PSA: Type Race threads are NOT for trading.

It's my belief that the type race threads are the most community-oriented event that the game has. This is a time when players are encouraged to work together and earn as many points as possible. The changes brought in 2023 clearly gave a lot of new life to the event that was needed, and increased the activity in the threads exponentially. The role of a type race leader is not that of a true "leader" - I think of it more as a secretary role. You're organizing and filing, you're not really leading as there is no power being passed to the type race leader except that of a watching eye for the sake of the mods. However, this is a flawed position in my mind: any reports made by the type race leader are a catch-22 of over or under reporting depending on how strictly they desire to follow the written rules (or how well they understand them), and their own tolerance of technical rule-breaking. They either have to become VERY friendly with the mod report page, or risk a moderator coming in to chastise the whole group for the actions of a few. I feel like this becomes an exceptional burden on the moderators. By making this catch-22, you either have a huge increase of reports during the week leading up to and the week of type race, or you have to have the moderators read every single thread multiple times a day to look for rule breaking and enforce it on their own. As a type race leader, you're also a volunteer who may be limited by their own free time. Of course by volunteering and accepting the role of leader you are making an unspoken pledge to do exactly that - but this is the critical misstep in my opinion: the only power they have is to put more burden on the actual moderators. The sense of community that is fostered by type race is one that makes type race "secretary" work worth it - players helping other players in a way that they can all succeed in the race. I think I speak for us all when we way we WANT to see everyone meet their personal goals, and helping other players is absolutely the best way to do that. People want to help other people, and they want to help in whatever way they can. There are of course limits. I do not disagree at ALL that SELLING on a type race forum is tasteless and spammy. However I do make a distinction between a loan, a gift, and a trade. If money is being passed around, it is a trade; a loan is like that of a pair being lent for the week; and a gift is that. And people LOVE giving gifts. It's a basic tenant of the human quality of compassion that makes a society work: benefitting others with no benefit to yourself. I think it's unreasonable to ask players to NOT help each other, as much as I think it's unreasonable to ask mods to spend so much of their time focusing on restricting the ability to help other players in this race. I think mod time is better spent on more pressing issues in the threads - or in participating in the races themselves and having fun. I also consequentally believe that there should be more responsibility placed upon the type race leader. Currently they are being rewarded for secretary work - which is important and helps keep everyone organized, but that catch-22 rears its ugly head as I mentioned earlier. It is my firm belief that if someone volunteers to be a type race leader, they should be given the small nugget of freedom to be a leader. I will define what I mean by this in clearer terms. I believe the ideal balance is to allow the type race thread leader to enforce the written rules to a certain degree - telling players to knock off spammy posts and reminding them of the written rules as they are outlined by the site. In turn, the moderators would be able to focus their attention on just the 18 leaders, rather than the entire community in equal measure. The leaders would then be able to make the decision to escalate an issue beyond them if there is a need to - or have an issue escalated above them if they aren't doing their job. This ties in to the issues that the other players here have brought up: by loosening the rules of what's allowed in a type race thread, but handing more power to the volunteer leader, you eliminate that catch-22 that places so much burden on the moderators. You create an environemnt of trust, and you create it in such a way that the community benefits as a whole. In turn, this creates a small pressure on the leaders to perform better and do their jobs correctly--and establishes that there ARE consequences for being a bad leader. The mods should have the power to say no, we gave you that trust and you abused it, so you cannot be type race leader anymore and do not get the benefits thusly. To be clear: I do not think this is a widespread issue, the concept of a bad type race leader. I simply think that it is the natural consequence to the concept of giving any amount of power to a volunteer leader. If you are going to trust someone, you must establish that there is a consequence for breaking that trust. In conclusion: this became a lot more of an issue of how much power the type race leader has versus the needs of the moderators rather than the specific rule breaking, but I believe that this is the source of the issue at hand. I'll summarize my suggestions below. I am happy to make them into a suggestion thread as well if asked. - Define the difference between a trade, a loan, and a gift as outlined by other players in this thread. - Give more power to type race leaders to reduce moderator burden. - Establish consequences for being bad at your volunteered job. - Establish trust and rewards in players for being good at your volunteered job.

Players can actually do this all they want right now, so long as the links/asks are in their forum signatures rather than making up the content of their posts.

So, you can put an ask for anything in your forum signature right now, post in a Type Race thread about something else (TR-related), and teammates can see your ask.

can we talk about WHY there has been such an increase in rule-breaking to the point that rule reminders are having to be posted? i know it's not such an easy answer, but do you have any leads on why there's been such an increase? for example, do you think the rules could do with greater visibility, especially subforum specific ones? should the subforum-specific rules ALSO be put on the main rules page, rather than simply linked? is it too easy to not read the rules?

If there's a lot of asking for free stuff in a TR thread and it seems "normal", unless they have actually read the rules or previously been corrected, players tend to generalize that as it being okay to ask for free stuff in other places as well.

Players can actually do this all they want right now, so long as the links/asks are in their forum signatures rather than making up the content of their posts.

So, you can put an ask for anything in your forum signature right now, post in a Type Race thread about something else (TR-related), and teammates can see your ask.