Talking about games here

Where these rules apply

Everywhere you can write something: chat rooms, game comments, wall entries, quick verdicts, your handle, your bio and your picture. The machinery described further down — the filter, the reports, the timeouts — was built for chat and is most visible there, but a slur is a slur in a comment thread and a handle chosen to impersonate somebody is a rules problem wherever it appears.

Ratings are the one thing not covered here, because they cannot really be broken: a rating is your own experience of a game and there is no wrong answer to give. Rating dishonestly to move a score — with a second account, or in concert with other people — is covered by the terms, and it is one of the few things that ends an account outright.

What the rooms are for

• Stay on the game. Each room belongs to one game. A room about Elden Ring that has become a room about anything else is no longer useful to the person who came to it stuck on a boss.
• Being bad at something is not embarrassing. This whole site exists because difficulty is real and personal. Nobody gets mocked for bouncing.
• Answer the question that was asked. “Just get good” is not help, and “play it the way I did” usually is not either.

Spoilers

Wrap anything that gives away a story beat, a boss, or an ending in double bars — ||like this|| — and it stays hidden until somebody chooses to read it. Some rooms are marked as allowing open spoilers; those are the only ones where you can skip it. Getting this wrong is the most common way to ruin somebody’s week, and it is also the easiest one to avoid.

What gets a message removed

• Slurs, harassment, and threats. There is no version of these that is a joke here.
• Sexual content, and anything involving minors, in any form.
• Encouraging self-harm. If you are struggling, a chat room is not the right help.
• Spam, advertising, invite links, and scam offers.
• Unmarked spoilers in a room that has not opted into them.
• Impersonating another player or a moderator.
• Somebody’s personal information — address, real name, workplace, private photographs — posted without their agreement. This one comes down on sight, and there is a route for it that does not depend on a moderator being awake.

How moderation actually works

Messages pass an automatic filter before anybody sees them. Most go straight through. Some are held for a person to look at — you will be told when that happens to yours, and the room will not see it in the meantime. A few are refused outright.

The filter is not clever. It is deliberately blunt, and it will occasionally be wrong about a sentence containing the word assassin. When it is, a human overturns it. It errs towards holding rather than blocking for exactly that reason.

Consequences run in order: a warning, then a timeout you can wait out, then losing chat entirely. Every one of them is recorded with a written reason by the person who did it. A moderator who cannot say why does not act.

Reporting and blocking

Report a message when a rule was broken. The report keeps a copy of what was said at the time, so editing it afterwards changes nothing.

Block somebody when you would simply rather not read them. It needs no reason and no approval, it is not a punishment, and they are never told. Moderators still see everything either way — otherwise blocking would be a way to make evidence disappear.

Private rooms

Anyone can open a small room and approve who comes in. Every rule on this page still applies inside it. Borderline material gets more room among four people who chose each other than it does in a room the whole site can walk into — but slurs and threats are the same thing in a room of two as in a room of five hundred, and are treated the same way.

Voice rooms

Some rooms have a call in them. Joining one asks your browser for the microphone, and nothing is sent until you say yes — you can sit in a voice room and only type, and plenty of people will. Everyone in the room sees who is in the call and who is speaking.

Nothing said out loud is recorded, and that cuts both ways: the audio goes directly between the people in the call and never reaches us, so there is no transcript for a moderator to read afterwards. The rules on this page still apply to what you say, but the only evidence of a voice conversation is the people who were in it. If somebody is a problem in a call, the host can remove them from the room, and a report explaining what happened is worth filing even without a message to attach it to.

Calls hold a handful of people, not a crowd. That is a deliberate ceiling: eight people can have a conversation, and forty can only take turns being talked over.

If you think a decision was wrong

Say so. Every action has a recorded reason attached to it, which means there is something concrete to disagree with rather than a shrug. Timeouts expire on their own; you do not have to argue your way out of one to get your voice back.

For anything longer than a timeout — chat taken away, an account closed — write to sharedwork37@gmail.com from the address on the account, with what happened and when. A different person than the one who took the action reads it wherever there is a different person to be had. Appeals about a filter that held the wrong sentence are the easiest to win and the most useful to receive, because they are how the filter gets less blunt.