Website-wide rules hyperlink

WS-

As was brought up in the Feedback Forum by Scott there doesn't seem to be a place to view rules for FC.com. Although the BOI sticky lists most of them (and common sense would pretty much dictate a lot of the rest) it might be a good idea to lay everything out so Mods and yourself have something to point to when slapping wrists or being questioned. How easy or difficult would it be to add a Rules link in the Inside FaunaClassifieds navigation bar?

I would think the rules on the BOI, with a little touch-up, would suffice.

Yes, but that is a double edged sword as well. It allows people to see the line drawn in the sand so they can see how close they can get to it without tripping the alarm. How do you define "profanity" in black and white terms? What terms are actually "racist"? What constitutes a "threat"? What is "spam"? When is a comment "derogatory"? At what level do responses become "flames"?

Those (and many more) are all going to be gray areas, subject to interpretation by the viewer. The warning system was designed to be an ex post facto guidance system for behavior on this site. People are welcome to read the warning point trip wires themselves, but few likely do, and I am not about to even try to force people to do that. The warnings are used to help guide people to act within acceptable reasonable limits for how they should act in a message board open to the public, based on MY opinion on the matter. Most are simply (I hope) common sense, and I personally would like nothing better then to think that only reasonable adults with a healthy helping of common sense would frequent this site. The fact that the warning system had to be implemented is acceptance of the fact that this hope will never be realized.

Look at the number of reads of the thread at the top of the BOI defining the rules there. And those reads do not reflect unique members reading that, either, as I am sure that many people have looked it over several times. People just do not want to spend their time reading the rules. Most would rather just wing it anyway, and hope that what they type is acceptable. Some will obviously fall short of the mark.

Yes, certainly sometime in the future I will take the time to make up a site-wide TOS, but it is not really all that high on my priority list at the moment. And quite honestly, I just really don't think it will make even a bit of difference in how people act here. I will still get the "I didn't know" responses, or "but he said the same thing to me and I had to respond like I did!" or "what TOS?".

I guess you all will have to trust in the judgement of my moderators as well as myself in how we try to manage this site. We try to be fair. But we are people too, who can have bad days where everything looks darker then it really is. Then there are days when things are just rosy, where even some very abusive posts don't even faze us. That's just the way it is, I guess. But we ARE trying as hard as we can to do this the right way.