runouw.com

Oh you, you excellent community. Welcome to the long overdue forum cleanup - or at least the start of it.

This is the start of a series of forum edits that we'll be doing to make the forum a better place. We have Runouw's forum redesign happening at some point in the future.

Changes

• Rules
• Groups

First off, we have the rules. If you look at them now you can see that they aren't really that clear, they're quite long, and they don't answer every question you may have. So, after much debate and general discussion we have come up with a more concise, and much clearer set of rules.


The Rules

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The Forum

• You should post in a way that is respectful to other users. (No flaming.)
• Illicit, explicit material (ie “Not safe for work”) material is forbidden. Posters to be found with this material will be permanently banned.
• GIF images that flash or are otherwise seizure-inducing are not allowed.
• We ask that you type in English as this is an English speaking community.
• Posts should be written in a way that is understandable, and how you would expect others to write. This means no excessive use of smilies, capital letters, punctuation colors etc.
• We remind you that this forum is for a general audience, so swearing should be kept to a reasonable level, and not be in any images at all.
• If you see a post or topic that does not comply with the rules (in the wrong forum, spam etc), do not reply. Use the report button.

Spam

• Spam is not tolerated at all on this forum. This means do not repeatedly post similar items (posts, topics), double post, advertise, etc.
• Make posts relevant to the topic. Exceptions are in the Fortress of Awesome.
• If you see a spambot post in the forum, don't reply or thumb up the post, just report it. Therefore the moderators can ban it quickly and cleanly. Ignoring this rule can result in a 1 day ban depending on how much it is done; however a warning is usually more common.

Punishment

• On Runouw we uphold a “3 strikes and you’re out” policy. Your first two offences will result in warnings, while the third will be a ban with the length varying depending on the situation. Subsequent warnings will be permanent.
• Staff members have the right to determine if you have broken any of the rules. Do not argue with the team for a given warning. Doing so will result in another warning. If you feel that you were given a warning unnecessarily, please contact another moderator or User Representative and the case will be reviewed.
• Any attempt to avoid the ban (by reregistering or manipulating another user) will result in a permanent and an IP ban.
• If you want to appeal your ban, mail the staff at support@runouw.com. If you believe our reason for banning you was not good enough, please tell us why in your message.
• If your ban is longer than 2 weeks, you may appeal for an earlier ban end after this timeframe, by sending us a mail at the same address. The staff team will then vote on your return. Even permanent bans can be appealed this way, though the timeframe before you we will start a vote is longer (about half a year).
• Do not try to moderate other users. It is the sole responsibility of the staff to give warnings and carry out punishments.

Account/Avatar/Signature

• Reregistering, that means one person having two accounts, is strictly forbidden.
• If another account uses your network to sign up or login, you must notify staff beforehand.
• Signatures should not largely exceed 250px in height -with a range of about 40px or so. We don't want there to be a strict limit, but neither should it go too far. Only one animated GIF is allowed in your signature. We're trying to keep load times down and keep the focus on the post.
• Youtube videos are strictly prohibited in your signature.
• If you find you want to add more to your signature, use [ spoiler ][/ spoiler ] tags.

The Chat - for more information click here .

• Please follow the rules of the IRC server.
• Name changing is forbidden under all circumstances. If you are off doing something else then use /away or simply log off. (This only applies if you have joined the #runouw channel.)

We will also be encouraging new users to talk to URs, maybe through some buddy system, where they can ask questions and get feedback.


User Groups

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If you look at the bottom of the Index page, you can see we currently have 8 groups. 8 groups is too many. We have groups with inactive members, and some which are relatively redundant.

So we're removing these groups:

• Story Mods
• Wiki Mods
• Honorary Members

Story Mods
The original idea behind Story Mods was that they would moderate both the Stories forum and the Story Portal. Interest in stories was a fad and quickly died. We now get very few stories, and there really isn't any need for a separate group to be dealing with this stuff.

Wiki Mods
This group has sort of been neglected. We have Wiki Mods but it seems to be only Zunar who does anything, and that's not even regularly. You can still change the Wiki exactly the same, but the group will be gone.

Who knows? Maybe we'll bring it back when the WIki needs a lot of attention.

Honorary Members
Now this is the big one. Honorary Members are our retired staff - or just about anyone who has ever had a position on the site but has since become a 'regular' user. We now have 13 Honorary Members, and so our forum frequently has a load of coloured names flying around the site without any real need to be there.

The colour gives them importance: something they shouldn't have. They are no longer staff so the distinction shouldn't be there. They can be honoured, but we don't have to place them on a pedestal. While this isn't finalised, I would like to give former staff members their own special medal, thanking them for their work at the site however long or brief.

