Allow me to bring my personal thoughts, questions and reaction to said rules.
I always had the strong belief that good rules needed to be pushed and tested, at a theoretical level at least, in order to be improved and polished
So dont mind me if the following contains some "devil advocate's speech", some extreme/unlikely to happen situations, or some rather weird-logic stuff:
GENERAL RULES:
Always treat others with kindness and respect, even if you don’t agree with them.
Implying we would be allowed to disagree with someone, and even more: express it ?
Use appropriate language.
Define "appropriate" ? same word can be appropriate or not, going from one country/culture to another. What is the common universal baseground ?
We don’t tolerate hate speech, intimidation, harassment, sexual, racial, or ethnic slurs, and discrimination.
So, for example, one shall refrain to post something like "i hate ISIS" in a support thread for victims of terror strike anymore, because it would both be discriminatory and hateful, right ?
WE DON’T TOLERATE:
Posting your own as well as other people’s personally identifiable information (i.e. name, address, email, phone number, place of work, etc.).
I get the "other's personal information" rule, but i fail to see about our own.
Posting links to phishing sites, malware, or spyware.
Considering Sony infected various computers and networks 10years ago with a very resilient rootkit malware by willingly injecting it in his products (music disks) and Microsoft's actual Windows 10 OS having some very valid concern/issues regarding pricacy and telemetry overabuse and other troubles of same category, it wouldnt be allowed to speak or link about those any longer, in my book ?
Impersonating forum moderators or other users.
Maybe a change in GOG display character font to prevents some letters/numbers to be used in that way could be a step in the good direction too, then ?
Spamming, bashing, flaming, trolling, or abusing the reputation and/or “report as spam” function.
So if someone is displaying an inappropriate behavior and message, while moderation is taking due daily rest, if more than one other user publicly comment about it being innappropriate or unwanted, then those users would be considered as bashing ?
Creating multiple accounts.
well i already have a secondary one, created during a serious tech bug on my main account that prevented me to buy on GOG, and about which support left me one full month without any answer or action after just telling me that it was a bug on my account side... what do i do about this account ? (in fact there is my main username within this new account's name, and i dont use it anymore, that's it until the next major account-breaking bug, i mean)
Aside from this personal anecdotic reminder, good luck to enforce it given the actual tech tools at people's disposal
Posting something that is knowingly false.
"knowingly false" is highly subjective, some countries or people do not have access to same sources of knowledge and/or education. Hell in my country in a tv-reality show there was a "player" who was convinced therwere two moons, one for each side of earth... "Knowingly false" could sometimes seem rather discriminatory of some less educated people or some countries's dwellers.
Thread bumping, hijacking or posting off-topic.
Well, what about the "don't create a new thread, use search function for existing thread on same topic FIRST", if cannot thread bump the existing thread one would find (highly doubtful with the search function available as it is), then the "do this and that FIRST" falls shorrt if FIRST followed by an interdiction to do anything "SECOND". My two cents
Posting pornography, inappropriate or offensive content, warez, unreleased game content, and things that are generally considered not suitable for work.
Games mods, total conversions, additional created contents or simply community-corrected games bugs/contents will so fall under this rule i guess !
Also, please tell why "unreleased game contents" would be on same bench than "offensive content", "pornography" and illegal "warez" or "NSFW", it's like mixing up two completely different stuff like vegetables and minerals alike/all the same. Many unreleased game contents are neither pornographic, nor offensive, nor illegal, nor NSFW
Linking to cracks, key generators, and pirated content. However, discussions about piracy are generally acceptable.
Well, considering that, in the past, as a part of tech/customer supports, some well known publishers supplied cracked exe files for some of their games as an official solution directly from themselves (the cracked exe still bearing the mark of any known warez group and not of the publisher's), what do we do in this situation ?
Using a third party’s intellectual property (full or partial scans of articles, books, full transcriptions of articles, etc.) unless you have permission to do so.
So no more "backing sources" when discussing a topic ? Also no more youtube links (like the 80ies vibe thread for example)
Selling (including real life or in-game trading), advertising, referrals, auctioning - unless this applies to giveaways.
No trading anymore then
Use of language that is abusive, vulgar, hateful, defamatory, obscene, profane, threatening, privacy-invasive, or law-violating.
As fine as i would consider this rule, it also appears to me as potentially discriminatory towards people suffering from tourette syndrome
Taking any other actions that are deemed inappropriate by GOG.com at our sole discretion.
joker rule for hidden intent against anything. Fair, should have started with this one maybe, or just bring this one alone without bothering writing down the rest.
