The global rules have been updated!

[Sheep]

Hi everyone! We hope you're all having a great day, both in your personal lives and on the community.

The team would like to bring your attention to our new set of global rules, which have recently received an overhaul. We ask you please take a look at these new rules and then read this post in its entirety as doing so would greatly help us get the point across of why the below changes were made.

What is different?

• The individual Flaming and Baiting rules have been combined into a single Respect other users rule, titled Flaming/Baiting. In the current era of the internet people often use the terms flaming and baiting interchangeably, and both warnings were already worth the same point values and had the same time durations. We felt it was simpler to combine the two into one.
• The Advertising rule was removed. Instead, you may find the mention about not advertising unless relevant in the updated Disruptive Post rule. We felt Advertising was no longer necessary to have as its own rule as its contents fit well within the existing Disruptive Post umbrella, where it's now been placed. Again, the point values as well as durations of both Advertising and Disruptive Post were the same, so it was easy to combine them.
• The rules are now sorted in highest to lowest point order, except for Sockpuppeting which remains at the bottom as it's less relevant to most users and a rule rarely broken.
• The rules have been shortened to be easier to absorb.

Why were these changes made?

Quite frankly, our previous set of rules were very long, had multiple inaccuracies, and were outdated given the state of Forum communities in recent times. Additionally, wording them in a 'don't do this' fashion meant we would find ourselves needing to include more and more examples over time as more of what is disallowed occurs on the site. With that, the rules were getting longer and slowly becoming unmanageable. This existing format wasn't ideal longterm and would only make the rules more tedious to comb through. Instead, we opted for a new style of wording going in the 'do this' rather than 'don't do this' approach as we feel this is clearer for both the current and future staff as well as our users. We're hoping with these shortened rules users will have an easier time absorbing them.

Is this going to affect my current warnings?

If you have an existing warning from the Flaming, Baiting, or Advertising category, which were the only warnings directly impacted by this change, nothing will change for you. Existing warnings users received will stay the same.

Are warning point values and ban durations changing?

Neither warning point values nor ban durations will be changing.

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We just want to emphasize that other than the individual Flaming, Baiting, and Advertising rules being updated, the rules themselves are mostly the same. They're simply worded differently and are now shorter. It may look different given how much we've cut down on them, but they have not actually changed too much.

Have any questions? Feel free to ask here!

 

[kiwichu]

A lot easier to understand imho

 

[Enzap]

The newly written rules have now been given their own thread to replace the old one, which was unstickied. If you have questions about the rules, feel free to ask them in that thread or PM a moderator.

 

[Enzap]

Made a small addition to the rules, I believe it had been accidentally left out of the new set when we last updated it. Make sure you're keeping any images that are larger than 500x500px in spoiler tags. Huge images will count as Disruptive Posting. When in doubt, just spoiler tag it.

 

[Greninjaman]

Made a small addition to the rules, I believe it had been accidentally left out of the new set when we last updated it. Make sure you're keeping any images that are larger than 500x500px in spoiler tags. Huge images will count as Disruptive Posting. When in doubt, just spoiler tag it.

How would it count as disruptive posting?

 

[Okido]

How would it count as disruptive posting?

If an image is really large, it can take up the entire length of someone's screen, sometimes even twice that. Including images that big outside of spoiler tags can make it difficult for other people to scroll past your post, and potentially harder for them to load the page if their internet is on the slower side.