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Forum Rules

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  1. The Basic Rules
  2. The Curse
  3. The Complicated Stuff
  4. Forum Vocabulary

Hi! Welcome to Tin Soldier‘s forum! There’s a lot going on. Maybe you’re excited to get started. Maybe you’re scared to participate. It’s okay! I’m excited and scared too! First thing’s first, these are the ground rules.

(Right now we are in beta! I’m making sure the plugin works and learning how people want to use the forum. When we go full-featured, these rules will look different and/or make more sense.)

The Basic Rules

Be Excellent to Each Other. Be Excellent to Our Universe. 

The Six Commandments

  • Read. We are text-based. Listening and understanding means reading carefully and asking for clarification when needed.
  • Respect. Obey boundaries, label things appropriately, give credit where credit is due. Be kind and understanding and act in ways deserving of kindness and understanding.
  • Repurpose. Sharing is caring. Tin Soldier is meant to be shared; your content is a contribution. We ❤ Creative Commons, Fair Use and the Public Domain. When you use another person’s content, give credit and add value.
  • Create. If you’re enjoying what’s here, please give something back. Even if it’s just a comment about how neat a thing is.
  • Donate. Your time, your talent, and your actual money can be used to help others. Contribute to the site upkeep and the Charity of the Month, or pick a cause of your own.
  • Engage. Give attention to get attention. Don’t just dump content and run, stay around and talk about it and give other people’s creations a look.

The Curse

Break any of the rules or violate what may fairly be called human decency, and misfortune will come on swift wings and nest in your home. Unless it is a hip misfortune, then it will probably use an Uber or another rideshare application. Your creations will turn to dust in your hands. You will die in obscurity, but not before everything you care about is pried away from you. Karma will take a crap on your head. The Furies will hork up pellets in your shoes. You will be vulnerable to demons, mysterious rashes, and any and all coronaviruses — including the crummy beer and the Big One. Every bad thing that happens to you can be attributed to the fact that you screwed around with the infinite, and there will be no absolution — because I do not control these forces, I just point them in your direction and they do whatever they want.

The Complicated Stuff

Okay, all this stuff here is about agreeing where the boundaries are and rules to make sure people get credit for their contributions. You can skim if you want or only look up the specifics when you need them, but you’re responsible for behaving as if you’ve read and understood all of the following:

