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Stupid Rules


Rune
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I know you've seen them. The dumb rules that make you go "... Huh?" 

Share them with me!

 

From a site that got weirder the more I read... (And is long since dead. By several years.)

Quote

If You Sign Into The Site And You DON’T Sign In At All To Any Of The IMing Systems Without A GREAT Cause Which MUST Be PMed To The Admin ON The Site, You Will Warranted A Minimum Of 500 Chores And Go Up From There! This Will NEVER Change!

 

I have no idea where chores figure into anything as that isn't explained and the rules only get weirder.

Edited by Rune
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Here's stupid from my own rules, and I fully admit they make no sense: Without explanation, without plot related reasons, I list Kazon and Talaxians as not being available for player characters at all. This is right next to species that make sense to prevent players from having characters of, such as borg and Q. I'm just waiting for someone to ask me about it or call me out on it.

 

Also, because I could, I listed Tribbles in the 'may be available with command team permission' list.

 

I'm really surprised no one has said anything.

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Captain Amelia Waterhouse, Commanding Officer

=/\= Join =/\= Roster & Openings =/\= Rules =/\= Chat =/\=

"It is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so." -Mark Twain

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Guest Archaic Cyborg

"No het characters' , and then 'no bis'. And this isn't even for a marriage or dating game (as if that would make it acceptable :T)

 

'No ugly characters'. or something to that effect. It was... strange.

 

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The old 'PLEASE SIGN UP WITH YOUR NAME IN ALL CAPS'. Well, not a bad rule in itself, but when staff make a huge deal out of it, chastising members when they don't do it. Psst, if you don't want the headache, just put text-transform: uppercase; into the username CSS. Sheesh!

 

'While we don't have a word count, we prefer at least X paragraphs' Either there is a word count or there isn't, so I don't see the need for vague statements like that which could be interpreted differently until the cows come home! :P

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1 hour ago, Honorem said:

'While we don't have a word count, we prefer at least X paragraphs' Either there is a word count or there isn't, so I don't see the need for vague statements like that which could be interpreted differently until the cows come home! :P


Oh gosh yes because that is so clear. Especially if they say we consider x amount of sentences a paragraph. So there is a word count just one in disguise. I do understand including something like that you have to talk it over with your partner. Other things I still see as a word count. 

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Threats.

 

I mean seriously, whenever I see threats in someone's rules I just kind of roll my eyes and move on. At best threats are a joke because most people don't have the power or knowledge to do anything. All they really do is show how powerless that admin is. (If someone did have the power to do something, they'd almost never threaten it. They don't want people to know they can do that until it's far too late. Well, that or because then if anything ever did happen they'd be suspect of it every time even though they were innocent.)

 

Plus, not going to lie, they come off pretty juvenile looking.

 

 

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"There are three sides to every story... Your side, their side, and then somewhere in the middle is the truth."
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Oh, on top of the threats, when the punishment for breaking every single rule is a ban. If your site looks like I'll get banned if I sneeze wrong, I'm not going to bother because I'm going to go ahead and assume I'm already banned.

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Gotta add something about threats too. When first person tense is used along with threats it just looks ridiculous. 'If you break X rule I will do this or that to you'. It just seems tacky like I'm reading the admin's personal diary full of rants. I mean, big companies don't write their TOS out in first person with the CEO saying 'I WILL PUNISH YOU', so I don't believe rules should be worded that way either. Just my preference.

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To be honest, there is only one rule on my current site that feels extreme, but I do it to protect folks.

 

We all know sites can go from G - NSFW in a heartbeat depending on the players. My only rule that will result in a removal from the site, is people playing anyone under 18 in those situations. It's a rule I've had on every site I've ever run, and no one's broken it. Sometimes I look at it and think it's a little extreme, but then I've never had to break it, seen it broken, so... it helps me sleep better at night, really.

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One I see pop up now and then is the "no cliques" one. Like it's something you can control. I get the reasoning behind it, but I find it hard to believe it actually works the way they intend.

