This is meant as a critique to the plethora of ambiguity of the rules, the method of announcing new ones (or rather lack thereof), and the lack of a CZ-approved complete rules page.

Really Ambiguous rules:

NON-RP RULES

1) The rule states that posting “personal insults, unconstructive criticism/suggestions/answers” is bannable. This is extremely vague, some detailed guidelines should be given on what is considered trolling. Personal insults are obvious, but “unconstructive criticism” is extremely vague. Is unconstructive criticism even bannable? Has anyone ever been banned for this? Or is it just an excuse that the mods can use to ban a player that they don’t really like? I’m not even joking here, a lot of times rules are just there as an excuse to ban someone without disrupting the community.

RP RULES

1) “Shock” is much too general for it to be ban-worthy. There needs to be a sort of detailed description of what is or is not considered shock. See the examples below on how vague the difference between the pictures are.

Examples:

*Shock

*Not Shock

*Not Shock

What would be ideal is a detailed description on what is, and what is not considered shock.

MC Banhammer said it best “Shock is SUBJECTIVE”, however there are 7 mods, and all of them have different definitions. There must be a better way than “If you don’t want to risk it, then don’t risk it.”

2) “No off-topic pictures in stickied threads in the Camwhore forum”. Though most of the problems surrounding this rule was in it’s announcement (or lack thereof), it’s still an unpopular rule, in that in a forum devoted to trolling (camwhoring specifically), pictures which troll the thread, (while involving camwhoring) is bannable. What should be done, is relocating the now “stickied” camwhore threads, to Ayn Rands (or another non-rp forum), a just add (NSFW) to the end of the title. This provides us with RP forums, in which the only stickied thing is the rules, and everything else is fair game for posting (rather than all the complicated stuff now). And even then, what is off-topic anyway? Can someone have a regular conversation in an RP thread?

General Rules

1) “NO TUBMAIL SPAMMING”. MC Banhammer has said “If you’re ****ing someone off, or causing CZ to lost tons of money because they exceeded their email quota from forwarding tubmails as emails to thousands of users, you’re likely to be banned.”, I understand the second one, but at what point is the former spam?

2) Spamming IDC. What qualifies as spamming, and where does it say this? Can we get some detailed guidelines on this?

3) “Voting fraud in Forumbuildr, Itembuildr, etc.” Does this include asking people to vote for your submission? Is making a thread in a rp forum saying “PLEASE VOTE MY SUBMISSION” a count of fraud? People have been banned for less than this, so please, some guidelines would be much appreciated.

4) “Making people perform actions against their will” specifically including sending someone a logout link. This is just strange, in an RP forum, someone should be able to post a logout link without being banned for it.

5) As zagerblag pointed out, I’m pretty sure autospam is bannable, but could a mod verify this please?

In addition to all of this, there is no CZ-approved page containing all the rules. You have the NON-RP rules, in a thread, in a Non-RP forum, the RP rules (which differs between forums now), in a thread in said forum, and all the general rules on a wiki page. This is unorganized and inefficient. At the bottom of the page, right next to “Code of Ethics”, should be a “Rules”, which links to a new wiki page containing all the rules and such.

I created such an example on this page, however there are 2 problems with it.

1) A mod/administrator needs to take a look at this, make sure everything is correct in the rules and such. A lot of this was done, by myself searching through forums for these rules, and a lot of stuff I put in here, is not listed on any official rules page, and instead contributed to common sense.

2) Desperately in need of a table of contents, I’ve researched the MediaWiki formatting, and on everything else, you’d just put a [code]{TOC}[/code} tag, and it’d make one for you. If someone more familiar with the MediaWiki syntax could please put one in, it would be a lot more efficient.