  1.  All Tin Soldier content, here and elsewhere, is under a blanket Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (subject to updating with similar features) — with the additional requirement that at least 50% of your profits go to charity. Simply subtract your operating costs and divide what’s left with a charity.
    1. Organizations that operate for profit or have been flagged as hate groups by the SPLC are not recognized as charities.
    2. If you sell your work, you are on your honor to follow these rules, and if you break your word you are cursed.
    3. I will publish my finances here in abbreviated format and let you know who I’m donating to.
    4. If you’re not profiting off what you’ve made, don’t worry about this part.
  2. To credit me on works offsite use the format: CC BY SA: Wyvr – tinsoldier.space, with a link to the Home page where possible. Onsite, it’s not as important, you all know where you are and who I am.
    1. Please use the “signature” feature to let us know how to credit you on your works. Use the format [YOUR NAME OR ALIAS] – [YOUR SITE, IF YOU HAVE ONE]. If you leave your signature blank, you will be credited as [YOUR FORUM USERNAME] – tinsoldier.space.
      1. If your site has adult content, for heaven’s sake either wall it off or warn people. Don’t be rude. If I find out you’re being rude, you’re banned. No warning or explanation. See below. (Also, you’re cursed.)
  3. If I don’t like it, I won’t host it. Period. You are free to find another host with different rules about content. If I don’t like it, I will delete it. Do not expect a warning or an explanation.
    1. Bearing that in mine: Keep a hard copy of your work! I’m not a real archive. I don’t have the time or the skills. Even if you don’t piss me off and get deleted, I may screw up my code and break everything so badly it can’t be fixed, or get hacked or arrested or something. Your work is yours, so protect it.
  4. Be Excellent to Each Other.
    1. If you’re not RPing in the designated area (Pending! I will designate a board when we’re out of beta. Until then, tag what you’re doing.), you should behave as a real person representing your real self. You should assume other people are real people representing their real selves. If the real person is a total jackass, do not administer vigilante justice, hit up the Contact page and report them.
    2. Make your best effort not to use the word ‘colored’ to talk about innate magic-users in shared spaces offsite. See: Notes on ‘Colored.’
    3. Swearing is allowed and expected, but keep the graphic stuff to the adult forums.
    4. Check your n-word privileges and similar at the door. We can’t see you. Not everyone knows you. And you’re going to get us flagged on search engines if you’re not careful.
      1. In-story and in-character use of slurs should serve a narrative purpose, and don’t go crazy with ‘em.
  5. Be Excellent to Our Universe.
    1. We are sharing. Don’t pee in the pool. We have designated areas. (We will eventually! Tag things until then!) Warn people about content, use the Pain Stars Index, tag things appropriately, and put them where they belong.
    2. Learn the vocabulary so you can communicate what you’re doing. See: Forum Vocabulary.
    3. You will not use any Tin Soldier content with intent to harm people for things about themselves that they cannot change. This includes but is not limited to:
      1. Race, ethnicity or heritage
      2. Gender or sexuality
      3. Disability
      4. Poverty (Wealth is excluded. It is very easy to stop being wealthy. Try it!)
      5. THOU SHALT PUNCH UP! Onsite, I will judge whether you are punching up. Offsite, you are subject to the curse.
    4. TAG YOUR SPOILERS! (See below.)
    5. Pandora’s Box (When available!) is to be used to make your content consistent. For example, if you know what that thing is in Room 101, you can make it behave appropriately in your works. Using your work to tell everyone what the thing is before I do in-story would be A Dick Move. I will ban you if I find out and you will be cursed whether I find out or not.
      1. If you happen to guess something I haven’t revealed in-story yet and I see you do not have access to Pandora’s Box, I will decline to comment or look you straight in the eye and lie about whether you’re right.
  6. Roleplaying and all other types of group activity will obey playground rules.
    1. The nature of your reality is agreed upon by mutual consent.
    2. If you fire your laser (or take another action) the person fired upon gets to describe if and how they take the hit.
    3. Please break character to negotiate what happens next and let other players know what you’re comfortable with. Use OOC: [CONTENT] /OOC  to contain such remarks to keep it clear.
    4. If you can’t work it out between yourselves, the teacher will break you up and either somebody will go in Time Out or nobody will get to play anymore.
    5. Please use the forum boards for long format playing with multiple paragraphs. We’re not set up to do the rapid fire IM-type stuff. Take that somewhere else.
    6. Give me a chance to play my characters here! I will if I have time and it looks fun.
    7. Sexual roleplay needs to go somewhere else. Not that it doesn’t have artistic merit or shouldn’t be shared, it just needs to go somewhere else. Not here. Romance – yes. Sex – dress hits floor and pull the shades. ‘Kay?
  7. Acceptable uploads are: jpg, jpeg, gif, png, bmp, pdf.
    1. Please consider hosting large works yourself, or outsourcing to AO3, and linking them. I’m paying for this space and I can’t afford a lot right now.
  8. You may edit and delete your own posts forever and ever. For deletion of entire threads, contact me or a moderator, if I should ever have any of those. Because your work may lose context or an entire thread may go, if it’s important to you, back it up and keep the files!
  9. If you want your work to be considered for adoption into canon (ACA) please label it PCA. See: Forum Vocabulary.
  10. If you want me to look at something you’ve done, even if it’s already at the forum, Submit it to be sure.
  11. Do your homework. Know the basics and consume at least some of the canon work before you start creating. I built this house and we can’t play in it if you start knocking out the walls right away. If you act like the Deetzes, I will go Beetlejuice on you — think giant snake, not Day-O.
  12. Because I’m throwing open the doors, I know trash is going to get in. We are going to manage horrible people via a combination of deplatforming and existential dread. If you believe in the metaphysical, you will use this content under a threat of metaphysical harm. If you’re more of a materialist, you’re risking psychological damage. Tin Soldier’s content comes packaged with a curse. I got brujeria on one side of my heritage and evil eye on the other, and I studied some psychology before I burned out on college, so this is for realsies. The specific wording is above with the basic information.
    1. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe. The human mind is a weird, scary place. You will always wonder if maybe you really did piss off the universe, and if you’re reaping what you sowed. The National Parks people made up those curses about taking rocks from National Parks — and they still get rocks in the mail from scared people who started blaming the bad things in their lives on the easiest cause. (That doesn’t work. You’ve removed the rocks from their geological context and they can’t be put back, so you’re still cursed.) This will happen to you.
    2. If necessary, the curse, the installments and the weekly forum topic combined will make a basis for claiming Tin Soldier is a religion. If I have to take you to court to make you stop being a dick with my/our content, I have a legal justification outside of trademarking and copyright laws.
    3. I’d rather give money to charity than a bunch of lawyers, so just play nice, okay?

