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User:WhiteWizard/New Policy

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* Keep it as short as possible
* Keep it as short as possible
* Break off additional information to other referenced documents
* Break off additional information to other referenced documents
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* Each section should start with a short philosophy for why the rules exist.
==Age Requirement==
==Age Requirement==
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For common building, [[MUF]], and such questions you may get a faster response from the [[helpstaff]], see the "helpstaff" command for a list of these volunteers.
For common building, [[MUF]], and such questions you may get a faster response from the [[helpstaff]], see the "helpstaff" command for a list of these volunteers.
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If the [[Wizards]] request to speak to you to perform their duties, you should not ignore them, be polite and [[Out of Character (OOC)]]. Failure to do so may result in punitive actions.
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If the [[Wizards]] request to speak to you to perform their duties, you should not ignore them, be polite and [[Out Of Character (OOC)]]. Failure to do so may result in punitive actions.
The wizards are unfortunately not as available as they would like to be, partly because they are under staffed, partly because they are merely volunteers themselves with their own lives. Please be understanding about this.
The wizards are unfortunately not as available as they would like to be, partly because they are under staffed, partly because they are merely volunteers themselves with their own lives. Please be understanding about this.

Latest revision as of 07:47, 6 May 2007

Contents

This is work on a new TOS for Tapestries MUCK. It is not yet policy. It is just here for consideration.

Philosophy for this Edit

  • Centralize all rules in one document
  • Keep it as short as possible
  • Break off additional information to other referenced documents
  • Each section should start with a short philosophy for why the rules exist.

Age Requirement

Tapestries MUCK provides services of an adult nature. To comply with California state and United States laws, we must require you to be of legal age to interact or view information with sexual and/or violent content.

In the case of California and many other states and countries, this age is Eighteen (18) years of age. We require this as a minimum to meet California state law.

You must also meet any requirements of your local country, state, province, or other locality to view and participate in roleplay of sexual and violent subjects.

Characters

  • Requirements for characters.
    • No humans rules
    • No Copyright/trademark infringement rules
    • Reference to harassment

Copyright and Trademarks

You may not play copyrighted or trademarked characters with out the express written consent of the owners of those properties.

Humans

Simply put, humans characters are not allowed on Tapestries MUCK.

We feel that allowing human characters on Tapestries MUCK will seriously detract from the Mission of the Muck. As is stated in the mission, we wish to maintain this as a place where no one will ever look at you funny for having fur or scales. See Policy Mission Statement.

Human is also a broad term on Tapestries, it includes all demi-human races from classical fantasy (except as noted below), and anything that too closely resembles a human. This also includes such minor alterations as a vampire's fangs, or a demon or angel that is clearly otherwise human.

What is "too close" is at the sole definition of the Wizards.

Because people like to push this rule a lot, our response to it is harsh. Characters deemed to be human are normally removed on sight with no warning. Wizards may choose to warn in marginal cases, but are not required to.

A special exception to this rule is Elves. Elves have a long tradition of association in literature with Furries, and as such, are tolerated as a species choice for this Muck. However, they should clearly be recognizable as an elf, and not just a human with pointy ears. A big burly elf will quickly get classified as human and removed.

Being an elf is something of a challenge on Tapestries. There are a lot of negative opinions about elves being closet humans, and while Policy Harassment protects people playing elves, it will be harder to make friends and otherwise socialize.

Purges

Characters are periodically purged to free up resources. The two most important resources are character names, and database space. There are three different sets of criteria that may cause an account to be purged, tailored to different situations and impact on the users. Character meeting the qualifications for purging at the time of a purge will be removed with all their objects with no chance of recovery.

For more information see: User:WhiteWizard/Character Purge Criteria

Account Transfer and Sharing

The accounts you register are for your use only. Allowing access to your account to other person us prohibited and is unauthorized use of our computing resources. Further, it may make you an accomplice in the corruption of a minor, harassment, or many other such activities.

Any accounts found to have been shared in any form will be purged from our systems.

