Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-4403232-20131015115213

Hey there everyone, it's Sgt D Grif. The chat policies have been recently updated, and I'd highly advise that you take a moment to look them over. You may be wondering "What has been changed?" For the most part, a majority of the changes were minor wording fixes to increase clarity and consistency. However, with these new changes, there are a few important things to focus on. Chat Moderators have had their powers defined slightly better to allow them to perform their roles more effectively. This included patching of a few potential loopholes, and a few policies that may have hindered proper control of chat. However, the rest of you also benefit from the changes. In addition to a few rules being made more clear, it is now more clear as to what steps a Moderator will take towards your behavior, including receiving fair warnings when appropriate. A few older policies of the past such as waiting a certain amount of time prior to taking action, and kicking users in the hopes that they don't return (which leads to things not being properly documented, and "he said he couldn't return" "no she said she could" situations) have been removed. This does not mean that you will be kicked without explanation. Moderators are asked to give fair warnings about behavior prior to resorting to kicking, and any action that leads to a kick that has not been warned about will be explained to you prior to the kick command being clicked. Obvious situations such as a user spamming malware links are exempt from this. But rather than just trying to make heads or tails of my explanation, I highly recommend that you simply click right here and take a look. For those of you that are curious, click here to see a side-by-side comparison of exactly what has been changed.

tl;dr version: Rules have been updated. Simple way to know what's changed is to just read them. I explained the reasoning behind some of them, and pointed out a few changes.

Have any questions about the new rules? Hate the new changes? See any potential issues? Did I make some sort of horrible mistake while editing the rules? Have any feedback about what rules should be added, removed, or worked on? Leave a comment below! Even if I don't reply to your individual statement, I'll still see it! 