Forum Vocabulary

Most of these terms are common sense, but I’m defining them and adding some abbreviations to keep things clear.

Types of Content

  • Posted: Anything in the forums or on the site.
  • Submitted: Something you’ve asked me to look at for some reason. (Use the Contact page to be sure, I won’t necessarily see you if you jump up and down and wave at the forum.) Reasons include – wanting to be featured in the Showcase, proving you’re over 18, potential adoption to canon, it’s really cool and I’d like it, and others.
  • Showcase: Things I have featured on Showcase weeks. If your content has been featured and you want it taken down, I need to hear in writing from everyone involved in its creation
  • Offsite: Hosted somewhere else. Even if you come back here and tell us about it, if it’s hosted somewhere else, it’s offsite.
  • Onsite: Everything you find at the “tinsoldier.space” address, without following a link away from it.

Spoilers!

  • In general, we’re going to assume everyone has read the Pilot (the first four installments), and the basic information on the Characters page. Significant plot developments (this is a gray area, use your judgment) beyond that are spoilers.
    • For ease of access, you may tag a whole topic or reply in bold in the first paragraph, such as Spoilers about [FILL IN THE BLANK] or I have read up to [FILL IN THE BLANK].
    • Spoilers which are not covered by a blanket notice in the first paragraph may be hidden with the help of the little button, or the obvious shortcode.
  • In the weekly thread for the current installment, we will assume that everyone in the thread has read everything through that installment. But I will try to remember to remind everyone.
  • WHAT HAPPENS IN PANDORA’S BOX STAYS IN PANDORA’S BOX. If I haven’t mentioned it elsewhere yet, don’t talk about it anywhere else, not even hidden behind shortcode.

Fun with Abbreviations and Tags

  • CA: Canon. This is the stuff that Wyvr (me) produces. Unless I’ve specifically tagged it otherwise.
  • DubCA: Dubious Canon. This is a pun, but it’s applicable to stuff I’m not sure about, or I’ve screwed up and corrected, or screwed up and not corrected yet, or changed for plot reasons.
  • NCA: Non-Canon. This is your default mode for creating Tin Soldier content. It covers all differences from CA, ranging from “so consistent it could have happened but didn’t” to “everyone is furry and also on the starship Enterprise for some reason.”
  • PCA: Potential Canon. This is something so consistent it could’ve happened but didn’t that you’d like me to look at in case I’d like to say it did happen.
  • ACA: Not the Affordable Care Act but Adopted Canon. This is something somebody else produced that I’ve decided to include in CA. I will credit the person. I will adopt from anywhere, not just PCA, if it’s really cool. Tin Soldier content is under a blanket CC license which requires we all share, with credit.
    • There is always the possibility that somebody guesses a plot development or a mechanic I haven’t told you about yet, so you’re going to have to trust me about what’s mine and what’s truly yours.
  • ALT: For when you have spun off your own universe with its own rules, but still derived from Tin Soldier in some way. If you’re going to set a lot of content in one consistent universe, tag it ALT and give it a snappy name so people can talk about it and use it. For example: ALT: Tin Jurassic Park.
  • THERE ARE NO TAGS FOR ADULT CONTENT. Adult content at the forum is board-specific. Put it (or links to it) where it belongs.
    • Artistic nudity is considered Adult Content. Let’s be polite to people browsing in public.
  • OOC: Out of Character.
  • PSI: Pain Stars Index. See here.
  • RP: Roleplay.
  • TSV: Tin Soldier ‘Verse. A blanket term for everything Tin Soldier-derived.