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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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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.

Hi there. I do jave one question about journal rules. Im unsure if its obvious and im just missing the point but. I'll ask anyways.

Howdy! Thank you so much for the "only posting your own journal" rule, it was getting a bit out of hand for a while, haha ;v;'' A question about that;; are the rules for discussions carried out in journals between users still the same? So, if you quote someone else's journal as a response or @ a user to respond to them, is that allowed as long as it's kept to a minimum and not becoming A Big Chat Thread(tm)? Or are the rules more strict now? EDIT: Also, in the new rules it states PG-13 content in general journals must be in labeled hideboxes. Does this mean journal threads with PG-13 content no longer need to be labeled as such in the title? Or is putting that warning in the title still a suitable substitute instead of labeling every individual instance of PG-13 content?

Another question here ^w^ After the Auction Rules update, what about "offer threads" (users make offers, owner accepts whenever they'd like, users can retract offers)? Are they still allowed?

We would strongly prefer that these topics not be mentioned, due to the difficulty of discussing them in a way that's appropriate for a general audience and our site rating. Almost as strongly as we would prefer that no one need to discuss those subjects. If someone absolutely needs to include any such topic in their Journal (which, as stated in the Journal rules are not really meant for that kind of discussion), we would recommend they check with a Moderator first to ensure the topics are being approached appropriately. This bit is stated in the intro for both sets of journal rules: Basically, players who respond to each other in their journals have always been using them to get around the rule against chat threads. This is something that's now going to be enforced, but was always rule-breaking. Marking journals in the title as "PG-13" journals has never been part of the written rules. It also incorrectly gives people the idea that journals marked in that way are allowed to be PG-13 overall, rather than having small hide-boxed sections of PG-13 content. That depends on whether the owner is waiting for multiple offers and only then responding to and accepting one of them, or accepting and "holding" an offer to see if anyone offers something more to their liking. The latter is an auction and must comply with all auction rules.

me and heartlessdemon had the same question, ive noticed it a lot in the trades lately so thank u for clarifying methos!

In general it would be a good idea to mark any "testing" posts, but this is part of the leniency we would be granting on a case-by-case basis.

The link in the current Site Rules thread under section 15 that links to the journal forum rules leads to a deleted thread now, heads up!

what happens to existing posts from other people in a journal?