Table of Contents

I. General Comments
..1. Common sense
..2. Rights of Staff and Member Contract
..3. Elastic Clause
II. Serious Offenses
..4. Flaming
..5. Trolling
..6. Disrespecting Staff
..7. Bigotry
..8. Disrespect of Community
..9. ROMs, Pornography and copyright material/etc.
..10. M-rated material
..11. Multiple Accounts
III. Minor, but Strictly Enforced Offenses
..12. Horizontal Scrollbars
..13. Image Dimension Limits
..14. Signature Image File Size Limit
..15. Profile Photo
..16. Spam
..17. Substanceless Posts
..18. Consecutive Posting
..19. Postcount Frenzy
..20. Advertising
IV. Guidelines
..21. Offtopic Posts
..22. Incomprehensible Posts
..23. Rent-a-mod
..24. Old topics
..25. PMs
..26. Signature
..27. Sarcasm
V. Consequences
VI. Staff
..28. Purpose and Rights of Staff
..29. Staff ranks
..30. Right of appeal
..31. Contacting Staff
..32. Becoming Staff



I. General Comments

1. Common sense
The rules of PureZC are based on common sense. The first and most important principle is this: Do not do anything that could hurt the site or any of its members. This page serves to elaborate and make precise what we mean. All rules apply, unless otherwise stated, to the whole of the site purezc.com including the forums, shoutbox, calendar and personal messages, and our chatroom #purezc currently located at irc.sixlabrats.com .

2. Rights of Staff and Member Contract
By becoming a member, you accept that this place is run by the staff and will abide by both the written rules and anything the staff instructs you to do. The staff reserve the right to act however they see necessary according to their own staff guidelines. They may at any time take action including but not limited to: Suspending, banning, modifying or removing user accounts, modifying or removing posts and topics without offering explanation or being answerable to the members. PureZC is not a democracy, you are allowed to post here only as long as the owner and staff tolerate you. Further information can be found in the staff section below.

3. Elastic Clause
No set of rules can ever cover all eventualities. No written rule can ever cover all the exceptional circumstances. For this reason, the staff reserve the right to use their own judgment and be more lenient or strict as the circumstances require.

If anything is unclear to you in any way about the site or its rules, don't hesitate to ask.


II. Serious Offenses
All offenses listed in this section are taken seriously and will have consequences for rule-breakers. Serious or repeated violations may lead to an immediate ban.

4. Flaming
Here, flaming falls under the definition of directly calling another member a derogatory word, or clearly insinuating that a derogatory word in your post applies to a member or group of members. An important thing to remember is if you are flamed by someone, don't flame back. As a matter of fact, you may want to avoid replying to the flame entirely, because most people who flame are looking to irritate the person they flame, and replying to them makes them feel successful at doing so. If you're worried about your post being a flame, note that usually a specific word like "idiot" can be cited in a flame. Then again, if you are worried about your post being a flame, you're probably trolling.

5. Trolling
Trolling is a less serious form of flaming, and at the same time broader. This is mostly comments that clearly belittle another member or make them feel unwelcome. Telling them to shut up is an example. If you don't like someone's posting habits, do not be mean about it. Trolling is also often done as flamebaiting, or trying to get the person to flame back. If that's what you're doing, don't post it. Also, repeatedly borderline trolling a member wherever he posts (stalking in essence) falls under here.

6. Disrespecting Staff
If a staff member makes a decision, do not argue about it in the topic or even in a new one. You are allowed to PM that person or a higher up to say why you disagree with the decision, and we will consider your point. Make the PM civilized though. This also includes direct and intentional disobeying of something a staff member says.

7. Bigotry
Racist posts, anti-semitic posts, and any other comment which trolls or flames a whole group of people (examples: gays or furries) are not allowed here. If you ever see a debate involving bigotry (example: whether whites are supreme or not), it's better not to participate in it. The topic will likely be closed soon with appropriate warnings given out.

8. Disrespect of Community
Plots to destroy/tease (such as spamming or hacking) other communities, members, and such are not acceptable on PureZC (posting and such). Impersonating our staff on other communities in such plots is also not acceptable. People found breaking this rule risk being banned from our community for an indefinite amount of time depending upon the circumstances. This seems harsh, but we do not welcome people using us as a crutch just to pull pranks (destructive, annoying, or whatever).