Building

  • What may be built by players
    • No public building by general users
    • Reference to zone owner information

Safeword

  • Policy
  • Reference to safeword definition

Public Conduct

Tapestries MUCK's mission, as stated in Policy Mission Statement, touches on areas that are sensitive to the population of the Muck, and seeks to encourage the exploration of these sensitive topics.

Therefor public conduct needs to be a bit more careful and polite than in many forums. This is especially true on issues that are core to the Muck's mission such as sexuality, kinks, and people's roleplaying skills.

  • Attacks on Sexuality - Attacks on peoples sexual orientation, choice of IC gender or related matters will simply not be tolerated. Ever.
  • Attacks on Kinks - Judgmental and teasing statements about people's kinks, IC or OOC, should just not be made. OOC such statements can be a major threat to the security and comfort of people who are exploring uncertain ground, and even IC remarks are much to easy to misread and take wrong.
  • Attacks on Roleplaying - You should not tease or be judgmental about how other people roleplay, be it about someone's wording, how they roleplay, how they spell, their lack of punctuation, or anything else.
  • Attacks on Species - While some stereotyping and teasing about species is expected as part of roleplay, this can easily go too far. It is also ALWAYS too far when negative statements about the player's choice of species are made.

There are also other anti-social behaviors which, while not threatening directly to the mission of the Muck, are a Public Nuisance, and will not be tolerated. They include (but is not limited to) excessive acts of:

  • Angsting - About most anything.
  • Character Assassination - Badmouthing people in public is a real damper.
  • Violence - Verbal or physical, IC or OOC, outside of what is reasonable in a scene. See policy roleplaying and policy harassment for more information.
  • Trolling - Attempting to incite an argument.
  • Griefing - Taking actions with the sole or primary intent of causing another player OOC grief.
  • Spamming - Dumping large amounts of text to a room that causes it to be difficult to interact with others.
  • Attacks on Religion or Race - Discussion of sexuality, lifestyles, and/or religion is appropriate. Antagonism and attack is not. Everyone's choices in these matters are their own business as long as it does not include nonconsentually interfering with other people. This includes acting out feelings of intolerance and hatred, IC or OOC.
  • Or any other disruptive behavior.

There are also some forms of play that, while within the mission of the Muck, are restricted. See Policy Roleplaying and TinySex for more details. Interactions directly with other players, public and private, are covered in policy harassment.

Punishment for offenses of this policy will range from warnings to immediate removal and banning from the Muck. How harsh the punishment is will depend on the following factors: malicious intent, threat to the mission of the Muck, and any past history of problems.

Roleplaying and Tinysex

Tapestries MUCK is setup to be a safe public play-space, and therefor people should feel safe to publicly speak of, and practice, various forms of sex, bondage, domination, and sadomasochism. You should expect to see it, and be able to at the least ignore it if you desire to hang out in public places.

As a public play-space, Tapestries has a few rules that should be followed in the Core Building and Public Building areas:

  1. Safeword OOC will always be respected. Safeword IC will be respected unless the area specifically states otherwise. See Policy Safeword or the alt.sex.bondage FAQ if you are unfamiliar with this.
  2. Some forms of play are considered to be too disruptive for Core and Public ares. These are: bloodsports, non-consensual play, scat, pedophilia, watersports and extreme forms of humiliation and violence.
    • This list may be reduced or altered in some Public Building, please read all such rules. If you are unsure about what is okay, ask the local staff.
  3. You should not disrupt someone's scene in progress.
  4. You should not involve yourself in a scene unless you are invited, IC or OOC. Ask if unsure.
  5. You may not represent yourself OOC or IC as an official of Layleaux or a Wizard.

Out of Character (RL) CONSENT is required for any play, public or private anywhere on Tapestries MUCK. See policy harassment. Not sure? Ask. You are responsible for establishing consent.

Harassment

Several terms must first be understood, see Real Life, In Character, Out Of Character, No Contact Order (NCO) and Harassment.

Harassment, in general, comes down to a lack of consent. It is important to show the same respect to people online that you do offline. Please think about what you are saying to other people, especially when you are angry or disturbed.

