Community Rules & Moderation Team

[ArmageddonMUD]

1. You agree to follow the registration agreement that appears when creating a new GDB account, posted below for reference. Staff make the final decision on the judgment of posts.

2. Posters should be respectful of one another. Flaming, baiting, trolling or abusing other posters in any way is forbidden. This rule extends to criticism and baiting of staff, as well as responding to such behavior with the same behavior in kind.

3. The forum is considered to be work and lunch safe. Do not post pornography, or racist, sexist, or homophobic material. Don't post gruesome images inline. Don't hotlink images, as some websites change the image when they detect hotlinking - instead, host the image on an image sharing service (e.g. imgur, photobucket) or your own web server before posting it here. Don't post, encourage, or ask for illegal activity, including but not limited to piracy, hacking, etc.

4. Posters should post in English, and in a way that would be considered normal writing, to the best of their ability.

5. Do not post sensitive game information, including information about your character, other characters, plots, or magick/psionic mechanics.

6. Don't use this forum to bash other MUDs, private individuals or groups, or other posters.

7. Keep posts on-topic. Derailing a thread or posting off-topic is not allowed. Talking about moderation actions or attempting to revive moderated posts or threads is not allowed.

8. Spam is not allowed. If you see a spam bot, please report it.

9. If you are not a moderator, do not moderate. Do not reply to a poster you believe is breaking the rules. Please use the "report to moderator" function instead.

10. The above rules apply to posts, private messages, signatures, avatars and profile information.

A poster may be warned and/or have their thread locked or posts removed if a rule break is considered minor, accidental, or unusual for that poster. Otherwise, the poster will be banned for 3 days, or longer if the poster has been banned recently or has failed to correct their behavior after numerous bans. A General Discussion Board > Complaint or Appeal request in the request tool can be used to overturn bans lasting longer than 7 days.

All members are assumed to agree to the registration agreement:

You agree, through your use of this forum, that you will not post any material which is false, defamatory, inaccurate, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, adult material, or otherwise in violation of any International or United States Federal law. You also agree not to post any copyrighted material unless you own the copyright or you have written consent from the owner of the copyrighted material. Spam, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are also forbidden on this forum.

Note that it is impossible for the staff or the owners of this forum to confirm the validity of posts. Please remember that we do not actively monitor the posted messages, and as such, are not responsible for the content contained within. We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information presented. The posted messages express the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of this forum, its staff, its subsidiaries, or this forum's owner. Anyone who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to notify an administrator or moderator of this forum immediately. The staff and the owner of this forum reserve the right to remove objectionable content, within a reasonable time frame, if they determine that removal is necessary. This is a manual process, however, please realize that they may not be able to remove or edit particular messages immediately. This policy applies to member profile information as well.

You remain solely responsible for the content of your posted messages. Furthermore, you agree to indemnify and hold harmless the owners of this forum, any related websites to this forum, its staff, and its subsidiaries. The owners of this forum also reserve the right to reveal your identity (or any other related information collected on this service) in the event of a formal complaint or legal action arising from any situation caused by your use of this forum.

You have the ability, as you register, to choose your username. We advise that you keep the name appropriate. With this user account you are about to register, you agree to never give your password out to another person except an administrator, for your protection and for validity reasons. You also agree to NEVER use another person's account for any reason.  We also HIGHLY recommend you use a complex and unique password for your account, to prevent account theft.

After you register and login to this forum, you will be able to fill out a detailed profile. It is your responsibility to present clean and accurate information. Any information the forum owner or staff determines to be inaccurate or vulgar in nature will be removed, with or without prior notice. Appropriate sanctions may be applicable.

Please note that with each post, your IP address is recorded, in the event that you need to be banned from this forum or your ISP contacted. This will only happen in the event of a major violation of this agreement.

Also note that the software places a cookie, a text file containing bits of information (such as your username and password), in your browser's cache. This is ONLY used to keep you logged in/out. The software does not collect or send any other form of information to your computer.

[Shabago]

Guidelines for Staff Dealing with Players

1) Be polite.  Avoid being snarky or rude.

2) Be respectful

3) Try to understand the player's side

4) Do not assume the worst.  Do not assume their motivations are underhanded, or project a tone to their communication.  Instead, read it again while imagining a respectful, polite tone.  Remember, text is lousy at communicating tone and intent.

5) Avoid closing a request prematurely, be sure everything is answered even if it's a simple "looking into that", or "no, we can't do that and here's why".  It's better to give a simple answer than none at all, leaving them with the impression they've been ignored.

6) If you get upset or angry, don't respond immediately.  You can always ask someone else to look at the situation / request with you

7) Escalate if the situation becomes too difficult and you can't / don't want to handle it

8 ) Do not try to railroad Player ideas/plots.  Instead, try to work with them on world fit, while being an advocate for the game's setting, lore, and style.  But be forthcoming on what you think the effort would be, and if it proves to be too much, don't be afraid to say no.

