Happy Monday, everyone!

As promised, this is the first of many community discussions we're gonna be having over the next few months to make sure that this place is what you guys want it to be. Each post will be stickied for a week so everyone has a chance to read and comment on it. Rules will be adopted based on what the majority of participating commenters seems to prefer, so if you want your opinion to count, make sure you speak up or at least upvote/downvote.

This particular post is to get a sense of which way the community is leaning and to give you an idea of the sorts of things we're discussing rather than to make concrete changes to the rules right this second - there's a metric crap-ton of stuff to discuss and we will be devoting an entire week/thread to each rule, just to make sure we're all on-board and nothing falls through the proverbial cracks. Once the real discussions start, however, we will implement any changes that you guys agree on.

Onward!

The main tenets of our mod team are transparency and community rules. We will never ban anyone or remove any posts/comments without letting the user know what action has been taken and why. Shadowbans will be reserved solely for spammers - however, we have a number of other tools which will enable us to closely monitor users who consistently break subreddit rules, and we will make use of those tools. Next week's sticky ("AutoMod and You") will deal all of that in that in more detail, because that's a whole 'nother conversation and this post is gonna be long enough as it is.

Moving on.

Very few rules here are non-negotiable:

• "Play nice" - that means absolutely no doxxing, brigading, harassment, account-stalking, abusive behavior, bigotry, general name-calling, etc. Behavior of this sort is grounds for a ban from the subreddit. You are absolutely free to disagree with each other, but you can always do so in a civil manner. (However, we will have a discussion to clarify how far you guys want to take this, and to make sure we're all on the same page about what "civil" and "name-calling" mean.)

• Only NP (non-participation) links will be allowed. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept, that means that you are solely a spectator - no upvoting, downvoting, commenting, etc. is permitted on the linked threads. Yes, I know it's easy to circumvent with CSS and by other laughably simple means. Don't do it anyway, because that can be perceived as brigading and (as already mentioned) that's grounds for a ban if people complain. Also that can get this sub shut down, which would suck. So - basic courtesy. Save your comments for our threads - that's what they're here for.

• [Insert standard anti-spam message here.] If you want to advertise, go here. If your stuff gets removed for spam and you think you're not a spammer, you're probably wrong and should go here.

We are open to discussing any and all of the above, but thus far we haven't had complaints about any of these rules. However, we do need to clarify the "play nice" part - that's pretty much at the top of our list.

Now: here come the rules where we really want your input, because they're less a matter of "we don't want to get nuked" and more of "where to you want this place to go?" Unlike certain other subreddits which shall not be mentioned, we believe that this is your space, and the role of the mod team is to keep it in line with what the majority (of people who care enough to comment) prefers.

• User-pings (/u/). At the moment they're disallowed because (in the mods' opinion) nothing good ever comes of them in subreddits of this type. So for the time being they're being automatically removed by our lovely and talented AutoMod (who is also enforcing the NP rules). We're not banning or even reprimanding for this - you just won't be able to do it. What do you guys think of this rule?

• At the moment we're trying to avoid drama-inducing titles, just to further distinguish ourselves from the bulk of X-in-Action subs. You can certainly make the title intriguing, but we're discouraging stuff that's heavily editorialized or flamewar-inducing. We don't (yet) ave any concrete guidelines for what counts as what, but the really egregious stuff is obvious and will be removed. Please note that titles cannot be edited, period, so if the removal is due to a flame-baity title, you'll have to resubmit the link. Thoughts, opinions, discussion?

• Post-flair: What flair do you guys think would be useful? We'd like to keep it down to a reasonable number of flair 'cause otherwise it gets too confusing, but we're pretty bare-bones right now. Have a look, let us know if you have ideas.

• What would you like to see on the sidebar, aside from the full set of community rules and the disclaimer that we aren't like the majority of X-in-Action subs and that we are a totally independent sub and mod-team from the other Legal Advice subs?

• Over the last couple of weeks people have come up with a bunch of suggestions, both in general conversation and in modmail. If you have any other ideas, post them and I will add them to this list for people's consideration. Anything that gains a reasonable amount of traction will eventually get its own week-long discussion, once the main stuff is out of the way.

Here is the most recent (and thus far only) State of the Subreddit post, including the rules posted here and sundry other things.

Here is the Wiki page with reference to all previous mod-posts, for easy reference. All of these weekly posts will be going on there as well.

As a final note - so far this community has been fantastic in every way. We greatly appreciate it, and hope everyone sticks around. You guys awesome and we hope you're having as much fun as we are with this little experiment. As always, feel free to reach out via mod-mail for any (reasonable) stuff that comes up.

Alright, I'm done blathering now. Discuss!!