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Guest Archaic Cyborg

A lot of sites have it, and sometimes I can understand the reasoning behind it, but--

 

'Have fun!'

 

Do people really need to be reminded to have fun in this hobby? Or is RP really just an outlet for angry young (and old) people to find reasons to nitpick and criticise each other? :T

 

Another one:

'You must have # high quality icons, with at least 6 different expressions, uploaded within 48 hours or else we will remove and ban you.' True story. I've seen this a lot at journal rpgs, it's insane. People and their damn icon-hoarding. As if owning # icons will prove you're a legit rper who's in the game for long-term purposes.

 

#3:

'No pregnancies'. While I've zero interest in marriage, dating & family-life plots, this rule has always seemed... off to me. Are pregnancy plots that common and game-breaking? Buh.

 

#4:

'No swearing, no racism, sexism'. Not OOCly, but IC. I once found a game where characters could not say anything remotely hateful / prejudiced / third example to another character, and the staff were/are deadly serious about it, too. Absolutely no hate was allowed at any level, and this was for a historical game--- where, welp, prejudices was as common as today, if not more. I hate it when people try to censor history like that. It's not all fun and games, certainly, but ...

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I've always found the "Be respectful" rule to be somewhat stupid. I mean each person has a different idea of what constitutes respectful. Your idea may not align with the next person's. (For example, one may find someone not using capitals disrespectful. Another person may find a lack of capitals acceptable but instead may take issue when someone inserts excessive punctuation. Yet another may find it disrespectful to use chatspeak.) And saying be respectful comes with the implication that people have to know what the admin means by it and abide by it. But people aren't mind readers, they can't know.

I understand the idea is to help condense the rules down, but take the extra few sentences and just lay out the behaviours you don't want (or expect) because the clarity goes a long way. 

Furthermore, I've also seen it as a general catch all for issues... but there really are far better ways to say it than a be respectful rule. (I much prefer something akin to: "Anything not explicitly covered by the aforementioned rules is subject to admin discretion."  Problem solved plus, I think anyway, it sounds better.)

 

 

The pregnancy one is one I haven't seen a lot myself... but I do understand the reasoning for it. One one site I was on pregnancy was banned because most of the character were incapable of ever being pregnant or getting a woman pregnant. (This species didn't get pregnant.)

Likely because there are too many times when a player tries to use the pregnancy to get a character that skirts the rules in other ways.

 

For examples:

- children of canon characters may have extra powers/abilities due to their parents; or,

- if they have a limit of characters they can use a pregnancy to get by it; or, 

- in some cases it's so they can force a particular ship. (Like from the Marvel Cinematic Universe... a Bruce and Natasha shipper might have Natasha get pregnant by Bruce to force that pairing even though Bruce is with Betty.)

 

Which means pregnancy can easily slip into powerplaying territory because it means that another character was involved. I could also easily see admins that just have had really bad experiences with people pushing pregnancies so they just don't want it to be an issue. 

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"There are three sides to every story... Your side, their side, and then somewhere in the middle is the truth."
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While I don't agree with outright bans on pregnancy, I have seen and heard some horror stories that can explain why some inexperienced admins might just go full on ban without an ic reason.

 

The biggest problem I see is people who do it without talking to the person who they claim is the father. Even if they're in a setting that has safe effective birth control. Or in a situation where building a family wouldn't be possible, such as military type situation that would result in a reassignment right out of the setting of the rp, then the player whines because they need to make a new character in order to keep playing.

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Captain Amelia Waterhouse, Commanding Officer

=/\= Join =/\= Roster & Openings =/\= Rules =/\= Chat =/\=

"It is human nature to yearn to be what we were never intended for. It is singular, but it is so." -Mark Twain

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I do temp bans on it. For whatever reason we have yearly baby booms so I let the boom happen, then ban it for a while so that we don't wind up with a million babies for no reason. It's weirdly effective.

 

I hate the For Every X you must roll a Y rules. But I also don't get the strict need to have gender ratios even.

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