9. ROMs, Pornography and copyright material/etc.
There's two things you can do to break this rule: you can either post a link to said stuff, or you can ask for it. If you ask for it, your topic will be closed and you will be warned. If you actually post a link to it, the link will be edited out and you'll be warned, and if you posted a topic about the site, you'll probably have your topic closed as well. Illegal material can get us shut down, so breaking this rule is considered one of the more serious offenses.

10. M-rated material
Excessive gore (in images or avatars), excessive sexual content, and excessive profanity are among the forms of content that are considered unacceptable here. In addition, do not evade the censors we have by replacing an I in the word with a 1, for example. They are put in to avoid people having excessive profanity in the first place. Depending on how bad it is, the severity of your warning for this varies.

11. Multiple Accounts
Unless two people use the same computer (or more, doesn't matter), don't register multiple accounts, or you may face consequences. Usually your alternate account will be banned for good, and you'll take a step closer towards a ban for your original account. If you're already banned when it is registered (which is most common in cases of this rule), then expect your ban time to be extended.

III. Minor, but Strictly Enforced Offenses
These offenses are not serious like those above, but are still strictly enforced by the staff. The purpose of this is to make these limits clear (many have been stepped over frequently in the past) and enforceable without too much debate. By strict, we mean exactly that. If the image size limit is 500x500, do not post a 501x501 pixel image. No exceptions.

12. Horizontal Scrollbars
Posting a huge line of text without any spaces or anything to trigger the word wrap is going to cause horizontal scrollbars from some people. For instance, posting_a_whole_paragraph_like_this. If you do this, your post will be edited with spaces until there is no horizontal scrollbar, and you will receive a warning for it. This is a rather large nuisance to people when it happens.

13. Image Dimension Limits
Images more than 600 pixels in either height or width are not allowed, due to the potential for horizontal scrollbars for those with lower display resolutions and also to make loading times easier for everyone. If you want to post an image that breaks the size limit, use [url] tags instead of [img] tags to link to the image.

- Note: There is no longer an exception for ZQuest screenshots that go over such dimensions. So please don't embed ZQuest images that are in big mode.

14. Signature Image File Size Limit
Each signature is restricted to 200kb worth of images. Every image put into a signature via IMG tags will be counted, and if the total is greater than 200kb plus the added 2kb of breather space, then you will be warned. This is meant to make the forums easier and faster to be viewed by everyone.

15. Profile Photo
The Profile Photo option available in the User CP is to only be used for photos of yourself. We do not have the server space to waste on a "second avatar." In other words, if you do not want to share your real picture, don't use it! Repeated abuse of this feature may result in loss of certain forum privileges, such as inbox size or mass PM option, for an indefinite period.

16. Spam
Spam (stupid pointless annoying messages) is generally defined as messages that have nothing to do with the topic, are completely pointless, or show extremely little thought behind them. It's not the most serious offense, but continuing to do it after warnings is a fairly quick way to face harsher consequences on the forums, such as a posting restriction or being put on moderator preview mode.

17. Substanceless Posts
Do not make posts such as "Hey it's cheese" or "Monkeys eat soup". Purposeless posts like these are considered spam and thus not tolerated. Also classified as substanceless posts are 1-3 word posts that add very little to the thread, even if they're on topic. Additionally, posting in a topic saying the same thing when you've pretty much already said it is pointless, and is therefore considered spam.

18. Consecutive Posting
Posting twice or more in a row is not allowed. There are 3 exceptions.

1. If 12 hours have passed since your first post. The reason for making a post like this might be to bring your topic up to the top of the forum listing- in other words, a BUMP (Bring Up More Posts.) A triple post is allowed if 48 hours have passed since the last post and if the post adds content to the thread. Thus, you can make three consecutive posts within 48 hours, but the third cannot be a BUMP post. A quadruple post is not allowed, unless one of the other two exceptions allow it.[/color]
2. If it is an announcement topic and it is locked. This also includes announcements made by hosts in Quest Project Forums. Generally speaking, double-posting is allowed by owners of QPF's within their own respective threads.
3. If you break the character limit (10240) and need to split a post into two halves.

