What should the policies for the chat area be? My initial thoughts:

- PG-13 (like the rest of the board, really)
- No Touchy Topics (like the rest of the board)
- No dice in the public channel
- Keep colored text to a minimum in the public channel
- Keep your /nick changes to a minimum
- Spoiler conversations only in appropriate channels

What else?

Check out the blog over at http://www.dresdenfilesrpg.com/ to see the partly assembled books in the printing plant.

Yes, I know, the spoiler tags went away. This happens every time I do a software upgrade. I'll get this taken care of some time today, but not sure when by.

The board moderators are not happy.

We've seen a lot of people failing to act like adults lately. We've seen aggressive behaviors and disrespectful stances taken by many. We've seen bullying and a general failure to look at things while standing in someone else's shoes.

This is not acceptable.

This stops now.

By unanimous decision of the White Council (that's Fred, Priscellie, Mickey, and Ashton), we're going to be taking some broad, sweeping action in an effort to get people to back off of all this contentiousness and really focus on contributing positively to this board and to the celebration of Jim's work. That's the mission here, and it should be your mission too.

Here's what's going to be in effect for the next week or so:

- The Pub -- i.e., MacAnally's -- is getting closed for renovations. We're going to sweep out the old threads and give the place a fresh start. This will include the sub-boards; they'll all be locked to disallow posting. We may change what sub-boards there are, we may add new ones, we may leave them as they are.

- We'll be cleaning up the joint -- As mentioned in the downsizing announcement.

- The baseball batbanhammer is on the bar.  Respect is mandatory.  People who engage in bickering, baiting, bullying, and so forth on the other boards are going to face a low or zero tolerance response from the moderators. That means we'll be more liberal than usual with temporary banning. We will do our best to explain to you why you're being given a vacation from the board, but you'll be given a vacation all the same.

We don't like having to take this kind of sweeping action, but at this point we just don't feel like people are paying attention.  You attract the Council's attention, you get a satellite pulled out of orbit and dropped on your house. That's just the way it is.

This policy will go into effect within the next 24 hours, and will last for at least one week (for the "closed for renovations" aspect).  The "banhammer" policy will likely last a few weeks longer than that.

As Jim's novels occasionally deal with instant bliss collars and sex vampires and whatnot, we cannot reasonably ask that this board be devoid of sexual/sexualized content.

That said, we do need people to start working to keep this to a minimum.  Sex *is* a touchy topic (and we all know how touchy topics have fared on this board). 

Utmost respect needs to be paid not just to the people you know you're talking to, but to the people you don't know might be reading you. That means toning it down. That means going easy on the "cat-calls". That means not using this board to get yourself some personal validation by how well you can sexually provoke other people on the board.

This goes double for anyone who is, or is interacting with, a board member who is not legally an adult. If you wouldn't talk to a random stranger at a bus stop about it, you probably shouldn't talk to the random strangers here about it either.

We do think that people who are uncomfortable with sexual content in general need to make choices about what they'll willingly expose themselves to, so this is a two-way street.  If sexual content makes you uncomfortable, don't read threads where it's a factor. 

What we're asking for here is for people to tone down the extremity and pervasiveness of it, not to remove it entirely from the conversation.

We don't want to have to make firmer policies. We don't want to have to take action to shut down conversations in order to improve the climate of the board. But there have been too many failures in the departments of "Think Before Posting", "No, Really, Think Before Posting", and "Get Some Freaking Therapy Already" to make it likely we'll be able to stay out of doing so.

Taking action according to the above guidelines will significantly improve your chances of not being the target of our actions when we do.

I put together a few graphics for some web ad use earlier this week. If you're inclined to use it on your own blog/website/whatever, naturally we'd be pleased to see that.

You can find the graphics here: http://www.evilhat.com/media/webads/

(If you do, please link it to http://www.evilhat.com/store/ or http://www.dresdenfilesrpg.com/)

Seriously, check this stuff out.

http://www.rickneal.ca/?p=611

I'm probably going to stop reading the message board after today as I work on the run-up to the printer this week. There's a LOT of energy getting thrown here -- some of it with a contentious rather than constructive edge to it -- and frankly taking the time to participate, respond, and where necessary fix the text is impeding my ability to get work done.

No game goes to press perfect, and this won't be an exception. I do think we've gotten it better than it would have been if it had gone to press three weeks ago when the preorder started, but some issues simply won't be resolved and -- in a few cases -- won't be viewed by Evil Hat as something that *needs* to be resolved in a general case. The tools are there to tweak the game to work for you at your table. Pursue that, with a passion, and our blessing.

But expect there to be a break from issuing Official Word on a lot of stuff because, well. We gots to get done.