9) If a player is frustrated, instead of taking it as a personal attack, try to get to the cause of their frustration and work towards resolution if possible.

10) When dealing with an issue with a player, especially in terms of any form of repercussions for their actions, handle it in a professional manner.  If you are upset about what they've done, see number 6 above.


Guidelines for Players Dealing with Staff

1) Be polite.  Avoid being snarky or rude.

2) Be respectful

3) Try to understand staff's side

4) Do not assume the worst.  Do not assume their motivations are underhanded, or project a tone to their communication.  Instead, read it again while imagining a respectful, polite tone.  Remember, text is lousy at communicating tone and intent.

5) If a staff member gives a short answer, avoid conflating that with rudeness.  Staff members can be quite busy and have a lot of requests to answer.  Generally a short, simple answer is not intended to be rude.

6) If you get upset or angry, don't respond immediately.

7) Submit a Staff Complaint if you feel you've been treated poorly.  All Staff Complaints are reviewed by Producers.  If it's a Producer who is the subject of the complaint, then the other Producers will review it.

8 ) Do not try to box Staff in.  For example:  A or B are the only options, and are all that I will accept as being ok.   Be willing to be flexible and understand that you can't always get exactly what you want.  Often an idea doesn't happen simply because it could mean a large amount of work.

[Ath]

We've already posted this over on Discord and I realized we need to get the information also here.  These rules can and will be changed as we go along, and the moderation team itself is within a 4 month trial period, with plan to implement permanently.  The goal is to allow for players to self moderate the community with staff empowering them as best we can.  This will allow for staff to be able to focus more on the game.

These rules cover the community of Armageddon mud:

General:
1. Show respect and kindness above all. This includes offensive actions and comments directed at someone's gender, sexual orientation, appearance, race, religion, language, etc. We respect healthy debate, but will not tolerate argumentative discourse. Discuss the idea, not each other.
2. Please keep the conversation on topic and in the proper channels.
3. Please keep your personal information private, and do not request the personal information of others in public channels or DMs. Please do not harass, abuse, or send other unwelcome communications to other members (e.g., romantic advances, explicit content).
4. No NSFW content allowed.
5. Do not bash other MUDs, communities or other users.
6. No advertising.

Game and Community:
1. Please follow the one-year rule: do not talk about characters or events until at least a real life year has passed and every PC involved is dead, to the best of your knowledge.
2. Do not post sensitive game information. This includes plots, magick mechanics, psionic mechanics, items, NPCs, or locations in the game. A good rule of thumb is if the information is present in the help files or is on the General Discussion Board, it is available to be discussed. Believing something to be 'common knowledge' is not sufficient justification for sharing.
3. Do not coordinate in-game actions outside of the game. Please keep all conspiring play inside the game.
4. Do not abuse any code bugs. Please report any bugs in the Request Tool (https://www.armageddon.org/request/new.php).

Moderators and Staff:
1. Community members may be timed out, or banned, temporarily or permanently, for breaking the rules.
2. Bans are usually the result of escalated, repeat, or egregious offenses.
3. Do not discuss the specifics of another person's ban or moderation in the
general channel. Provide any feedback about moderation using the modmail feature.  (NOTE: this is a Discord feature, we're investigating how to report for GDB concerns.)
4. Moderators have the authority and responsibility to make judgment calls on issues that arise.
5. Please do not repost or quote any comments that violate our guidelines. Doing this encourages continued violations. Instead of engaging, please ping @Community Moderator or send a message through @ModMail  (NOTE:  Once again Discord features, please utilize the report feature in the GDB to report posts you feel break the rules, and please reference the rule(s) you feel are broken.)
6. Do not @Staff, @Armageddon Producer, @Armageddon Admin, @Armageddon Storyteller unless it is a game-breaking situation. Please respect their time, they are people too.

The Community Moderation team will be made up of the Lead Community Moderator, Staff Community Liaison (name pending), and Player & Staff Moderator.  All volunteers are vetted/interviewed by Lead Moderator and Staff Liaison, with the initial team being made up of some Helpers along with other players that were suggested within the team.  Staff members can also volunteer to be moderators, and will be interviewed, vetted, and held to the same standard as a player moderator.

Player Moderation Team

• mansa - Lead Community Moderator
• Ath - Staff Liaison
• Gynesis - Temporary Staff Liason
• Nao - Community Moderator
• Rahnevyn - Community Moderator
• zealus - Community Moderator
• MarshallDFX - Community Moderator

We realize that we cannot make everyone happy, but we can try to make the best decisions we can and also keep this community healthy.  Please read over these rules, as they will be enforced, and I especially want to point out the very first rule.  "Show respect and kindness above all."

