Last Changed: 9th of February 2018

The providers ("we", "us", "our") of the service provided by this web site ("Service") are not responsible for any user-generated content and accounts ("Content"). Content submitted express the views of their author only.

You agree to not use the Service to submit or link to any Content which is defamatory, abusive, hateful, threatening, spam or spam-like, likely to offend, contains adult or objectionable content, contains personal information of others, risks copyright infringement, encourages unlawful activity, or otherwise violates any laws.

All Content you submit or upload may be reviewed by staff members. All Content you submit or upload may be sent to third-party verification services (including, but not limited to, spam prevention services). Do not submit any Content that you consider to be private or confidential.

We reserve the rights to remove or modify any Content submitted for any reason without explanation. Requests for Content to be removed or modified will be undertaken only at our discretion. We reserve the right to take action against any account with the Service at any time.

You are granting us with a non-exclusive, permanent, irrevocable, unlimited license to use, publish, or re-publish your Content in connection with the Service. You retain copyright over the Content.

Forum Rules

The #1 goal of this site is a platform to discuss StarMade and provide a central location for StarMade’s community. The rules of this site and moderation/administration decisions are made to achieve the goal listed here.

SMD is a civilized place for public discussion. Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

SMD staff members are volunteers; they help us manage the forum and enforce forum rules. Please respect our staff; they dedicate their free time to keep SMD running. Moderators are entrusted with the duty to ensure these rules and guidelines are upheld; this often requires human judgement. The point of moderation is not to limit discussion, promote or suppress points of view, or any other secret agenda. The goal of moderation is to keep the forums enjoyable and free from problems that detract from the experiences of our users.

Basic guideline to interacting on SMD.

Be:

• Welcoming - New members are here to discuss and learn! Show them the ropes, make them feel welcome. We were all new once upon a time.
• Civil - We all have our own opinions, feel free to challenge other's points of views, but do so respectfully and thoughtfully ... without resorting to insults, personal attacks and ad hominems.
• Friendly - We're all here to have an enjoyable experience interacting with others, let's make sure everyone's time here is free from hostile interaction.

These rules are not designed to be comprehensive. Instead, they serve to be a guideline and provide definitions for our community and moderators to understand what general behaviour is and is not tolerated. Just because something is not expressly listed in the rules, doesn't mean it's welcome on SMD.

Tier III violations

Harassment
Purposely intimidating a particular member, harassing them, doxing, witch-hunts, character assassinations, sending them rude or unwanted private messages, etc. This includes personal attacks on moderators for doing their jobs. If you have a complaint with moderation, make an appeal or send a PM to a Schine member.


Sexual harassment
Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, and other verbal harassment of a sexual nature.


Threats
Any threat or intimidation of a threat. In-game threats are solely permitted in the Forum RP section.


Racism/Hate
Racism and hate will not be tolerated at all under any circumstances (joking or not). There is no room for that kind of behaviour on these forums. Any user found being racist towards or hating on another user/people (for gender, sexual preference or any other reason) will be permanently banned from the forums.


Offensive Content
StarMade Dock is the official StarMade forum, as such we try to be accommodating to a broad range of audiences. We have many families and younger users frequenting this site, offensive/obscene content is NOT permitted. Please respect those around you when posting or using our chat function. This warning has two versions, 'Major' and 'Minor' infringements. Generally, 'Major' warnings are issued for second offenses, but this decision is up to the moderator - depending on the severity of the content. Explicit material (defined below) will be met with a 40 point violation/immediate permanent ban.

Explicit Material on the forums include: pornography, gore, violent images/videos etc


Pirating
Pirating is the act of acquiring digital goods online illegally without paying for them. Because this is illegal, we will not allow discussion of pirating to occur on the forums. This includes pirating video games, software, books, images, movies, television shows, or anything else.


Ban Evasions
Evading a ban (Ban Evasions) is when a user uses alternative account(s) to get around any type of ban, whether it be temporary or permanent. All alternative accounts have to be issued the points other accounts have received. If a user does evade a ban using an alternative account that has not been issued the warning points, this will be met with a permanent ban on ALL accounts (40 points).

Tier II violations

Hostility
Hostility is unfriendly and unwelcome behaviour, often expressed through flaming, trolling, baiting or personal insults/ad hominems.

Flaming can be (but is not limited to) being negative towards another user based on any number of contributing factors, be it the user's opinion, spelling, grammar, choice of faction, etc. Examples can be telling someone to shut up, being extremely or repeatedly rude or sarcastic.

Baiting or Trolling is a term to describe when a user sows discord by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion.

A personal insult is name-calling or other negative personal characterisation. Directly attacking a person's character through insults. For example "You're an idiot." You may dispute somebody's opinion but not attack the person who stated it.

Ad hominem is where an argument is rebutted by attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

Hostility is not tolerated. You can disagree with someone or criticise something respectfully; there's no need to degrade or belittle. We have a zero-tolerance policy for hostile behaviour. We want to encourage a friendly environment on the StarMade forums, and hostility has no place in that design. Anyone found being hostile to another user, user's or group for any reason will have the appropriate action taken against them. There are ways to disagree with someone that doesn't involve being negative towards them.


Abuse of Report System
Intentionally creating false or misleading reports, whether that be to harass/defame a user or to troll moderation. Abuse of the report system is subject to not only this rule, but any other rule broken as well.


Alt Accounts
Alternate Accounts(AA) are accounts owned by a user that are separate from the main account that they use on the forum. Unacceptable use of AA’s are as follows:

• Downvoting another user’s post
• Upvoting your main or AA’s posts
• Posting in main account threads to promote ideas

Use of AA’s is not prohibited, but all moderation action taken against an AA will also be taken against the main account of the user in question. BOTH main account and AA must be notified of the warning.

