Ubuntu Hideout - #Rules
🔖Our Rules and Community Guidelines: ⚖
This is intended as a place where people can chat and enjoy their conversations with other people of the Ubuntu community and anybody else. Therefore most rules are actually implied by “be nice and respectful”.
While the first seven rules are generally considered more major, violations will be judges individually based on their severity.
You are required to familiarize yourself with the rules below before you participate! The rules apply whether you read them or not. Make sure you know and understand at the very least the bold part of each rule. The remaining text mostly describes each rule in more detail.
① Respect, listen to and collaborate with the server staff team. Our moderators are responsible to keep this community safe and welcoming. Please support them by following their orders and guidance and by reporting any issues to them. The server team is still bound to our rules too though, if you notice an issue with or unfair treatment by staff, please report to a higher member, i.e. admins or the owner. If there are cases not covered by the rules, moderators may judge and act on their own accord. We will review the case later and adapt our policies if necessary.
② Respect and follow Discord’s TOS and common laws. All activity in the server is subject to Discord’s Terms of Service and Community Guidelines. This especially forbids anything breaking common laws, promoting illegal or immoral activities and material – including piracy and unethical hacking. Additionally, it also forbids circumventing server bans and other Discord mechanisms, or using self-bots and other account automation techniques. Children under the age of 13 are not allowed to use the platform at all.
③ Respect people. Do not attack, offend or discriminate against anyone on or off server, nor incite hatred or call for action against anyone. Any form of discrimination or serious offense against individuals or groups of people is not tolerated. This includes – but is not limited to – protected attributes such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, disabilities, political or religious affiliations. We believe in a progressive society, and stand with minorities and disadvantaged groups such as LGBTQ+ and people of color. The rule includes discriminatory or hateful memes and jokes as well.
④ Keep this place safe for work and minors (13+). Absolutely no NSFW content. No porn or other sexually explicit or overly suggestive material or messages. No depictions or descriptions of gore or significant violence, self-harm or suicide. Always keep in mind we have people of all allowed age ranges and occupations here.
⑤ Do not spam or advertise, including especially server invites and product promotions, without prior approval from the staff team. Invites to servers listed in #server-links are always allowed, any other invites need approval of a staff member first. Approval is not permanent though, nor does it mean endorsement or indicate any kind of affiliation with the respective server. Same goes for affiliate links or promoting any products or services you profit from. Unprompted, off-topic or shady advertisements and links are considered spam.
⑥ Do not post dangerous commands, links, file uploads or media, including obscured or just potentially harmful content, even as “jokes”. Do not post any dangerous content, like e.g. malicious software or website links, but especially also (potentially) dangerous commands or instructions. Obscured links (such as QR codes, link shorteners or obfuscaters, etc), files or commands that might potentially seem harmful are not allowed either, even if they are safe and meant as a joke. We can not exhaustively check and vet for them, and it harms building a trustful environment. If you need to post anything that might be dangerous under some circumstances (but is e.g. required in a specific help situation or for educational purposes), a clear description and explicit warning in the same message is required. Note that very loud or brightly flashing media can pose a danger to people’s health and well-being too, avoid those or add a specific warning, use spoilers for GIFs.
⑦ Never post personal information, including photos, without consent of everyone involved. No doxxing. Never publicly share secrets or credentials for any services, including your own. People have the right to control their privacy and what personal information about them is shared with whom. Never reveal anyone’s real life identity or other personal or identifying data. Posting private photos requires consent of all visible people. Under no circumstances you may publicly share technical secrets and credentials, such as passwords, private keys, access tokens or anything else, in order to protect your accounts and devices.
⑧ Do not intentionally annoy or troll people. Be genuine and nice, avoid disrupting chat. This should go without saying. Do not annoy people by e.g. posting loads of meaningless messages, typing all uppercase (Caps Lock), sending one message per word, repeatedly pinging people for no apparent reason or abusing role pings. Use common sense and netiquette. Respect if people are talking about something else and don’t disrupt conversations. Read the room and adapt. Don’t force topics if people express they don’t want to talk about it.
⑨ No impersonation, false claims of affiliation or backseat moderation. Impersonation of other server members, publicly known people or especially members of the staff team is not allowed. Same for false claims of affiliation with or endorsement by the server/team or public institutions. Also please refrain from “backseat moderating”. Reminding people of the server rules when necessary is fine and appreciated, but e.g. threatening consequences is not. Enforcing those rules is the job of the staff team, which you should notify in case of a rule violation.
⑩ Do not send members unsolicited DMs/private messages without their consent, excluding the staff team for server moderation issues only. Please refrain from contacting other server members in DM (direct/private messages) without their permission, or to ask for topical help. If you have a question, post it in an appropriate help channel and wait. For anything related to this server itself, which needs too be discussed with a moderator in private and should not go to #server-feedback (e.g. reports of spam, harassment, etc), you can of course still DM any @admin / @moderator or preferably the @ModMail bot to open a ticket with the entire team.
⑪ Avoid sensitive topics that could escalate in heated discussions. Always stay calm, respectful and civil. We prefer to keep discussions away from topics about which some people might have very strong opinions, like e.g. politics and religion, which could lead to severe arguments. Such topics are generally not forbidden, but definitely remember to be mindful and keep it civil and respectful. Also don’t bash products (operating systems, editors, languages, …) or companies (Microsoft, Google, …) you might not like. Reasonable debates based on factual arguments are appreciated though.
⑫ The server language is English only. Please use it to your best abilities. In order to make all content accessible to the largest possible audience and to facilitate effective moderation, we ask you to talk in English only. You may use services such as Google Translate if you are struggling with the language, of course.
⑬ Use appropriate channels. Prefer topic-specific channels over general ones whenever possible. We have plenty of channels for various purposes in the server, make use of them. All technical support questions should go to a channel in the Help category. Check which help channel is most fitting for your specific issue and ask there. Use #help-general as last resort only if nothing else fits. Similar to that, while #the-lounge is our primary off-topic chat, prefer the more specific channels for common topics like technology, programming, creative stuff or gaming. This helps distributing traffic to make it easier for everyone to follow and find conversations of their interest.
⑭ All rules apply to usernames and profile icons too. Additionally, your display name must contain at least some regular Latin characters so that people can type it and mention you. Your visible name and icon must be SFW and appropriate according to the other rules. An offensive or NSFW profile may get you kicked. If you have a server nickname, that will take precedent over the user name. To make it easier for members to mention you and type your name, we require that at least a significant part of your nick or user name consists of regular Latin/ASCII characters that can be entered with common keyboards. Also don’t abuse special Unicode features such as direction markers, oversized characters or excessive accents (zalgo).
🔨 Violations: 🔫
Rules are enforced by staff members, namely the @admins, @moderators and @guardians.
Depending on the violation severity and your reputation so far, they may decide on a punishment ranging from informal or formal warnings over temporary mutes and kicks up to temporary or permanent bans, based on their own personal judgement and privilege level. Sentences will be reviewed in the team afterwards to ensure they were appropriate, and might get adjusted if necessary.
You may follow the appeal process below to influence your case.
🥺 Appeals: 🙏
If you feel you were punished unfairly, or want to clarify what the reason was or to apologize, you may of course do so:
🙉 Warned members should just reply directly in the same public channel where it happened, unless told otherwise.
🙊 Muted members have access to a special #mute-appeal channel to talk with the staff team in private. It will appear in the META channel category. 🙈 Banned members may send a DM to one of the @admins or alternatively write an email to [email protected] if that fails.
Abusing the appeal system and continuing any offense there will increase your sentence and might stop us from reacting to future appeal requests.