Moderation Warning before Issuing Punishments

I would just like to make a friendly suggestion that the MODs send out a warning to users when a rule is broken; mainly because there's a lot of different rules that can fall in many categories and as far as I'm aware there's not a huge "main post" somewhere that has a link to every set of rules for the entire site. I will say that certain rule breaking should not come with a warning i.e. blackmailing/harassing, hacking of accounts, or just bullying shouldn't warant these types of warnings but something as small as "Hey you can't post that here because it breaks rules x,y,and z. You have 24 hours from the time of this PM to fix/remove/ask a MOD to delete your post" or something similar would help the entire site with keeping everything in regulations better. Example: I made a post in thread "A" for something. The post in question broke a rule in thread "B" rules. I had no idea because I was looking at rules for thread "A". Before punishments are handed out I would like to be informed by MODs that I broke a rule in thread "B" rules even if my post is in thread "A" I still must adhere to the rules in thread "B" and I have 24 hours to fix my mistake before punishment of any type is taken.

I agree with your points, but would you be willing to clarify a little more? As far as my personal experience goes, I've always been given a warning before punishment on any of my 'less serious' rule breaks the first time. The only time I've ever heard of punishment on first rule break, either through locks or anything else is because of genuinely larger issues.

I fully support. At the moment there's no clarification (as far as I'm aware) of what warrants a warning and what doesn't. And I've been given infractions for breaking rules I didn't even think were problems that the mod did, with no warning beforehand. I would have adhered to the rules if I was aware, but punishments were instantly issued. There seems to be very little leniency on what is okay and isn't and I'm constantly walking a fine line. I'm always thinking I'm not going to get a warning if I do something wrong on accident and it makes it scary sometimes to interact with other users. Which, as I understand, goes against what the site wants? So clarification would help, as well as a clear location to access all rules? They're all over the site. It's hard to know.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, that is already how it is. Not a lot of issues lead to immediate consequences unless they are compounded issues (Ex: User X sends out 45 instances of spam PMs within 2 days, this would yield an immediate short PM lock and a PMed warning). A full list of what is and isn't warnable/lockable isn't provided for multiple reasons. Upkeep of such a list would be complicated when we're a small group of volunteers, we don't want people picking and choosing their misbehaviors based off of what consequences they are and aren't willing to accept, the consequences change based on severity and quantity, are based on whether the user has prior offenses, and so on. The site rules are linked in the footer of every page of the site. The only other time other rulesets are needed is when you're in their respective forum — the Contest rules are pinned in the Contest forum, etc. Is there anything I can clarify about this to help?

For the record, I’m not trying to weasel out of the punishment I’ve been dealt, I (apparently) broke the rules as they stand so obviously a penalty is warranted and I don’t want it revoked or anything, but I’m chiming in to support this notion as well because of my situation; that being me offering free specials to my teammates in the type race thread. I did this three times on three different days and had fun doing it. People got some specials they wouldn’t have otherwise and I like to think a fun time was had by all. My teammates really seemed to enjoy the idea. As far as I can gather, no one complained, it sure as heck wasn’t spam at a rate of less than one instance per day, and I got no warning after any of the individual posts. I understand I should’ve hypothetically known it was a rule but frankly I think I can be forgiven for not thinking that that would be one of the rules for a casual, friendly thread meant to inspire teamwork. Something as completely and totally innocuous as giving gifts to your teammates being against the rules unless you do it a certain way (one single post, one single time that no one is ever going to scroll back to in order to see if you update it) is frankly a little asinine, and in my (albeit meaningless) opinion, if you’re going to regulate that so closely for whatever reason, the least you can do is offer a warning before giving someone a three month ban from any contests or whatever. Granted, I had absolutely no plans to go make any contest threads or anything so it’s not like I’m upset about the terms of the punishment, it’s more that I take umbrage with the fact that it was immediate punishment with no warning for something that was just fun, harmless, and brought a little extra life to a type race team thread. Rules are important, as is enforcing them, but a little leeway and understanding is pretty important too, particularly when no harm whatsoever has been done.

So I will say that I did have a ban placed on my account due to the entire elitist jerk fiasco. I'm not going into details. I understand why I was banned and I didn't need a warning in my situation. But even users who just had it in their trainer card were banned without a warning to change it. That seems a little harsh for some words in a trainer card in my opinion, I understand the entire reason why and I'm not here to argue but for some of the users just a warning to change it would have been the end of it. I think it was unfair that some users got banned just for their trainer cards with no warning. Many of them woke up the next day to a ban. Again, I'm not here to argue about that one instance because as I previously said, I understand why I was banned and it wasn't needing a warning. But for the others it was unfair.

@Ethereal Moth The contest strike you received was separate from the warning for distributing specials in your type race thread. Distributing specials does lead to an uptick of unnecessary posts that are only relevant to the two users involved and not to the rest of the team. Due to this, it is considered spam because the same action can be accomplished in PMs. It is also limited to one post per person to prevent offering specials every time one is hatched. As an example - if I hatched 20 specials in a type race and made a post giving away each special, that is 2 pages of thread spam, 40 notifications (posting and claiming) that would be useless to most other users subscribed of offerings and claims. The issue at hand was the way the specials were distributed. Which was requiring a user to answer a question to receive a special. That leads to potential additional spam, however the bigger issue is having a user complete X to receive Y is a 'contest'. Contest strikes are taken extremely seriously. This is with good reason, there have been instances in the past of users utilising contests to scam others and receive personal gain. That is certainly not what you had intended, but it's for that reason that any sort of contests being held outside the moderated contest forums receive such a harsh punishment. It is to prevent potential abuse, additionally, contests not in the proper forums cannot be validated for legitimacy. @insanemandii What you state happened is, as far as I am aware, not what occurred. The way that it was set forward to be handled (and was, to my knowledge) was that users who had the issue-content in their trainer cards received warnings and the content was removed. If there were additional journal posts, links to others' journal posts, or the issue-content returned, for instance, after removal then an account lock was placed. If any slipped through the cracks and were not handled according to what was just said, then they were indeed mishandled and I would be grateful to know of such situations via. PM (as to not break our rules). As an additional bit of information - Account locks are utilised, a majority of the time, to prompt a conversation in the Support Centre when a situation is serious enough to warrant that, or when a user doesn't take the warning seriously and proceeds to either break the rule again or, indeed, doesn't stop breaking the rule. Unlike PMs, a temporary site lock cannot be avoided or accidentally missed or forgotten - when genuinely missed or such, a temporary site lock should not last very long at all. That all said, the event you spoke of did require such conversations with those involved who escalated the issue due to the severity (whether 'escalated' enough off the initial finding (meaning them being reported or a staff member coming across the content) or thereafter). I am aware that you have both been given direction towards me to discuss such things and neither of you have done so. This is me re-stating that direction. My PMs are open and I am quite happy to talk with people on Discord or some such, presuming other peoples' comfort with that, of course. I also want to offer a reminder that discussing other peoples' locks is against the rules. If you want clarity on things, or to ask questions about things that perhaps you have been told, then by all means - feel free to talk to me and ask me through the appropriate channels. With that, I am going to lock this thread and move it to complete, as the requested course of action is - to both my knowledge and that of the other staff members - how things are already handled. That said, I will be taking the time to investigate and verify this, just to be sure of my claims. Thank you, and I hope that you do indeed choose to discuss this with me further.