There are IC situations where such behavior may be an important part of a roleplay, however, you must establish the OOC/Real Life consent of all parties involved. Do not assume that your actions will be taken IC.

Some forms of harassment are covered in Policy Public Conduct. This document discusses additional and directed issues.

This is a list of some of the types of harassment that the wizards will take action on:

  • Not respecting a Safeword. - If someone tells you OOC (Out Of Character) to stop what you are doing with them, especially by use of safeword, then you are obligated to do so. If you are uncertain if is an OOC or IC request, it is your responsibility to find out. Ask. If you are making this request, make certain that you specify that it is an OOC statement to help avoid confusion. See also policy safeword.
  • Not leaving someone alone when requested to. - If someone tells you OOC that they desire you not to interact with them, then you are obligated to respect their wishes. As these are OOC requests, that includes any alternate characters you have as well. When making such a request, make it clear that you are speaking OOC. Also, you must yourself stop interacting with the person that you requested not to talk to you.
  • Attacking someone's sexuality, lifestyle, kinks, gender or religion. - This is covered in Policy Public Conduct, but doing these things privately and/or directly to someone is also actionable.
  • Continuing slander and/or public personal attacks. - The use of public rooms and bulletin boards to carry out personal attacks will not be tolerated. Not only is it a harassment problem, but it detracts from uninvolved people's ability to enjoy the muck. See Policy Public Conduct as well. This includes the Tapestries MUCK Forums and other FUR.COM forums.
  • Miscellaneous abusive behavior. - Again read the definition of Harassment.

What to do if you are being harassed?

If you find yourself in a situation where you feel you are being harassed, a lot of the time it can be resolved by all parties involved getting away from each other for a while and calming down. Almost all such situations are misunderstandings of one sort or another.

If, however, this does not help, or the parties can not be separated for whatever reason, then there are a few steps that you need to try before contacting a wizard:

  1. Tell the person, clearly, that you do not wish the treatment, and make it clear that it is an RL/OOC request.
  2. If this does not work, tell the person to leave you alone, again in the same clear RL/OOC way. You should not at this point continue interacting with them yourself. All requests for no contact apply to both parties.
  3. If you feel you would have a hard time ignoring them, "page #ignore [player]" and "whisper #ignore [player]". You may also wish to use your client's ability to filter output from them, if available. Look for the terms "gag" and "ignore" in your client's documentation.
  4. If the problems persist after these steps, page #mail wizzes describing your problem, and request a official No Contact Order (NCO).
  5. If someone violates an Official NCO, do NOT respond to them. Contact a wizard instead.

Requesting an NCO is a last resort. At the point you have done that, it becomes hard to "make up", because it requires a wizard to remove the order. That can only be done by asking a wizard to ask the other party if they are willing to have the order dropped.

Privacy

We believe that privacy is a very important part of making a safe play space.

It is important that a person be able to explore themselves on a muck with out worrying about these things coming to haunt them in other places, or even other characters.

The following things should not be done:

  • Sharing Logs - Sharing logs from Tapestries in any form is prohibited UNLESS everyone who's output is displayed in the log is consulted and agrees to whatever distribution is done FIRST. This not only includes says and poses, but descriptions of people and rooms as well. Violating this is a copyright violation and considered a very serious Muck offense. Editing out names is not sufficient to evade this policy.
  • Real Life Information - Handing out RL information about other players with out their consent is not acceptable. This includes the identities of alts (other characters that they own.)
  • Snooping - People should not attempt to access through tricks of MPI or other code things about people they could not otherwise find out. Getting at descriptions and other properties, writing tools to log or otherwise listen into conversations in areas you are not in and don't own are all examples of this.
  • Monitoring Rooms - Public Building may be monitored by their owners in private monitoring rooms. These monitoring rooms should not cover lockable "private" areas, just the main public ones. Such monitoring should also be mentioned in the area's rules.

Privacy and the Wizards

We believe that privacy is a very important part of making a safe play space.

