if its going to cause a domino effect
YES! If you feel that a topic you are about to post can potentially cause a "domino effect" then please post it in your PDA.
ut my question is, if you implement the above ideas, what is the guideline for this? Would this topic cause a domino effect, and 10 other people start threads that their grandma and aunt all died that week? I'm not being snarky, im being dumb, i really hope you can give examples, because from what you said above, it isnt clear to me where that should go.
Sadly it will cause more similar posts. There is no need to imagine hypothetical situations. We've already seen this exact thing happening a year ago or so.
That time, it was in conjunction with prayer requests. But life is life, and posts like that would flood the section if we don't limit them.
And I don't feel comfortable deleting
only some of the posts just to keep the total number under control. So the only fair solution to me seems to be not to allow any of them in GCC at all.
The only exception I'm still considering is when a member gets ill (or something else happens), and she can't post herself. In this case, some other member who has other means of communication and learns about what happened might choose to post a notice about it to let others know.
PDA won't work for that. So that leaves either GCC or nothing at all.
In this particular case, I think posting in GCC is a reasonable exception.