When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.
—The Lady Jessica, from "Wisdom of Arrakis"
- Behavior rubs off.
- Do not try to sell M.U.G.E.N.
- Do not talk about warez.
- Do not lie, be honest (#post_honesty), 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 (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?action=profile) (avatar + signature) should not contain more than 250 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 150x200 pixels.
- Signatures should take up no more space than 600x200 pixels.
- This is a forum that's designed to be safe to browse in professional environments, therefore, explicit or overly suggestive avatars and signatures are not allowed as they cannot be hidden by spoiler tags.
- 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 (http://mugenguild.com/forumx/index.php?action=profile;sa=theme).
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.
You should not be requesting unrelated things in release threads. This means requesting new characters, existing characters, lifebars, stages, AI patches, etc is not allowed in release threads, unless specifically stated that it's allowed.
About necro posting:
Necro posting is when you reply to a thread that has had no new replies for 30 days or more. When you try to make a post in these threads you are given a warning message letting you know that the thread is "dead".
Why would necro posting be bad? It bumps back up threads that are no longer active while pushing down the active threads giving active threads less exposure. In most cases this isn't a big deal at all on this forum. We typically don't enforce this rule outside of the following boards.
Your Releases, Mugen 1.0 +
Your Releases, older Mugen
Projects
Sprite Projects
The exception is if you are the topic starter and you are necroing to give new information/updates. If you're not the topic starter you may necro if you have something useful to add. Valid feedback, resources to aid, etc
The Request board has it's own rules about necro posting. (http://mugenguild.com/forum/topics/general-rules-you-must-read-these-request-71620.0.html) Be sure to read them.
So much for rules of thumb.[/list]
If you are new and have questions like "where do I get MUGEN?", etc check out the FAQ (http://mugenguild.com/forum/msg.1615911)
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 (#post_honesty).
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.
4) Do not link to ad referrals or any "get me money" schemes. This applies to your profile (signature, etc.) as well as your posts.
5) Do not use hate speech nor any hate symbols in your signature, avatar, or personal text; this goes along with the established rules against any nudity and shock images in your profiles. Hate speech is not appreciated here. Racist symbols will not be tolerated.
6) Please try to post responsibly, Treat others how you would like to be treated.
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"
...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.