A quick note: These are by no means a complete description on how to conduct yourself in the group. It is simply a list of "DO NOT"s that I've gotten tired of seeing people DO. As well, these are for our steam group chat room only. This has NOTHING to do with private messages, in-game chat and importantly the IRC channel. This has nothing to do with how us as friends talk to each other or how any of us should see or treat anyone else. It is only to deal with the difficulty of moderating our steam group chat room. ________________________________________________________ I've been moulding some stricter rules for our steam chat room in my head for a month or two now. Steam's admin tools are not as complete as they could be and that makes moderating people who don't conduct themselves as well as we'd like harder. This hasn't been too much of an issue most of the time before because everyone has either conducted themselves well enough(-ish) or hasn't, but rarely anything in between for very long. Now it's starting to get, not too hard but, too frustrating to keep things in check and not ruin the atmosphere. So to make things easier, for everyone and anyone using the steam chat room, I have the following rules: -- No all caps (objective) If it's an accident, ok, but you should not have any reason to post in all caps, there are always better ways and if you can't see them then you haven't thought very hard about what you're trying to say. This is also a pretty universal rule for the entire English-speaking internet. -- No in-the-news people-politics (kinda subjective because strictly, politics is a very broad topic and the news does talk about cool stuff sometimes) Absolutely no discussion of politicians, laws, celebrates, international affairs, government nor elections. This is not a news group. That's not to say history that involves politics and science that's in the news cannot be discussed, but the politics of telling other people what to do causes way too many arguments that dissolve into flame wars and hate and is too boring for everyone else when they don't. Oh and it also too often mixes with... -- No religion (kinda objective, because it's easy to spot a mile off but the informed/though-out opinion part of this is hard to nail) For pretty much the same reason as above. You can mention you're at church and what you're doing (your culture, if you will), but we don't want to hear anything about your beliefs or opinions. At least not in steam chat because discussing it is off-limits for everyone else (because we don't know whether you'll conduct yourself well in the discussion and in steam we can only remove you from it if you don't) -- Don't be an ass - (subjective) Sometimes I'm an ass to others here. Sometimes it's by mistake or misunderstanding, sometimes there's good intent (bad thing for the right reason), but sometimes I'm less innocent. I've seen just about everyone here be somewhat of an ass (or maybe that's how I've seen it because whoever it was pissed me off a little), but if we agree that you're being an ass and you don't stop to listen, expect a kick because with steam, that's our only next step. The objective stuff you can expect an instant kick, almost as a reminder, because there will be no warning. The really subjective stuff we'll do a lot too, but in moderation and if you try it too and mess it up, you'll get a lot of hate pointed your way. As a final reminder, this is only for steam chat, we have an IRC channel and most topics are open for discussion most of the time, if you're tread carefully enough and you're subtly enough. It's just that with steam, it's hard to get everyone to follow these unspoken but important rules of discussion. Also there's usually fewer on IRC so you'll bore fewer. ;)