However, to know you have that privacy, you first must trust your Wizards. To that end, we believe that we need to provide information on what sort of access we can have.

Abilities specific to Tapestries wizards:

  • Command Logging - A restricted set of the wizards have access to a command log of all commands entered on the system. These logs are kept for the last fourteen days, partly due to the size they grow to. At this time only three wizards have this access.
  • Real Name - Your real name is NOT transfered to the muck when your character is created to prevent a security breach from leaking the information. This information is, however, emailed to the wizards as a daily report of registration activity, and stored in a database that only the Head Wizard has access to at this time.
  • Email Address - Your email address is stored on your character in a wizard-only property.

Wizards on Tapestries should not access information about you except as required for them to do their job. This includes actions such as reviewing harassment complaints, debugging server problems, and other policy enforcement and maintenance.

Wizards on Tapestries are selected for their abilities to show restraint. While no person or organization is perfect, we believe we do a good job of this.

Privacy of the Wizards

A wizard's effectiveness is severely compromised if their identity is know, and they tend to burn out if they can no longer enjoy the muck themselves. They deserve their privacy and freedom from harassment as much as you do. Thus:

  • Contacting characters that are not listed in "wizzes" about wizard matters believing that they are an "alternate" character of a wizard is forbidden, and should only be done if there is a dire muck wide emergency.
  • Speaking to people about who you know or suspect to be the "alternate" characters of a wizard or their real life identities is also forbidden.

While most wizards remain anonymous, it is felt that the head wizard, WhiteWizard, needs to be identifiable, so that you have some idea who is running the show. As such it is well known that WhiteFire is WhiteWizard. However, this is still not a reason to contact the character WhiteFire in-game about wizard matters any more than another wizard's alt that you may know about or suspect.

Keep it Legal

Illegal activities will not be tolerated on this Muck. Performing such activities potentially puts other users and the administration of the muck at risk with out their consent. This includes using the Muck to arrange such activities.

As such people found to be using the muck for such activities will be permanently banned from the system with no warning.

Further, if we are approached by law enforcement with proper warrants we will cooperate with them.

Tapestries MUCK is hosted in the State of California in the United States of America. Laws here apply to what you do on the muck as well as your national, state and local laws.

Interacting with Wizards

If you feel you need the assistance of a wizard, or have questions you should use the Request System.

If you have a situation where you can not log into the Muck, you can email the wizards at [1] or use the Forums.

If you feel the issue is something you want to discuss privately with the head wizard, such as an escalation, you may page #mail WhiteWizard, or email [2].

For common building, MUF, and such questions you may get a faster response from the helpstaff, see the "helpstaff" command for a list of these volunteers.

If the Wizards request to speak to you to perform their duties, you should not ignore them, be polite and Out Of Character (OOC). Failure to do so may result in punitive actions.

The wizards are unfortunately not as available as they would like to be, partly because they are under staffed, partly because they are merely volunteers themselves with their own lives. Please be understanding about this.

MUF Programming and Programs

Tapestries MUCK does not provide MUF programming to the general user.

While in the past Tapestries MUCK used to allow a very select group of people access to the ability to program MUF, this is no longer the case. A few existing people with that access and the Wizards are now the only ones that will have that access.

The reasons for this is to preserve your privacy (MUF is very insecure), system resources, system stability (it is very destructive when a MUF programmer withdraws their programs from the muck), and to help prevent Harassment.

Software for use on the muck must meet several criteria:

  1. The software must include a GNU, BSD, or other copyright or license agreement that will allow Tapestries MUCK to use the software with out continuing approval of the author or other parties.
  2. The software must be deemed to be useful to the general populace. This can cover a program used by one or more Public Building facilities, or that are intended for general consumption as a global command, or other widespread usage.
  3. The software must be reviewed by a MUF wizard for security and privacy issues.
  4. Widespread programs, such as those intended to be a global, or to be offered as publicly linkable require the approval of the Head Wizard so that he may retain creative control of the look and feel of the muck.

Right to Refuse Service

Tapestries MUCK and it's Wizards reserve the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.

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