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Level Moderators
Hey? What are these doing here?
There will be some staff change ups happening in the near future.

User Reps
If you read that last part in the rules (probably not), then you'll know that User Reps will now play a larger role: they will be a helper for new users. Their job is to basically teach newer users, and answer their questions through PM.

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These changes won't go into effect immediately as we're looking for some community feedback. Does all this seem reasonable? Are there any changes you would make?

All comments are welcome.

Four questions -

1) Why do we have an image/text-line limit now? It never raised itself as an issue outside of F23, and even then I'm only guessing it was added for being brought up in F23.
2) I'm fairly sure that swearing enforcement was quite relaxed and never really raised itself as an issue, although I am aware it shouldn't be tolerated by a large margin. Can we have a clarification on exactly how the rule affects our current level of swearing?
3) Can we have a clarification on what makes an NSFW image? Obviously only Kevin is going to post ♥♥♥♥♥, but I'd like to know what the bounds are otherwise.
4) Double-posting doesn't seem to do much harm in moderation, so how would the new rule affect how we currently double-post?

I'm going to miss my yellow name and being able to curse. D:

but it's about time we got around to this, so thanks, guys.

Emelia Kaylee wrote:Four questions -

1) Why do we have an image/text-line limit now? It never raised itself as an issue outside of F23, and even then I'm only guessing it was added for being brought up in F23.
2) I'm fairly sure that swearing enforcement was quite relaxed and never really raised itself as an issue, although I am aware it shouldn't be tolerated by a large margin. Can we have a clarification on exactly how the rule affects our current level of swearing?
3) Can we have a clarification on what makes an NSFW image? Obviously only Kevin is going to post ♥♥♥♥♥, but I'd like to know what the bounds are otherwise.
4) Double-posting doesn't seem to do much harm in moderation, so how would the new rule affect how we currently double-post?

1. I'm pretty sure there was always one but this is just being made much clearer. If not, then I suppose it was brought up because we felt that multiple images weren't really needed in sigs. After all, they are just a sign off after every post and not a full made topic about someone in a tiny amount of space.

2. Since these are updates of the rules we just wanted to make things clearer as a whole. Swearing was always quite relaxed, yes, but even in the past if it was done in a large amount it wouldn't have been tolerated. (well, maybe except for FoA) This is just really making that rule official. But I'm quite certain that to some level it always existed.

3. I suppose it depends at what point the image becomes too explicit or not, so pr0n wouldn't be tolerated at all. But mostly anything that could make a user feel uncomfortable looking at a picture. IMO I think you're okay until the picture shows body parts in a kinda obvious way. Same with cartoons or whatever too.

4. I personally think double posting is acceptable until you post over and over and over. If there is a topic that you made a post on and no-one else responded to it, and then decided to bring it back up but didn't want to delete your previous post but wanted it to show up on the board's newest posts, then I think that's okay. I do that a lot, for good reasons though.

Hope that helps in someway.. :3

Since when have we ever treated our signatures like a sign-off? It's a bit miserable capping ourselves to just that :<

I suppose it's not how we treated them but that's their purpose really. :p A bit of brief information and a single image is fine for a signature, after all, they're not supposed to be that big anyways.

1) It's been a pretty universal thought that there are some signatures that are just too unnecessarily large. Most sites are at least twice as small, with much less information. You can bypass the limit to a point if you decide to use spoilers, so you're not as limited as I think you think. The thought came up a few times, mostly in RtAUS of course, but was just looked over each time. Of course, I will need to edit my signature as well.

2) Swearing as it is should be fine. When you use a curse word or otherwise inappropriate term in every sentence, that is usually where I would draw the line.

3) Other than in FOA(and even then, images should at least be subtle), images shouldn't be excessively gory, have any swears captioned (we can't censor images), and of course, shouldn't show any 'parts'.

4)I actually think we forgot to add in the 1 week exception. Nothing should go wrong with the way we post now. We made these rules mainly to clear up confusion about the original rules, and add issues that have come up in the past 3-4 years, as MP3 said.

Being as committed as I am ( ) I don't mind updating the smaller topics too, like the stickied topics, in the other forums too, like I briefly mentioned in F23 methinks.

Also reminds me that it would be great if Suyo or Runouw could update the About page and add me and Buff considering we are now global mods.

...about time we're getting a cleanup.

But... I don't support being unable to swear. It's never caused a problem before, and we do have a built-in censor for those who don't like it.

We didn't mean stop it altogether, just limit it. So, course you can swear when necessary, but just don't swear in like every sentence in an 8 paragraph long post. We're just clearing up a rule that sorted of existed silently IMO. But I don't think anyone swears enough to break that rule really.