ANY use of an AA when any of your accounts are banned (temporary or permanent) is considered ban evasion which will lead to an instant permanent ban across all accounts owned by the user in question.

Tier I violations

Advertising
If the advertisement in question is not directly related to StarMade servers (In the “Servers” sub-forum) or a StarMade fan service then the user in question will have their post removed from public view and warning points administered to their account for unsolicited advertising. If the user in question can be confirmed as a spambot then an instant ban will be issued.


Spam
Spam consists of one or multiple people repeating the same thing (or very similar things) over and over in a very small amount of time. Spamming will be met with a removal of offending posts and the appropriate action taken against the user. (See warning point documentation).


Offtopic
Deliberately changing a thread’s original topic un-organically (forcefully changing the topic). Threads of discussion on StarMade Dock should adhere to the original purpose of the thread’s creation. Any user who has created a thread has the right to lock or modify their thread properties by notifying a member of staff. In addition, members are advised to keep on topic when replying to a thread. Offtopic posts will be deleted.

See Natural Derailment for unintentional offtopic posts.

Minor infractions

While we may not directly list these in our rule violation section, we may remove or ask you to edit any content that violates points listed here.

Selling products or services
Selling any products or services is not permitted.


Signature Rules and Guidelines

• You can link to your homepage or favourite site, but you can not use it for advertising.
• Limit your signatures to several lines.
• Please keep the coloured text to a minimum (and your signature readable).
• Please make sure your signature adheres to the other rules and guidelines found on this page.
• We reserve the right to edit signatures that we consider (but not limited to): too big, flashy or inappropriate.

Do not beg (for likes, reputation, etc)
People will rate your content based on their opinion, please do not beg.


Profanities
Profanities are permitted, however excessive usage (determined by moderation) will likely result in the material to be edited or removed. Please use common sense.


Bumping
Bumping is discouraged unless it is a support question and the user has not received an answer in over a 24 hour period of time.


Natural Derailment
Sometimes, through the natural course of the conversation, the original topic of a thread can be changed. In these cases, offtopic posts are not intentional and have followed the flow of conversation. To get the thread back on track, moderation will delete posts that aren't on-topic.

Chat Rules and Guidelines

The following rules specifically apply to the chat on StarMade Dock. Chat is also subject to all other rules.

• Keep swearing to an absolute minimum.
• If any users are found posting images in rapid succession a member of the SMD Staff may issue a verbal warning in chat requesting that the posting of images be kept to a minimum, in the event that image posting continues SMD Staff are at full liberty to remove (ban) users from the chat without further warning.
• Chat bans issued in this manner are indefinite and must be appealed by the user in question that has received the ban from chat.
• If you disagree with a user in chat about something and feel that the issue cannot be resolved in a constructive way, please either cease discussion of the issue or take your discussion to private messages on the forums.
• Faction chat is restricted to the faction channel, if you wish to recruit or discuss factions; please use the appropriate faction channel. You will receive a verbal warning first to stop, any further violations will result in a chat ban and/or warning points. This is up to moderation interpretation.

Reporting Content and Disciplinary Actions

Users may report any posts infringing this Terms of Service, or any of the particular sections in our Terms of Service by utilizing in-line content reporting functionality. Abuse of this system will also be considered an infringement on our Terms of Service.

Our disciplinary scale is measured by the Forums warning point system. For each type of rule violated, a certain number of warning points will be issued. Below is the system we are currently using:

Forum & Chat Warning Point System

Active warning point thresholds:

• 10 points = 1 Week Ban
• 20 points = 2 Week Ban
• 30 points = 1 Month Ban
• 40 points = Permanent Ban
• 40 total (inactive & active) points = Administration Review

When a user receives a warning, "warning points" are assigned to their account. When a user passes a warning point threshold, an automatic ban takes place, the length of that ban depends on the threshold passed (defined above). The number of points a user is assigned for each violation will depend on the severity of the violation (this is defined below). Some violations will trigger an automatic temp ban, or for extreme cases, a permanent ban. Warnings expire after one year, once expired, they do not contribute to the threshold.

Warning Points

Tier III

• Harassment - 30
• Sexual Harassment - 40
• Threats - 40
• Racism/Hate - 40
• Offensive Content I - 20
• Offensive Content II - 40
• Pirating - 20
• Ban Evasions - 40

Tier II

• Hostility I - 5
• Hostility II - 10
• Hostility III - 20
• Abuse of Report System I - 5
• Abuse of Report System II - 5
• Abuse of Report System III - 10
• Excessive Profanity I - 5
• Excessive Profanity II - 5
• Excessive Profanity III - 10

Tier I

• Advertising I - 0
• Advertising II - 0
• Advertising III - 5
• Spam/Offtopic I - 0
• Spam/Offtopic II - 0
• Spam/Offtopic III - 5

Alternative Accounts (AA)
(Any points awarded to one AA will be issued to all accounts.)

• Posting in AA Thread (Bumping, talking to AA etc) *Certain violations may be accepted in different forum sections - 0
• Posting in AA Thread (Bumping, talking to AA etc) II - 5
• Liking/Rating AA I - 0
• Liking/Rating AA II - 5

Parts of these rules are from The Admin Zone and Discourse - Civilized Discussion . Thanks must go to the administrators responsible.

These terms may be changed at any time without notice.

If you do not agree with these terms, please do not register or use this Service. If you wish to close your account, please contact us.