written about their face blindness.

This Yahoo Group is Public. Is There a Private Mail List?

Yes, there are two:

There is also a small group being conducted in the "Live Journal" system here. Posts are publicly viewable but one must pay to join their system in order to post.

[ Go to Yahoo Group "faceblind" ]