Misc: Granaboard Rules & Regulations discussion [!OT]

**mrwiseman** · October 13th, 2003, 01:10 PM

*BUMP*

There are some people who think our current rules & regulations are too harsh or restrictive. Please, express your thoughts here, I will take every suggestion into consideration - otherwise I wouldn't be asking for them.

**mrwiseman** · November 15th, 2003, 07:40 PM

I'm writing the new Rules & Regulations for the new site, which will be the largest update I ever made to the rules.

The main change will be in the structure of the rules, but I'll be adding/changing the following things as well:

- Member classes will be official. Refer to the jobs thread for more information.

- Adult contents allowed everywhere. Even theories. Of course, they will be properly marked.

- Impersonation will be punished with a ban.

- Moderators may now edit posts to split lines that are too long.

- Moderators may now edit posts to mark spoilers, though don't count on this. 99% of unmarked spoilers will be moderated, and if you leave spoilers unmarked because a moderator will mark them for you later, you will be warned, or banned.

- Reposting a moderated message as is, is also specified as a severe violation, just like editing a moderator edited message.

- More clarification on spoiler marking, tag abuse, disencouraged tags, etc.

- Multiple posts/threads with no useful contents of any kind now considered spam and subject to warning or ban.

- You may send fanart for fanfics as long as they are 4 KB or larger.

- JPEG2000 format for pics now allowed (not required)

- Ruling for the chat (basically: channel ops are gods; they may kick users who misbehave, act annoyingly, or violate the general ΩR&R, or even temporarily ban them; and users banned from the board are banned for everything else too, including the chat)

- Message Board "Code of Honor": a set of non-mandatory, yet recommended rules to follow: usage of IRT/WRT instead of QUOTE, offtopic behavior and [!OT], l33t and AOL speak only when fun, mark adult contents in the board.

What do you think? If you want to ask for something, want something clarified, changed, etc., now is the time to request it.

**mrwiseman** · July 28th, 2004, 04:22 PM

Forget all above this.
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Phew... Finished the Proto Omega Rules and Regulations (our 15th revision of the rules already). The rules have been completely rewritten and are now much simpler, clearer, and thought, as a larger site demands. They are also shorter (net text 15144 bytes, vs. 19721) and fewer (49 vs 79). You can guess how better are they now (or how badly written were the previous ones after having suffered so many revision-after-revisions...). I'll publish the new rules when Proto Omega is launched. I'll publish a draft if anybody wants to read them beforehand.

The main changes are:

- Better disclaimer to cover my ass in case some moron lawyer feels like screwing us (no reason to, though, as we're 100% legal).

- Moral ratings now include shoujo-ai and shounen-ai.

- Member classes (retired, newcomer, member, veteran, staff, and founder) officially recognized.

- "After months of regular activity without severe violations, warnings might be withdrawn, but this is left to the moderators' judgement."

- People can now IM me to report rules violations or whatever in real time.

- Impresonation officially forbidden.

- Helping to get warez is also illegal.

- "The support and/or encouragement of any kind of activities detrimental to life like suicide, anorexia, self-abuse, self-flagellation, and drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, is not allowed."

- "The support or apology of illegitimate independentist groups from any country, or the repeated illegitimate claim for independence of any region from any country, will be judged on a case-by-case basis and may be declared illegal."

- "No blatant advertisement is allowed, commercial or not".

- "Members may submit their profile to the Member Profiles section. Details on this will be added when the section is open."

- "Details on the Post Repository will be added when the section is open."

- Moderators may "fix a message which broke rule 4.3 or 4.4, even though this is not guaranteed and case A [regular moderation] will be used most times".

- "Unproper [spoiler] marking is subject to moderation. In case of doubt, mark spoilers. Repeated violations of this rule will lead to a ban, so do not push your luck expecting moderators to fix spoilers. Unmarked spoilers is one of the fastest ways users can be banned from Proto Omega."

- "No spam is allowed. Common ways to spam the board are posting several times in a row to the same thread, posting the same message over and over, posting the same message to several threads, posting to increase your post count, posting countdowns, and chain letters."

- "Signatures must be no longer than 250 net bytes and have no more than one line break (Enter). Users with signatures larger than this may be asked to change them. The usage of the SIZE tag to make signatures look smaller is welcome. (Changing the size does not make them smaller, but look smaller.)"

- Added the Granaboard Code of Honor, a set of recommendations (not rules) optional to follow to increase the quality of the board. The current Code of Honor is:

5.1. Keep threads whose title contains [!OT] on topic.

5.2. The QUOTE tag makes pages longer and slower loading. Instead of quoting, use IRT {person} (In Reply To). If you want to specify a subject instead of a person (or a subject after IRT {person}), use WRT {subject} (With Regards To). If you are replying to a long post, you may feel copying the bits of text you are replying necessary. In that case, copying and pasting that text in italics (between the [ i ] and [ /i ] tags) is preferred over quoting. Remember if you copy spoilers you have to copy the mark to not break the rule 4.4.

