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[Purple]

When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.

—The Lady Jessica, from "Wisdom of Arrakis"

• Be nice, and treat the other users with respect. Behavior rubs off.
• Do not try to sell M.U.G.E.N.
• Do not talk about warez.
• Do not lie, be honest, and do not present speculation or conjecture as fact.
• Handle unexperienced members with special patience. There is a first time for everything.
• If you find it difficult to stay calm after reading the same question for the fifth time in a week, let somebody else respond.

• Your combined profile (avatar + signature) should not contain more than 180 KB of data to load. Your profile content should not take too much attention away from your actual posts.
  
  • Avatars can have a maximum size of 120x150 pixels.
  • Signatures should take up no more space than 600x200 pixels.
  • If avatars or signatures disturb your reading or take a long time for you to load, you can choose to not have them displayed to you on this page.

There has been some confusion about this in the past, so we decided to lay down a few rules about explicit content:

• Mild nudity ("boobs + butt") and more aesthetic stuff is ok clearly marked as NSFW, preferably put into a [spoiler] tag.
• Anything "hardcore" is obviously out of bounds.
• Zero tolerance towards "shock" images, animations and links. This includes stuff bluntly meant to disgust, filmings of suicide and the like.
• No nudity in profiles or images linked using [img] tags.

So much for rules of thumb.

[Purple]

A little more detailed rules about treating others:

1) Do not write users off as worthless beings because they:

• have not seen all episodes of your favorite anime
• cannot tell the original from an obviously badly stolen and over-powered MUGEN character of a very good friend of yours
• appear unable to simply contribute a half-decent stage background to MUGEN.
• . . .

It takes all kinds of people to make a world and we cannot all be superior.

There are probably a lot of disciplines in which you would end up on the latter places yourself—could you even be bothered to compete instead of just trying to have fun as a mostly uninvolved spectator who might not even care that much about the discipline in question to begin with. . .

2) Being honest and being nice are not mutually exclusive concepts:  you neither have to run around politely faking to "love this thing, and especially you as a person :) :)" nor stomp cursing and insulting through every thread informing the members just how little you really think of them and %(/§&%)§&!!.

3) This is also a discussion platform.  Being polite does not necessitate agreement in all matters.  You can disagree vehemently with a claim brought forth by somebody else and start a discussion about this point.

Fencing back and forth over a matter and evaluating arguments from all sides can be good training and healthy—but it requires a certain detachment and that you take the time to type an actual counter-argument that has a relation to the statements of the other side's position . . . and that you actually read and respond to what they have said, and not just rant in the general direction of their user profile starting with the creation of the universe until you run out of words.

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.

—Chenoeh: "Coversations with Leto II"

[Sepp]

...in the long run, the "minor" virtues are the only ones that matter. Politeness is more reliable than the moist virtues of compassion, charity, and sincerity; just as fair play is more important than the abstraction of justice. The major virtues tend to disintegrate under the pressures of convenient rationalization. But good form is good form, and it stands immutable in the storm of circumstance.

—Trevanian: Shibumi (1979)

[...]

With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.

—Robert Bolt, Michael Wilson: Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

I don't doubt for a second that the quote from Lawrence informs the bit in Shibumi. They're the same idea, expressed at different lengths. If my kids get anything from me, growing up, I hope they get this—you can depend on people to do what is in their nature. So you'd damn well better associate yourself with decent people who will do the right thing because it's who they are... because nothing else can be relied upon.

[Sepp]

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

The cost for believing that no one is better than me is grasping that I’m not better than anyone else. The instant I slide away from that position, my ego will measure the rest of the world according to my standards (which no one has any obligation to measure up to) and suddenly I look pretty damned good. And most of the world would look like sickly, lying, damaged goods. They would look like retarded children too deluded to see that they are too sick to have healthy relationships, too lazy to lose weight, too stupid to build a satisfying career.

I mean this very very seriously. As you dig deeper into yourself, the temptation to say "Hey! If you’re not doing this there’s something wrong with you!" is fantastically high.

What stops me? Basically, knowing that no matter how far and how fast you run, everyone is the same distance from the horizon. That’s not to say I’m totally morally relativistic: no child molester is gonna baby sit my son.

Nor does it mean that I excuse all behaviors. Do I love my enemy? Sure. Will I blow your head off if you break into my house? You bet. But I won’t be angry with you about it.

Hmmm. So, without compassion, understanding, forgiveness, not only do I lose perspective on myself, become incapable of protecting myself from my Ego’s frantic attempts to preserve itself, but I’d isolate myself from most of mankind, hallucinating that because I score high in these three important but artificial categories, I am somehow better than other people. And I’d hate myself for the black blood that connects me to the po’ black folks. And hate and despise white folks because with all of the advantages I craved, and cried myself to sleep as a child for not having, most of them really ain’t that much, and have a fantastic capacity to delude themselves into believing they and their culture are superior.

No. There is no joy down that road. So…people are people to me. Forgiving others means the ability to forgive myself. Seeing the way we have all fallen short of our potential keeps me sane. Seeing myself in every human being I meet fills me with love and compassion.

And frankly, when I meet people who are balanced in these three ways, they seem to be more open than average, more accepting of the flaws of others, less judgmental even as they strive for excellence, and encourage it in others.

I think that honesty is the hardest thing. The first thing. And the first thing to go when people are in pain. If I can forgive myself for my past sins, and move forward toward my future, I must first see how we’re all in this mess together.

[Purple]

(bump to make it show up as newest post in this forum )