Bugs, news and stuff: [pcgen] File - Greetings from Moderator Monkeys.txt

Greetings:

* This was last updated 19th of August 2009

Posting guidelines:
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http://wiki.pcgen.org/index.php?title=Posting_Guidelines

Here is a re-emphasis of those guidelines:
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We are the Moderator Monkeys. There. We said it. We hope you all enjoyed it,
as it's the first, last, and only time we will refer to ourselves as such, actually we tell a lie, but that's OK, because we're the Moderators :-)

You've all read the posting guidelines, right? Ha! Fat chance! We've only read
them once myself in several years of service to PCGen. That's a rather long and
lengthy read, not to mention boring. We'll point out the part that concerns us, and therefore you, the most. We'll even sum it up in two words (points to anybody that knows where the words come from...don't respond, you know who you are):

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Be Nice
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That's it. That's the rule. Be Nice. If you have a disagreement with someone, Be Nice. If someone's point of view irritates you, Be Nice. If anyone irritates you, Be Nice. If someone insults your mother, Be Nice.

How, you ask, will you know when it's time to not Be Nice? We're glad you asked
us that. It's a simple answer. It's NEVER time for you to not Be Nice. If you
decide to not Be Nice, we start charging up the Ninja Monkeys. If you're not
nice, we'll close the thread and ask you to Be Nice. If you ignore our request to Be Nice, we'll close down the thread, again, and TELL you to Be Nice. If you
ignore that we'll get irritated. We really hate having to close a thread more
than once. If you make us close it a third time, we'll whip out the Stick of
Doom(TM), smack you upside the head with it, and then gag you. Oh yeah and the Ninja Monkeys will then take bits of your soul and scatter it across the wastelands.

What's a gag, you ask? That's a simple one to answer too. A gag is where we
remove your posting privileges. If we have to gag you, the typical time is as
follows.

First offence: You get off easy, you lucky sod. You only get gagged for one
day.

Second offence: You don't get off quite as lucky. You get gagged for three
days.

Third offence: By this time, we're becoming VERY irritated with you. You get
gagged for however long we feel like gagging you at the time.
Any offence beyond the third: Now you've flat out Torqued us off! You get one
of two things. Gagged for a VERY long time, or gagged subject to banning by the
BoD (that means you're gagged until the BoD removes you from the project, or the BoD in a majority decision, makes a very special, very persuasive,
request that you be un-gagged).

Now for the bad news <evil grin>. The above times are NOT set in stone, as some
of you are habitual offenders. You all know who you are, so we don't have to
name any names. Most of you get to skip the request, skip the order, and go
straight to the first offence. Some of you get to skip that and go to the
second offence. A small number of you get to go straight to the third offence.
A VERY select few of you are already at the very long time, or even the gagged
subject to banning by the BoD. That select few: you know who you are. This is
your ONLY warning.

That is the only sidetrack we're making for the habitual offenders. Now everybody else (the very large majority of our community) pay attention! Request, Order, Gag is what happens in the typical situation. Not every situation is typical (imagine that). There will be times where the request phase will be skipped, and even times when the order phase will be skipped and you'll go straight to gagged, even though you've never been offensive. We don't expect those times to happen often, but we imagine they will happen, so we're giving everyone fair warning. It all depends on how much you offend us <evil grin>. we'll give you all an example, from recent times, even. If anyone, in any way, shape or form that we can possibly imagine, bashes/flames any publisher on these boards, you proceed directly to a minimum of first offence, more depending on how offensive you were.

Now, we're going to put something to rest right away. Code Monkey Publishing IS
A PUBLISHER, and we're tired of hearing them bashed on and flamed until
well-done. If you don't agree with us, TOUGH! You can disagree with us all you
want off the boards, this is not subject to discussion on the board. Only
warning.

OK, we think we all understand each other now, don't you? Time for us to wrap
this up. What, there's a question in the back? OK, go ahead

Question: You're not just going to leave it like that, are you? You're going
to say something nice to wrap everything up, just like the rest of the BoD,
right?

Answer: Well OK then, we really, really love the fact that we have such a large a passionate community, we're sorry for the rules, but with 5000+ and counting of you something had to be done, think of it as the Iron Monkey Paws in the Velvet Gloves :-)

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New Policy on Asking Questions about PI/Closed Content Sources
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We respect the Publishers wishes with regards to PI and Closed Content
and therefore strongly prefer that any discussion of the creation of
those data sources are held in Generic terms.

However, we realise that a vast majority of you are asking questions
on how to code data sets for your own personal use and so we're no
longer going to growl or wave fingers at people who mention a
PI/Closed Content reference when asking questions. We will however
continue to state our responses to those questions in a generic manner
and hope that you'll do the same.

We will still not tolerate any PI/Closed Content being uploaded to our
file areas or any attempts at illegally sharing data sources.

Examples:
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1.) A user asking how to code the Skirmish ability from the Complete
Adventurer (WotC) will receive a helpful polite answer phrased in
generic terms, e.g "To implement an Ability that gives 1d6 damage
every 3 levels you'd want to look to the Rogue sneak attack
progression in our SRD files". But no more finger waving or growling
from the Moderators!

2.) A user stating that they want someone to give them a privately
coded data source for the Complete Adventurer set will be warned etc.

3.) A user uploading the Complete Adventurer data source will be
warned etc.

So, for all community members, there's no longer any need to call in
the Moderator if a PI/Closed Content question is asked. We will step
in if necessary if someone blatantly abuses this new policy.

For reference:
--------------

Closed Content/PI is any data source that we don't have permission to
publish ourselves or isn't OGL/OGC.

Please see:

http://pcgen.sourceforge.net/autobuilds/pcgen-docs/acknowledgments/publishersandsources.html

For a list of publisher permissions that we currently have.

PapaDRB and Karianna - on behalf of the Moderators
- This doc was modified from Mynex's and Hetter's original doc.