5.3. If you have something to add to your last post, edit it instead of posting again, unless you absolutely want to bump it or others to notice it has changed. In that case, if you are feeling really honorable, copy your previous post to your new post, and delete your previous post after posting the new one, to minimize thread size and avoid double posting.

5.4. If you notice you have accidentally posted the same message twice, or you notice you have broken a rule, do moderators a favor and fix it yourself. This not only helps Proto Omega, but it does not count as a rule violation if a moderator does not see it, and in the case of violations, you can edit your messages to remove the conflict without deleting the rest of them (something moderators cannot do). You do not need to do this, but it gives a bad impression that you know something is going to get moderated and you still keep it, and impressions are useful for judgement.

5.5. Use l33t and other intentional typos and errors only if phun.

5.6. Be nice to all.

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Comments|Suggestions=Welcome

(I took 6 hours of my time to do this, so you may very well take 6 minutes of yours to read this and give feedback ^_^ .)

**Dreamer7000** · July 28th, 2004, 07:05 PM

Okay, they're hard, but rightful. It will be hard for me, not to go off-topic, I always loved wonderin' around, but I'll try my best.
Askin' for warez isn't gonna be hard... I learned that for sure now.
The only thing I don't like is the signitures size. Like in mine now (see below) there are two enters, the RAWK and the Note... Oh, and exactly how big is 250 bytes?

And my main question is: What's "l33t" ?
I've seen it lotza timez now, but donno what it could be.
Everything else is fine with me, as I said b4, good work. ^^

**mrwiseman** · August 1st, 2004, 07:05 PM

IRT Dreamer: Thanks for the one and only piece of feedback.

It will be hard for me, not to go off-topic

Remember it's only for [!OT] threads, and it's not absolutely mandatory, but a Code of Honor rule. I won't be modding anything for going offtopic unless it's a special thread (sticky) and I explicitly said so; it's just it'll be nicer for everyone if we keep [!OT] threads on topic.

The only thing I don't like is the signitures size.

Yes, I know most like to set up long signatures. The problem is they take more space than actual posts, which makes thread pages longer than they should and it's not the best for aesthetics. I'll think over it. It would have helped to have feedback from other users on this, but it seems the rules are not really important, so I focused on making a consistent, shorter, and safer rules.

Oh, and exactly how big is 250 bytes?

(I should have said characters. I'll take note of this.)

A character is any letter, number, space, sign, etc. If you don't want to count them, copy and paste your signature into Notepad, and save it as a new file, then look at the file size.

And my main question is: What's "l33t" ?
I've seen it lotza timez now, but donno what it could be.

L33t is writing like this: "7h1s 1z l33t" (This is leet). Comes from the word "elite". Check the cultural dictionary for more info (I think it's there).

good work

Thanks!

**Xellos** · August 1st, 2004, 07:47 PM

No problems outside of sigs, which is too short... 2-3 always worked out well for us, didn't it?

**Dreamer7000** · August 2nd, 2004, 06:59 AM

Thankz, I'll check out my signature... =)

**mrwiseman** · August 2nd, 2004, 01:48 PM

The problem with counting visual lines is that users with lower resolutions see more of them if they wrap. That's why I decided to count line breaks (Enters). This allows for a minimum 2 lines, or more if they wrap. I think 2 lines is acceptable; consider 1/3 of posts aren't larger than that ? and we don't want signatures to take more visual space than posts; besides, how many times do you read others' sigs? Once, twice as much, and you'll be skipping it every time you see it afterwards. As for the 250 characters limit, it's for length (so you can't make a huge line that wraps into several visual lines, nor write a book in your sig which we don't want either).

I've taken a sample of 16 users from recent treads in the board and analyzed their sigs:

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size=2 face="Verdana,sans-serif">code:</font><table border="0" width="90%" bgcolor="#333333" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0"><tr><td width="100%"><table border="0" width="100%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" bgcolor="#FF9900"><tr><td width="100%" bgcolor="#C0C0C0"><pre>
Member Chars Enters
???????????????????????????????
Beat-chan 14 OK 0 OK
Cataferal 33 OK 0 OK
Cavalier 111 OK 0 OK
CBA 95 OK 1 OK
Daigotsu 167 OK 0 OK
Dragonrider 78 OK 0 OK
Dreamer 218 OK 2 Must fix
Melfice 159 OK 2 Must fix
Nevan 125 OK 0 OK
OCB 0 OK 0 OK
Phaq 114 OK 2 Must fix
Sizer-chan 37 OK 0 OK
Smelly Cat 0 OK 0 OK
Wiseman 137 OK 0 OK
Xellos 247 OK 2 Must fix
Zeratul 157 OK 0 OK
</pre></td></tr></table></td></tr></table></BLOCKQUOTE>

As you can see, the majority of sigs are compilant; most of them don't even exploit half of the allowed space and enters. And Xellos' sig has an extra line break because it was copied from a text file.

If you'll be happier and others won't complain, we could allow 2 Enters per sig. Since I haven't gotten any more feedback, I'll change it to 2 enters a sig (never more than 2 though), unless other members come here and say they prefer 1.