[2020] PINNED: RimWorld Community Rules

As we are now taking a more active approach to moderation here on the Steam Discussion board, here are the RimWorld Community Rules.

Originally posted by Tynan: Goals: In no particular order:

• We want the RimWorld community to be enjoyable, informative, and inviting to as many people as possible, while also supporting respectful disagreement, unpopular views, and edgy content that is posted in good faith.
  
• We want each participant to have the same rights and responsibilities, and to have rules enforced the same way, regardless of identity, connections, or viewpoint.
  
• We want all participants to be able to predict what is allowed and what isn't instead of being subject to penalties based on standards that seem arbitrary, whimsical, or personal.

User responsibility: Participants come from diverse background and have diverse interests and feelings, so many things will create a negative emotional reaction in somebody. We don't want to enforce rules against anything anyone finds disagreeable, because we'd have to ban huge swaths of discussions and much of our own games. So each person is expected to have and use coping skills when faced with challenging content.

Discussion welcome: Discussion on these rules, how they're enforced, enforcement actions and the philosophy behind the rules is welcome.

Penalties: Violations can lead to a warning, temporary ban, or perma-ban, depending on the specifics of the situation. Generally, a warning should be issued before greater penalties are enacted.



Rules:

1. No personal attacks or criticism of individuals: Even oblique or implied personal attacks or criticism are disallowed. Limitation: Feel free to criticize a game, mod, idea, philosophy, viewpoint, religion, plan, social practice, company, or non-human entity. You can also criticize public figures. Discussion: We all have flaws; pointing them out may very occasionally be useful, but is so often destructive and so outside the purpose of this forum that it's better to simply disallow criticism of individuals in any form.

2. Sustained hostile, resentful, derisive, or angry tone: This rule isn't so much about the content of what you say, but how you say it - you must express yourself in a way that doesn't feel persistently hostile, resentful, derisive, or angry. For example, there is a difference between criticizing a mod constructively, and criticizing it derisively; doing so derisively is against the rules. Discussion: This doesn't mean everyone has to be happy or have good opinions of everything and everyone all the time - it means that phrasing complaints in constructive ways and without a negative emotional tone leads to much better results all around. We don't want a community where anger, resentment, derision, and hostility are behavioral norms. These ways of communicating may be acceptable in some other communities, but are not acceptable here.

3. Do not respond to rule violations: If you see behavior that seems out of line to you, report the topic/post using the report button. Don't make a fuss about it in the topic itself. Do not message or respond to people who you think are breaking rules. Simply report them, and move on.

4. Stay on topic: Please try to stay on topic. Ask yourself: Am I answering the author of the topic? Does this relate to the title of the topic? If you want to discuss something else, make a thread! Limitation: Some topics can wander as the discussion develops. This rule is fairly topic-specific; some topics really need to stay on topic to be useful, while others are much more fluid.

5. No self-promotion: No promotion of your own channel/mod/product. Limitation: You can mention your product or channel in context of other discussions, as long as it's a non-forced mention.

6. No penalty evasion: If your account is penalized, do not create another to get around the penalty. Doing so will result in more severe penalties.

7. No doxxing: Posting personal information about anyone is prohibited.

8. No impersonation: No impersonating other people or forum users.

9. No piracy: No posting of game pirate links or material. No discussions of game piracy.

10. No porn: No posting or linking of not safe for work (NSFW), pornographic, or X-rated material. Limitation: This doesn't ban all possibly racy photos (though they will be off-topic in most forums), only specifically pornographic ones.

11. No sexualization of minors: No sexualization of minors in any medium, or linking thereto.

12. Mods enforce these rules only: Moderators enforce these written rules only. Moderators should try to cite which rule is being enforced when enforcing any rule. If a new rule seems needed, a mod should start an internal discussion about it. If a mod is enforcing rules inconsistently with what's written here, that's a violation that can be reported directly to Tynan.

Community-wide rules for modders:

13. No copying someone else's content or code in to your mod without permission: You're not allowed to copy and paste code or content from any other mod, or from an expansion, into your mod without permission from the original author.

13b. No linking code for users who don't own the product it belongs to: For technical Reasons, all our code is packaged up and shipped together, but it's not allowed to make a mod that accesses expansion-specific code unless that mod requires the expansion.

13c. No close copying of expansion content: Don't make mods with close design/artistic/text similarities to an expansion but which don't require the expansion. This rule applies even if you didn't copy/paste anything directly and didn't link our code.

Steam specific rules, but not necessarily other parts of the RimWorld community.

15. No unnecessary self-replying: Do not spam repeated posts in reply to yourself. Use the modify button unless it has been more than 24/48 hours since your last post. If a self-reply will help people with troubleshooting/bug fixing or other critical player information, that is considered 'necessary'.

16. No content-free bumping: No posting of content-free posts in topics just to bump them to the top of the page.

17b. No Necroposting: If a post has lain to rest a half year or longer, do not comment on it unless you are positive you are adding to the discussion and the post will be wanted by the OP. If a necropost has been marked solved, never post on it. If a necropost refers to previous versions of RimWorld, do not post on it.

]Rules various notes:

• In an open online community attempting to include people with wildly diverse experiences, tastes, worldviews, and cultures, creating and enforcing rules is very difficult. Moderation in such a context requires great personal maturity, a strong sense of responsibility, solid coping strategies when facing conflict and emotionally offensive material, and a dedication to introspecting one's own thought process to ensure it carefully incorporates others' views and judges evenhandedly. Nothing about this is casual, and many of these tasks require real mental fortitude and incur real stress. It's not unlike being a judge in the legal system - one of the hardest jobs in the world to do well!
  
• Each participant in the community has both rights and responsibilities (since rights are almost the same thing as responsibilities when seen from others' point of view). For example, while participants have a responsibility to be mature enough to not lash out destructively or post trollish, deliberately-provocative material, they also have a matching responsibility to maturely cope with challenging material or material that violates their cultural assumptions. We must balance these responsibilities carefully.
  
• We want rules to be applied consistently over time, and to be logically and philosophically consistent with each other.
  
• "Don't scar on the first cut." Local disturbances shouldn't get transformed into permanent, global rules changes too quickly. When there's a disturbance that might seem to need new rules, we should take our time in considering what those changes might be, wait to see how the community to adapts by itself, and let feelings cool on all sides before making permanent changes. Often, no change is necessary.

You can find the rules on the Ludeon official forums here: https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=40838.0

If the community would like to post Steam Discussion specific rules, please let me know. I have seen a lot of reporting of necro posts, for instance, which is not against our rules in general but am open to making this one if there is a good consensus. Also spamming self replies is another rule that may be useful. Let me know what you all think.

I am unable to moderate in Steam Workshop pages, sorry. If mods themselves are reported I can review them, but not the discussions in the mods themselves. However I would encourage mod authors to use the RimWorld Community rules for self moderation and not feel like they can't delete people harassing them.

How does everyone feel about the daily or more frequent '1.1 broke the game with mods' threads? Should I start locking them?

Originally posted by ⌛➡☕:

Originally posted by pheanox: How does everyone feel about the daily or more frequent '1.1 broke the game with mods' threads? Should I start locking them?

If I recall correctly, it was posted someplace that he wants you to try to break the game with as many mods as possible... so probably not yet. The best way to handle this, is to tell people to provide a mod list order, and the save that broken. It is probably the fastest way to get a bug fixed for him.

The posts I was seeing there for a while were not productive posts, but it's died down anyway.