We'll post more information as we decide on further processes and procedures.

[Ath]

Working with the Community Moderators, and the Producers, we've decided to enable two features on the GDB to allow players some choices and ways to improve their experience using the GDB.

We've enabled Buddy & Ignore Lists, where you can add Buddies to track folks you enjoy talking to, and Ignore those that you may wish to not see.  We have also enabled the ability to ignore a Board, it doesn't completely remove the board, but if you minimize the board, it will prevent you from seeing the "New" icon.  You can see the documentation on these features to learn more about them.

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Profile#Ignore_Boards_Options

https://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Profile#Buddies.2FIgnore_List

Both of these options can be found in your Profile, under Modify Profile options.

One note here, if you choose to ignore the Staff Announcements board, being that this is where we post rules changes and other important information, all will be still held to these rules.  You will still be able to read and see these posts, you will just not get notified of new posts on the board.

[Ath]

Community Moderator Announcement:

After some discussion, the player-run moderator team has decided on a wide-scale unbanning after the events of last week.

First, the set of accounts that can be identified as recent bans and / or related to recent events will be unbanned.

Second, if we missed anyone recently banned, please use the request tool to ask for an unban. Anyone requesting an unban to Discord and the GDB  who is not currently banned from playing the game will be approved. All who are willing to respect the new community rules are welcome to return.

To be clear, submitting a request with just your name is enough. We aren't asking for apologies, just a willingness to start afresh.

To make such a request in the request tool, use these dropdowns:
General Discuss Board -> Complaint or Appeal
Subject:  DISCORD unban
or
General Discuss Board -> Complaint or Appeal
Subject:  GDB unban

Please provide your Discord handle or GDB account name in the request.

Finally, anyone with a banned game account can request at any time to have their game and community accounts unbanned and everyone will be considered.  These requests may take longer to verify.  (Request -> Game Related -> Question with the subject 'Unban Request')

[Ath]

A new addition from the Community Moderator Team:

Anti-Harassment Policy

Shorter version
The Moderator Team of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all ArmageddonMUD's community spaces, including the General Discussion Board (https://gdb.armageddon.org/) and the Discord Server, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Moderator Team.

Some ArmageddonMUD's community spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

Longer version
The Moderator Team of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This code of conduct applies to all ArmageddonMUD's community spaces, including the General Discussion Board (https://gdb.armageddon.org/) and the Discord Server, both online and off. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the Moderator Team.

Some ArmageddonMUD's community spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. 
Note: Interactions are defined by comments, emojis and other media ways to interact with each other.

Harassment includes:

* Offensive interactions related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
* Unwelcome interactions regarding a person's lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
* Deliberate misgendering or use of 'dead' or rejected names.
* Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they're not appropriate.
* Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like "*hug*" or "*backrub*") without consent or after a request to stop.
* Threats of violence.
* Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
* Deliberate intimidation.
* Stalking or following.
* Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
* Sustained disruption of discussion.
* Unwelcome sexual attention.
* Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others
* Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
* Deliberate "outing" of any aspect of a person's identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
* Publication of non-harassing private communication.

The Moderator Team of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server prioritizes marginalized people's safety over privileged people's comfort. The Moderator Team reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

* 'Reverse' -isms, including 'reverse racism,' 'reverse sexism,' and 'cisphobia'
* Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as "leave me alone," "go away," or "I'm not discussing this with you."
* Communicating in a 'tone' you don't find congenial
* Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting
If you are being harassed by a member of ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the Moderator Team by using the 'Report to Moderation / Report to Admin' button, either on the forums or in private messages. If this is happening in the Discord server, send a Direct Message to @modmail and it will create a ticket for us to track.  If you are unable to use either, create a ticket using the Request Tool under 'General Discussion Board - Complaint or Appeal'.
If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

This code of conduct applies to ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server, but if you are being harassed by a member of ArmageddonMUD outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by ArmageddonMUD members, especially the Moderator Team and Staff Members, seriously. The Moderator team reserves the right to exclude people from ArmageddonMUD's Community Forums and Discord Server based on their past behavior, including behavior outside ArmageddonMUD's Community spaces and behavior towards people who are not in ArmageddonMUD.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse.

Consequences
Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the Moderator Team may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all ArmageddonMUD's community spaces and recommending expulsion from the game by staff.

[Ath]

Community Moderator Guidelines

s the ArmageddonMUD moderator team, our vision for our community is to be a place that anyone can feel welcome, safe and comfortable to interact with other members of the community about the game or shared interests. Our mission is to keep the community free of harassment, mocking, shaming, insults, and other negative behaviors that create division and harm fun.

As moderators, we are more than rule enforcers. We are examples to the community we serve. Users will be looking to us to see what sort of behavior is acceptable on the server. That means when we have a rule that says "be kind and respectful", all moderators must always be that, and if a moderator feel they can't be, they should say so, and we should encourage them to step back and take a break. We will participate in the community in an authentic and active way.

