Community Standards (OOC Rules of Conduct)

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The information covered here applies to: All Out-of-Character (OOC) forums, the on-sight chat, and our public Discord server.

We have some simple guidelines for how to best manage yourself here. If needed, we’ll expand these as we see fit.

Before the nitty gritty, please remember to direct questions and requests/updates to the staff using the [Help Forum]. Staff are free to politely decline helping you on social platforms.

Our site’s community is PG-13. We have tags for in-character work, but when you’re talking in the social platforms, keep it PG-13. No ‘sexy talk’, no sexual innuendo (blatant or otherwise), no sex or sex-themed jokes, and avoid excessive ‘baby’ talk or affection emoting. Share your penis memes elsewhere. We don't want prospective members thinking that we're a bunch of high school boys who make dick jokes and poke fun at sexual assault. Staff reserve the right to silence or ban you if you violate community standards.

This should go without saying: Rape jokes/memes and even memes/jokes that imply rape have a no tolerance policy and will get you banned. Anything that smells faintly of child porn or sexualization of minors will merit the same punishment. You know better.

On a similar note, watch how you speak to others in general. You may call your buddy a bunch of awful nicknames, but you wouldn’t call a stranger by that. Also, try not to dominate any of our communication channels. If you’re having a cool conversation with a few people, and you notice others trying to use the platform, consider moving your conversation elsewhere (maybe to a voice chat channel?).

Furthermore, I’d recommend you just avoid discussing matters of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, politics, or other sensitive matters on our public platforms. Conversations like that can often… spiral. We do not tolerate discrimination and will never tolerate the use of racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic remarks. It may be ‘a joke’ to you, but it may not be a joke to someone who lived through real discrimination. Be mindful of your peers.

Don’t ever harass anyone. Ever. Private or public. If anyone is making your life here unreasonably uncomfortable, please let a staff member know, even if the person upsetting you is a staff member themselves. If you don't tell us, we can't do anything about it.

Do not link the following: Porn sites, torrent sites, warez, or anything in the shady parts of the Internet. This is against our host’s terms of service.

Please use the nickname feature on Discord to have a recognizable character or HUB name. Do not use non-site nicknames, web handles, or ‘goofy’ names. You can do that stuff in your private Discords.

Treat the staff with respect. Staff are just members with extra power and authority. Some want to just be able to enjoy the site and write from time to time, without having to do a deluge of work or answer all your questions. Again, use the [Help Forum] when you need help, instead of trying to pester a staffer who may just want to have a day to write or hang out.

Remember that our staff are volunteers. They’ve volunteered to sacrifice some of their time as writers to help keep the various aspects of the website operational. They often have a thankless ‘job’ where their only reward is a neat title and the occasional thanks from members. The other part of their sacrifice is that they are responsible for holding themselves to a higher standard than their peers, whether that be on the boards, chatbox, or Discord, especially in regards to their behavior and attitude. We hold every member of the staff to these standards. If you have concerns about the staff or its members, do not hesitate to reach out. We constantly work on make the website a better place, and we know that sometimes that starts with us.

Please see <This Thread> for official warnings and how they function.
 

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Respect, Consent, and Loving our Community

There are two things that make a good community: mutual respect, and as a function of that respect, consent.

The other writers on this site deserve to have their boundaries respected, and that is a foundational aspect of the staff's code of conduct. If you want to interact with another character, please reach out to the writer and ask about what you want to do first. If you do not have the time, energy, or desire to reach out to others to ask their permission about a thing you'd like to do with them, then simply don't do it. If another member asks you to stop doing something that you're doing, respect their request and stop. At any point during a public or private exchange a person withdraws their consent to an an interaction, be it in an IC thread or in an OOC chat, you must do so.

This is why we do not allow harmful subjects in public spaces: the people who are likely to encounter that material have not explicitly consented to interacting with it, and thus you are violating their consent. If you willingly read a topic which has been clearly tagged with the same harmful content, you are giving your consent to being exposed to it. If you join an event which has clearly defined content, you are responsible for accepting the consequences of that event.

Essentially, we are asking you to communicate and ask permission when you are interacting with others, and allowing them to set the standards of that interaction. If you don't like or agree with those standards, you should just not interact with them. There is no demand on this site to interact with people you do not consent to interacting with, and we require you to understand and respect that
 
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Here on Multerra, we value the comfort of our members. This generally means that we don’t want people walking in on content that they weren’t expecting. Our general philosophy in regards to sensitive content and themes is, “Let people opt-in, don’t force them to opt-out.”

What that means more specifically is that you MUST designate areas where sensitive content is present and make that designation very clear. Public spaces, such as the integrated Chat, any Discord channel that carries the Multerra banner, or any other space that the site has created for you, should never contain material that may be distressing for the members of our site. In public spaces, we ask that you avoid any form of content that would need to be tagged (description of tags below).

However, that does not mean that we have an outright ban on that content.

We’ve integrated a “Tagging” system into the forum, which allows you to more easily designate the content that we’ve categorized as sensitive. This is the Content Tagging feature. When you create a new thread, you must select the appropriate tag for the content that will be in the thread so that people have the choice to not click on that thread knowing what’s in it.

The tags that we’ve created for you to use are:

-Graphic Violence
-Sex/Nudity
-Serious themes (-isms)
-Sexual Abuse


Graphic Violence refers to content that includes specific descriptions of violence, such as gore, torture, prolonged scenes of emotionally traumatic violence, or anything else that has protracted or intense violence. Videos that depict real world violence are never allowed in any area of the site (even tagged ones).