19. Postcount Frenzy
This mostly consists of substanceless posts, but this is put here to broaden it to posting incessantly replies that are borderline substanceless. Often when this happens, you'll be PM'd and asked to refine your posting habits to include more material in your posts. If you fail to heed this PM, you may face reductions in your post count.

20. Advertising
I know you're excited to tell everyone about that new forum or site you made, but keep it in your signature. Posting a topic or reply about it is prohibited. Don't do it.


IV. Guidelines
These guidelines are both elastic and relatively minor, compared to the rest of the rules. The general principle is that each of your posts should contribute something to the topic and the site. Use your common sense and if anything is unclear, please don't hesitate to ask.

21. Offtopic Posts
Please try to stay on the topic. Here at PureZC, topics are not meant to go from what they started out being about to something completely different. If that happens, we either lock the topic and ask people to start a new one about what they were talking about, split the topic into two separate ones, or attempt to steer the topic back on track. If someone posts a topic about how awesome the Beatles are, don't reply saying that you love Zelda. If you do, you may receive a reminder about it, depending on the nature of it. Also making a post towards one specific member falls under this. You should use the PM system instead.

22. Incomprehensible Posts
If no one can read your post because of the abundance of typos, overuse of obscure abbreviations, or for any other reason, you'll receive a notice about it. If you hear from us about it, then consider that you need to spend more time proofreading or in general looking over your post before you submit it. The use of shorthand and somewhat obscure abbreviations is also discouraged. If your first language isn't English though, we'll understand, as usually we can tell when that's the case. Try to avoid "leetspeak" (u, l8r, teh, 133t and the like). If you're obviously doing it on purpose in a serious discussion topic (exceptions would be birthday and postcount milestone topics) you will be told to stop.

23. Rent-a-mod
The meaning of rent-a-mod is to act as a staff member when you really aren't. That is, warning someone else, saying this topic should go here, etc. This is more or less disrespect of staff, but in a much more minor form. We carefully hire staff so that we have no need for any rent-a-modding. If someone breaks a rule or misplaces a topic, one of them is almost certainly going to catch it eventually. If you do see a rule violation or misplaced topic, and it hasn't been seen in a few hours, PM a staff member (preferably one that's online at that time, use Who's Online) who can fix the problem and report it to them, or use the Staff Dropbox forum.

24. Old topics
If you want to make a post and there's already a topic for it, we'd prefer you to make it there however old that topic is. For example, if you have a question on a certain quest and there's a one-year-old topic about that quest, put it in there. This is unlike what some other forums (and, in the past, PureZC too) say, where any post in a topic older than a certain time limit is disallowed "grave digging". But if there's no point in reviving an old topic - like posting in a months-old happy birthday topic - don't do it.

25. PMs
The mass PM feature is a nice one, but don't abuse it to advertise your site or whatnot. Also, PMing a person with content that would be inappropriate in a topic is considered harassment and is not allowed. If you are the victim of this, report it to a staff member. We can't read PMs you don't report. Abuse of the mass PM feature may cause you to lose forum privileges, including the mass PM feature itself. Harassment is considered a minor flame or troll.

26. Signature
Please try to keep your signature lengths from getting too long. A general limit used by the staff is about a full screen in 1024x768. If your signature is determined to be too long, you will be PM'd asking to shorten it. You have 24 hours from the time of the reading of the PM to comply with this PM, so that's plenty of time to get your signature to a reasonable length. If you fail to do so, your signature will be deleted, PM'd to you, and you will receive a warning. See also the signature image size limit, which is more strictly enforced. Also, embedding youtube videos in your signature is strictly forbidden. Doing so will have it removed upon notice, and you will be PM'd about it.

27. Sarcasm
If you feel the need to be ironic or sarcastic, remember that others might not notice and take it as an insult. It is best to be careful with sarcasm and to mark it clearly, such as using smilies.