We need to be objective. We all have opinions, but the job of a moderator is to be as objective as you can be and try to look at situations with a level head. Don't play favorites, and don't conflate unpopularity or unlikability with actual harm or rule breaking. Everyone deserves to be treated fairly. Being generous and willing to assume positive intent of the community is the best starting place.

This is a tiring practice, especially when done voluntarily/without compensation. Being aware of your own energy here and having ways to share the load with each other is important. It isn't useful to community culture to enforce rules while breaking them yourself because you're tired and overstressed and can't deal with one more asshole without snapping.

Our role is not to censor every disagreement or police every heated discussion. Heavy-handed actions can sometimes be worse than doing nothing. We will not be able to change minds and should not try to argue community members into submission. If a member of the community has created a ticket about another member of the community, we should proactively remind them that they should use any ignore feature available while we are in the process of handling the moderation ticket.  When things appear to be heating up, our role is to encourage community members to bring their best selves to the discussion, to suggest topic changes, and to remind community members of the rules. If these actions are insufficient, we will use our moderation powers as necessary to issue warnings and timeouts to community members. Bans and long-term punishments should always be discussed as a team.

Specific Moderation Guidelines:
When correcting a community member, we need to follow these rules:
* Do not use private messages or direct messages to correct community members.  Use the moderation tools to protect yourself.

Discord:
* If a modmail ticket isn't created, create a modmail ticket.
* Link the comment(s) in the modmail ticket.
* Using modmail, reach out to the community member in question and:
* * Be extremely clear about the wrong doing.
* * Tell the community member to not do it again.
* * Ask them to edit or remove the content, or remove it yourself.
* If you feel that they are not listening to you, or that you need to create a second ticket, you can put them on "timeout" up to 1 day.  (Note:  Discord conversations usually die after an hour, so a timeout for an hour is typically sufficient.)
* You must include a reason for the timeout.
* If you feel that they need to be put on a timeout for longer, or that they need to be removed from the Discord, timeout them first, then put a message in #moderator-chat and ping at community moderator. We will discuss the next steps for the community member there as a team.

General Discussion Board:
* If a moderator ticket isn't created, report the post to moderation to create a ticket.
* Expand on the moderation ticket using comments.
* Using the "WARNING" feature, reach out to the community member in question and:
* * Be extremely clear about the wrong doing.
* * Tell the community member to not do it again.
* * Ask them to edit or remove the content, or remove it yourself.
* If you feel that they are not listening to you, or that you need to create a second ticket, you can put them on "BAN - Partial BAN - Cannot Posts" up to 1 day.
* You must include a reason for the Partial BAN.
* If you feel that they need to be put on a BAN for longer, or that they need to be removed from the GDB, 'Partial BAN - Cannot Post' them first, then put a message in the Moderators subforum. We will discuss the next steps for the community member there as a team.


Removal from the Community:
* If the account in question is specifically made to cause harm to the community, 'time out' the account immediately and put a message into #moderator-chat and ping @Community Moderators.  We will make a decision together what the next steps are.

Auditing the Moderator Team:
It is recommended to do an audit every 6 months on the moderator team, and to do a round-table discussion of what hardships we've encountered, what we should change going forward, and if individuals want to remain as a moderators.  This can be done over a few days, as everyone does not share the same timezone. At this time, all timeouts, bans, and other activities should be reviewed from the past 6 months.

Joining the Moderator Team:
When requesting to joining, the whole moderator team will have input whether this new person can work successfully together with the rest of the team.  A brief interview will then be conducted by an active staff member and the lead moderator.  The staff member will do an account review of the person, and questions that contain "conflict of interest" and "conflict resolution" scenarios will be asked.

Complaints about the Moderator Team:
If you do not agree with an action by a Moderator, please do not use Mod Mail to put in this complaint.  Please utilize the Request tool and use the Player Complaint option.  In the Subject Line please put: Moderator Complaint, and please include any links to the conversations be it on Discord or the GDB.  All evidence of would be appreciated, and feedback as to what the issue is with the Moderator.  All Moderator Complaints are to be reviewed by Moderator Team Lead and Moderator Staff Lead, actions will be derived from there.

[Ath]

GDB Warning System:

At the behest of the Community Mod team, I have enabled the Warning System for the forums.  This will allow the moderation team to send off a warning to a GDB User that is logged for the moderation team to see, and attach on warning points if they so desire.  This will allow a log of warnings for particular users without having to use PMs which are kept private (unless reported, which goes directly to Board Administrators).

* Points system is 1-100 points.
* Mods can assign a total of 25 points per day.
* After 75 points, user is muted.
* Points are removed 5 points per day.

Mainly this is going to be used to send warning messages to a User, less for the point system, but is available as needed.