Sex/Nudity refers to content that includes the graphic depiction of sexual acts. You can imply that people are having sex or engaging in any form of erotic activity, but giving it more than a passing implication or statement that it happened pushes into this category. If you’re giving a lot of detail to make-outs, grabbing, or anything beyond what you’d see on daytime television, this is the appropriate tag. Characters can be nude or naked so long as you don’t describe their bodies in depth or objectify their appearance without using this tag. Videos that explicitly depict erotic or sexual acts are never allowed in any area of the site (even tagged ones).

Serious Themes (-isms) refers to content that targets minority groups or individuals in a negative way. Slurs, discrimination, defending or justifying discrimination, encouraging discrimination, harassment, or victimization of people based on aspects of their lives other than their actions are all considered to be an “ism”. Age, body type, color, disability, gender identity, romantic and civil partnership, national origin, maternity, race, religion or belief, sex, and sexual orientation are all considered to be “protected” from discrimination in all content and public spaces unless explicitly labeled with this tag. This is likely the most likely perpetrator to get people reprimands in our chat spaces and in your creative works, and we will delete your content and restrict your access to our site, in accordance with our values.

Sexual Abuse refers to content that depicts any act of physical, mental/emotional intimacy that does not first gain consent from all participants. Explicit depictions of sexual intercourse of any sort between parties that do not or cannot consent (rape) is never allowed with or without tags.

To clarify that point, I’ll define a few of those terms:
Physical intimacy is any kind of touching that is intended to create or imitate emotional intimacy. This usually means the touching of erogenous zones such as the genitals, buttocks, legs, breasts, hair, face, or other “personal” areas that we wouldn’t come into contact with in a normal conversation. Sometimes physical intimacy can be created by touching (or almost touching) areas that would usually be a part of casual contact in a sensual or erotic way.

Mental/emotional intimacy is the use of communication to create or imitate a sense of intimacy, such as talking about sexual, erotic, or romantic acts. Cat-calling is a common form of harassment which imitates intimate acts by framing the victim as the target of their intimate desires, and would need to be tagged. However, any kind of communication can be designed to imitate or create romantic or sexual intimacy, depending on circumstance. If you're unsure, tag it.

Consent refers to a person’s willingness to participate in an activity.

In order to be willing to consent to an activity, the participant must fully understand what those activities include, which is what is inferred with the statement “informed consent.” In this scenario, all consent is informed consent, or it isn’t actually valid consent. Broad or deceitful statements designed to omit parts of an activity do not give the participants the full idea of what will happen, and they can therefore not consent to it. This also means that an individual must also be able to understand all of the implications and consequences of participating in those activities.

Intoxicated or mentally impaired people cannot give consent because their ability to understand the implications or consequences of their actions, and thus any sexual contact with an intoxicated or mentally compromised person must be tagged with Sexual Abuse and cannot be explicitly depicted, even if consent was given while the person was intoxicated. Consent can be pre-negotiated before such a state, but that consent can be removed at any point.

Children, animals and people who are otherwise not able to understand what is going to happen or the consequences of those actions are incapable of giving consent, and may NEVER be depicted as engaging in sexual or intimate acts, even with tags.

A participant who is willing to participate in an activity must also be willing to engage without coercion or outside influence. This means that a person who is being threatened in any way can also not give consent, because they would not normally be willing to participate. Individuals who exist in positions of authority are often included as being coercive because their position could allow them to punish individuals who refuse consent. Coercion is a type of Sexual Abuse and sex scenes involving coercion must be tagged and cannot be explicitly depicted.

Additionally, consent can be WITHDRAWN at any given point. If a character ever says "no" after giving a "yes," it still means no. Consent can be given and taken away before or even during interactions.

Consent is always the presence of a “yes” not the absence of a “no.” Any and all sexual or intimate encounters in Multerra must have POSITIVE AFFIRMATION from all involved parties that they’d like to engage or it will need to be tagged, and no explicit descriptions of the encounter may be made.

This is not an excuse to create grotesque characters that are rampant sexual predators. This allows you to depict skeevy characters and slimy bastards that will, hopefully, get punched in the face. DO NOT TAKE THIS AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO BE DISGUSTING. I WILL BE WATCHING YOU.

TO REITERATE: GRAPHIC, EXPLICIT, OR DETAILED DEPICTIONS OF SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH AN UNWILLING PARTY IS NOT ALLOWED.

CHILDREN AND ANIMALS MAY NEVER BE DEPICTED, EVEN IN PASSING, AS HAVING A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ANY PERSON FOR ANY REASON. CHILDREN MAY NOT HAVE ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIPS WITH ADULTS FOR ANY REASON.

If any member encounters material of any of these types that isn’t properly tagged or is in public spaces, please take a screen cap and report it. We will do our best to remedy this behavior.

As is stated in our IC rules, we are allowing you to create content with these themes in them with the proper tags. However, this is not free license to post things that utilize this type of content for no reason. These themes must be used to tell a story, and add to the collective world. If your content is designed to be cruel or gross for the sake of being cruel or gross, we’ll delete it and ban you. Plain and simple.

We have all come to write on this site as a community and for fun! So if your personal beliefs include the persecution of others or pushing their boundaries simply because you don’t respect them, this isn’t the site for you.
 
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