BC.org Community: Change in PolicyChangesTo be enacted immediately and enforced
after a period of 48 hours, the
Begeren Colony.org Community Guidelines will now apply to
officially promoted BC.org in-game chat channels (listed
here).
To this end, the conduct of users in these chat channels will be likewise measured in accordance to the Begeren Colony.org Community Guidelines. Any user who has violated these Guidelines in the above-mentioned in-game chat channels, and whose violations have been properly reported to BC.org administrators or arbiters, may have appropriate action taken against them
as if they had made the remark or action on BegerenColony.org itself. To facilitate this change, the language of Community Guideline #4 has been modified to read as follows:
"Members of the BC.org community agree not to post any material which is false, defamatory, abusive, vulgar, hateful, harassing, obscene, profane, threatening, discriminatory, invasive of a person's privacy, or otherwise in violation of any International or United States Federal law. Spam, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations are also forbidden on this forum. Any member who feels that a posted message is objectionable is encouraged to notify an Arbiter or Admin immediately through the 'Report Post' function. Please note that this policy also applies to member behavior on any BC.org promoted in-game channels, and action may be taken on the site for in-game behaviors reported to the Admin team.
Any actions taken against players that have violated community guidelines in-game are still subject to pre-existing policies concerning administration action, such as the ability to appeal as detailed
here. This policy
is not retroactive.
The Reporting Process If you wish to report offensive content, please do so by taking screenshot(s) of the content and providing the screenshots to an admin or arbiter along with some explanation of the events as you understand them.
We suggest that to make sharing screenshots easies, you host them on free image hosting services such as imgur.com, tinypic.com, or photobucket.com.
Overview and Rationale Hello, and thank you for making it this far! We wanted to give a bit of insight behind this policy change and why we feel the way that we do.
Recently, the BC.org admins and arbiters have been receiving a lot of complaints from those in the community regarding in-game communication, whether for RP or OOC chatter. We have no intention of harshly regulating in-game communication or keeping people from expressing themselves – just as we have no intention of doing so here on the forums. However, this influx has led us to the conclusion that people very often do not feel safe or feel directly threatened when they participate in this community’s official channels.
The administration team here at BC.org does not condone such behavior on the forums and now, we are empowering ourselves to confront that behavior wherever it manifests in the community. We have been informed of reprehensible interactions between forum members – interactions that we believe may have taken place precisely because interacting that way on the forums would be cause for immediate moderation. We cannot allow members to feel that there are certain places where abusing their fellow community members is acceptable, or easier to do.
This policy will not begin an era where admins and arbiters become responsible for sitting in-game all day, every day. We recognize that we are not Bioware, nor are we SWTOR and we further recognize that we will never be these things. We understand that adults use adult words and talk about adult things. This policy is not about those things.
Further, we understand that not everyone in /OOC has an account here. We will, as we always have, rely on our best judgement when examining any report of harassment or community guideline violation.
While we clearly have no power to ban someone from the game or even our channels, we do have some say to deciding what we as a community can tolerate. We cannot keep bullies from using our in-game channels, but we will do whatever we can to ensure that their actions have consequences.
Finally, we are not dictators. We are not tyrants. We take great pains to listen to every member of BC.org and we suffer when you suffer. When I became an arbiter, the only thing I wanted to do was to help people enjoy this forum, this game, and the company of likeminded others. I, and the rest of our staff, think that this policy change will help us do exactly that. As always, please feel free to contact your admins or arbiters with any questions or suggestions.
Thank you,
