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Single post in Rule Updates - February 2021

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Methos's AvatarMethos
Methos's Avatar
Hello there! This announcement is intended to bring your attention to several rules updates, as well as explain a bit about the reasons for the changes.
We'll start with the biggest (and probably most controversial) changes: the Journal and Mature Journal rules. For the most part, these are the same as they have been with three exceptions. Firstly, players will no longer be able to post in a journal that does not belong to them. This is actually going to be something hard-coded by Niet, so don't worry about forgetting and accidentally posting something. Why the change? Far, far too many people were mistaking their ability to post in other journals as an invitation to turn the journal into a chat thread. Many more people than were using the ability responsibly and as intended. In addition, we took a look at the ability and decided... well, that between PMs and our Discord chat, there really wasn't a reason to have that ability implemented in the first place.
Our second change is less a change and more an expansion on our existing respect and anti-vaguing rules. Sadly, we find ourselves in need of explaining to far too many players what falls under the umbrella of "disrespectful", which includes *any form of discrimination.* This has particularly been an issue with Mature Journals, as though players have decided that relaxed rules on profanity and topic choice in that particular section have also meant that the respect rule does not apply. Even if you yourself feel no respect for someone? You still need to act respectfully while on PokeFarm grounds. That's the agreement you made with us when you set up your account. I'm going to be blunt here; the Mature Journals have generated such a disproportionate number of reports regarding violations of the respect and vaguing rules, for a non-essential/superfluous portion of the site, that the staff have had multiple serious debates about removing them entirely. Journals have never been intended for the kind of content that we regularly see in them. Those things were meant to be glorified gameplay logs, not a replacement for LiveJournal or Tumblr. Even though this isn't actually a change to the rules, we are offering a brief grace period for players to ensure their journals are in compliance with respect and anti-vaguing rules. You have until the end of this coming weekend to get your journals in shape for posts made prior to this announcement. Hopefully only a few of you actually need to do so. However, these rules are in full effect for all posts created from this point on.
The third change to the Journal rules is that we are now giving a small amount of leniency regarding legibility when personalising your Journals. If you choose to change any colours, you still need to define your text, background, and link colours. Likewise, please don't use colours that will burn out the eyes of other players. They generally need those. But if you want to use slightly larger or smaller font sizes than are generally allowed, or use two colours in combination that are a little bit harder to read for other people, we won't make too much of a fuss about it. Please don't get carried away with this, though, for all of our sakes. (As a side note, not actually a rule change: If you are distributing forum or About Me templates for the use of others, they need to comply with all legibility guidelines. Please, define your template colours. Especially don't forget your link colours.)
Moving on to the next rule change; our Art Director Sei took a good look at the rules regarding tracing official Pokemon artwork and decided they could be relaxed just a *smidge*. Artists, you're still not allowed to outright sell traced official artwork. However, you can trace said artwork *as a base* provided you then give the piece of art enough of your time and effort to make it your own. At *minimum* this means a full, decent quality recolour of the piece, and hopefully more. We still don't really approve of tracing, after all.
The last update is to the Auction rules, and is a pair of related rules that we decided on after realizing there was a hole in the existing rules. The foundation of the change is that a binding, though non-permanent trade agreement is entered into *as soon as the auctioneer accepts the first bid*. This goes two ways: once that first bid is in, the auctioneer is no longer allowed to cancel the auction, so be very sure you want to sell before you create that auction. Likewise, if a player has the highest *accepted* bid in an auction, they cannot withdraw that bid until another bid is accepted over theirs. The second bit is something we actually used to enforce, years and years ago. We realized that logically if we wanted to implement the first part of this rule change, we logically needed the second part too.
We will be paying attention to comments to answer any questions you may have. If anyone wants to suggest other rules changes, though, please head over to the Suggestions Forum instead.
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