I've done compliance stuff IRL. The absolute last thing I want is copy that into a !@#$ing GAME.
The day this game has a rule for everything is the day I'll walk away from it. Have all of you forgotten the Social Contract you signed? Play as you would with a bunch of friends. Do you make rules for your friends? No, of course not. You establish a very small number of ground rules for the most important things like "no smoking in my house" and leave everything else to sort itself out because amongst friends you don't need to write a law book. The law is not written for friends, it is written for enemies. When you are in a competitive or hostile environment, that is when you need a hundred rules.
I personally think that the rule "don't be an !@#$%^&" is all we need and every ruling we've ever made can be derived from it. The more detailed rules we do have in the IRs and Social Contract just specify what "!@#$%^&" means in a bit more detail.
If the Locals needed explicit rules about what postings were ok and which ones not, then shutting them (they are not deleted, btw., just inaccessible) was the right thing to do, because they stopped being friendspace.
So Tom, is it being an !@#$%^& to post an IG letter? I'd say you shouldn't do it unless you wrote it or its very public but I wouldn't call you an !@#$%^& for doing so. I also informed a newish player today that its poor form to completely copy and paste roleplays or to even use the knowledge without giving a reason for knowing it, but I don't think he is an !@#$%^&, I told him he has nothing to be sorry about because he just didn't know when he said he was sorry about it.
I also would like to see an example of gameplay being done the forums. I seriously can not think of a single instance. Recently in the Dwilight thread I felt a poster was saying too much about army movements in the thread so I told him and I didn't hear info that I thought was a bad idea to be posting on the forums afterwards. He isn't an !@#$%^& for it though. I would say you are certainly missing out from not being on the local boards because its quite enjoyable and was the reason for several players that i have talked with in the past few days for unpausing there characters and rejoining the game because of what they read on the forums. The local boards in fact is the main reason I joined the forums and is likely the reason I am as involved and active as I am with BM because being a knight was fun while in war although it eventually went to peace and I probably would have quit the game entirely if I hadn't heard about Bedwyr knowing a lot about BM through the forums and introducing D'hara and Dwilight to me which was precisely what I was looking for.
To your reply to stabbity's comment, its certainly is done through tournaments, guilds, and traveling about as I do with my characters because while I might learn a little about stuff through the forums or chatting on IRC like many others, what I read on the forums makes me want to play more and travel about and join guilds. I nearly paused my character on AT but then I heard about some things on the forums and IRC and decided instead of giving up on my character I should put more effort into finding out about and joining in on the fun things I hear about on the forums.
Guidelines would be like: remember that you are talking to the player, not the character on here an issue not caused from the forums but players taking the game to seriously; don't post IG letters that aren't public, wrote by you, or unless you have permission from the author; avoid talking about army movements because we don't people having to make random mathematical choices which i heard someone had to do because they heard a little too much on irc and didn't want to feel like they were cheating; avoid talking about motives or secret events so they can be kept secret/found out in game. Those are all good guidelines that wouldn't make someone an !@#$%^& for not automatically knowing to follow them. They might be an !@#$%^& if they heard about them and completely disregarded them, but hearing about them at all and breaking them doesn't make me feel like the other guy is an !@#$%^&.
Btw, I have probably read 20-30k or more of local's board posts because I make it a habbit to read pretty much all of boards and if you have several mods who read their continents actively you don't need people like me that read all the boards in order to moderate without the report to moderator function.
