/rules/ - Ponyville Rules

Hello, my little ponies! Your staff and I have been discussing the state of our humble home together for the past few months, and I think we have something today for you that I am hoping you will like.

We founded Ponyville on a set of ideals: our Constitution. Our site was founded with the dream that the internet needn't be a place of serious business. We defined our home, set ourselves apart, by valuing kindness, tolerance, civility, respect, and understanding: concepts that are seldom held in high regard on imageboard-style websites.

It is the opinion of the staff that the goals of the site have shifted away from our founding Constitution, to the detriment of our most vulnerable users, and as such, we are starting the Return to Love Initiative as a way of recapturing the spirit of kindness and love that our site was founded on.

[1] Enforcement of the Rules
Our policy in the past has always been to err on the side of lenience. In so doing, however, we moved the goalposts too far, and have gone past lenience and into negligence. Effective immediately, a new enforcement policy will be in place: one that is simple and easy to understand.

Moderators will be given much more autonomy to act on the rules. The rules themselves will be vastly simplified, as you shall soon see. The first rules offense a user makes will generally be considered with a warning in thread, publicly visible. The second rules offense a user makes will generally be considered a short ban. And the third rules offense and after will invite any ban, up to and including a permaban, that a staff member feels is fit.

Please note that this is a guideline, and that a moderator will have leeway to even permaban on first offense, depending on the situation, from here on out. Moderators will be much more proactive in enforcing the rules, and though we shall still err in favor of leniency, we shall be taking more firm action towards rule breaking behavior.

[2] The New Rules

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BEHAVIORAL RULES
[Third Degree]
Rule 1. Please keep posts generally respectful towards others;
Rule 2. Do not post in a thread for the purpose of being rude or inciting trouble;
Rule 3. Do not derail a thread intentionally. Please generally be respectful to the current topic and atmosphere of the thread. If an OP asks you to stop derailing, please do so;
Rule 4. Please do not engage in advertising or promotion of any kind without first contacting site administration. Pony fanart, stories, music are generally acceptable.

[Second Degree]
Rule 5. Please do not act with extreme hostility towards any user, this includes all manner of insults, threats, and name-calling;
Rule 6. Do not bait or goad another user into engaging in rule-breaking content. In the event of such an occurrence, the baiting user shall be found in violation of this rule. The baited user shall only be in violation of this rule if the user, after receiving warnings from staff not to engage, chooses to ignore such warnings and engage with the bait instead of reporting or informing the staff. Purposefully allowing oneself to be baited, after being given fair warning by staff, shall constitute a violation of this rule;
Rule 7. Do not post content of an aggressively, ironically, or trollishly poor quality, designed to derail discussions, or otherwise make the site unusable or intolerable to our regular community;
Rule 8. Do not post threads or posts that are deliberate provocations to certain users, or deliberate provocations concerning the topics of Race, Religion, Nationality, Political Opinion, or Membership of a Particular Social Group;  

[First Degree]
Rule 9. Malicious spamming or raiding, on and off site, are disallowed. Do not encourage spamming or raiding any other community;
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>>890205
Concerning Christmas Truce initiative.

As per discussion on /pony/, and subsequent discussion on /canterlot/, the following clarification is being issued, pertaining to Rules 1 and 8.

Ponyville adopts the Cambridge English Dictionary definition of the word "slur", defined as follows:

SLUR noun: words intended to insult someone or injure someone's reputation.

He apologized for shouting an ethnic slur at a fan.

Slurs are prohibited on Ponyville, as per Rules 1 and 8.

Rule 1 pertains to use of slurs that is merely disrespectful (i.e., invocation of a slur outside of its generally understood offensive context for a non-scholarly purpose [newfag, oldfag] or variations on slurs used for comedic effect [nibba]).

Rule 8 pertains to use of slurs for the purpose of insulting or provoking another user.

Please note, the degree system applies as is typical to each of these rule violations.

Effective immediately, our policy towards fetishistic content, as per the new rule, shall treat fetish content the same as regular sexual content: don't get too explicit about it, don't derail threads with it, and know your audience.

This includes lizards on leashes and diapers and what not.

However, we expect all posts to treat this decision with respect: this doesn't mean you can spam this stuff all over, and we seriously hope you won't do that just to test boundaries.

These boundaries aren't for the staff's sake: they're for your fellow users.

In addition, we'll be reorganizing our rule on advertising in the near future, to be more allowing for our userbase to share their creations without ambiguity.

Lastly, we expect that when the nsfw filter is put in, that users who post any kind of sexy stuff, be it fetish or otherwise, would kindly use the filter option: this way, we can proceed with our rolling out of the rules, hopefully, without too much further contention.

does this sound agreeable?

please let me know. And please, please, please, respect your thread op's, respect your audience, and treat this as a privilege, for the time being.