V. Consequences
The staff can impose four levels of consequences on rule-breakers:

• Notice. A notice is a short, friendly and informal message to point you in the right direction. Notices are given out for minor offenses; if you get a notice you are not "in trouble" but you are expected to follow it.
• Warning. An official warning can be recognized by the fact that it tells you "this is a warning" or similar. If you receive one of these, take it as a warning that you have stepped over a line and must change something. Warnings are pretty serious and should be taken very seriously.
• Posting Restriction or Moderator Preview. These modes replace the temporary bans that used to be set. Users under such modes still appear in the Members group, and no public announcement is made about them. What we the staff choose is based on what we see best fit for each situation. They can be set for any length of time, but are typically set for as little as three days or as much as one month. We notify people by PM if they are ever put on these modes and for how long. A posting restriction means that the person can't post on the forums at all during the time of the restriction. A moderator preview means that while the person can post, the public can't view each new post made until someone on staff chooses to approve of each of them, one by one. Unacceptable posts will remain hidden or be removed. Other board features are still usable under either conditions, but if you choose to abuse those in response to our actions, we will likely take matters to the next level: an indefinite ban.
• Ban. Bans are the last line of action for either extremely serious offenses or repeated offenses. All users placed in the Banned user group are either banned permanently or for an indefinite amount of time. For the worst of the worst (like posting child pornography) the staff reserves the right to issue an instant permanent ban, skipping any earlier consequences. An indefinite ban means the ban is either permanent or for a very long time (months or years), with no plan of when to lift it or if ever to lift it.
  
  The staff reserve the right to skip steps in this procedure wherever they see fit. The levels are a guideline for everybody to understand and for staff to follow.

VI. Staff

28. Purpose and Rights of Staff
The staff are appointed by the owner (Wild Bill) to run the site and to enforce the rules. They have the right to do whatever they think necessary for the site, including banning members, without being answerable to anyone but the other staff and Wild Bill. Staff are not perfect but they are expected and allowed to do their job. As a member, you agree to respect the staff and their decisions. Do not challenge their decisions or attack staff in public for doing their job.

29. Staff ranks
There are three levels of staff: Local Moderators run a specific forum or section of the forums, Global Moderators have moderational power over the whole forum, and Site Staff have more power over the site as such too.

30. Right of appeal
Because staff are only human too, if you do not agree with any staff decision, you have these possibilities to appeal or discuss staff decisions:

• You may send a personal message to the staff member in question.
• You may send a personal message to a higher up staff member.
• You may do either of these via a private message or query in chat.
• You may post a topic in the staff dropbox for the whole staff to read.

Please be mature and polite when if sent such a message and do not be rude to the staff - it will make us take your message more seriously. If you really must let off some steam, use the staff dropbox only where we're a lot more lenient about rudeness. Being rude is unlikely to help your cause anywhere though.

We promise we will read every such message, take it seriously, and give you a reply soon. Appealing in these allowed ways if done politely does not lower your standing with us and will not lead to other consequences.

You may not criticize or appeal against staff decisions in public, including forums, chat room and shoutbox. Such topics and posts will be removed.

Banned users also have the right to appeal the decision of a ban. The one forum they can see, "The Lockbox", only viewable to banned users and staff, can be used for that purpose.

31. Contacting Staff
The different staff are active at different times and while we can't guarantee any single staff member will be there at any time, at least one of us should be around regularly to deal with questions and the like. We recommend you use the following methods of contacting staff, which we all read:

• For anything you'd like to ask or suggest in public, use the Assistance and Propositions forums.
• For anything you'd like to ask or suggest without it being visible to all use the staff dropbox. Topics posted here become invisible to members once you've posted them but the staff can see them.

These are the quickest ways to get answers. You may of course also send a personal message if you want to talk to one particular staffer.

32. Becoming Staff
The staff selects new moderators based mainly on when and where there is need from them and their own assessment of who would make a good moderator. Do not ask to be made a moderator or advertise yourself for this position in any way. If you do so, it may be noted down and count against you the next time we do need a new moderator. If we want you, we'll ask you and not the other way around.

What you can do to become both a good member and increase your chances of being selected for a staff position here is this: Follow the rules, don't cause or get into trouble, be helpful and polite to others and contribute to individual topics and the site as a whole.

Thank you for reading this. Once again don't hesitate to ask if you have any questions, and above all -
Have fun!

The PureZC Staff