Shacknews Community Guidelines

The most important guideline is simply to be a positive poster in the interest of fostering a safe space for our community members, moderators, and the Shacknews staff.

We rely on moderator discretion to help maintain the comments, and topics may be deemed nukable by the moderators in the spirit of maintaining a positive and engaging community. These posts may be nuked with a minimum one week ban. Subsequent violations may result in longer periods that are left to the moderation team’s discretion. A user may receive a permanent ban from the community at the moderators’ discretion.

Moderation decisions are made collectively by the moderation team and ban messages will be signed by the entire moderation team in the interest of protecting the individual moderators. We will be providing a future website update to allow for moderators to reply to messages collectively.

We will be engaging in further discussions with minority groups, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and women about rules that would help foster a safer space going forward and how to best implement them.

Nukes

The following types of posts will result in a permanent ban:

The use of racist, homophobic, transphobic slurs or any other hate speech will be met with zero tolerance going forward.

Cyberstalking across other platforms (social media, email, Discord, other forums, doxxing etc.) that escalates to harassment or threats will also be met with zero tolerance. The safety of our community members is of the utmost importance.

Extreme abuse of the community features by users. (Repeated threadshitting, for example).

Threats of violence (including death threats and wishing harm).

Overtly sexist or extremely misogynistic posts (ie. porn dumps).

Some examples of other nukable posts (carrying a minimum one week ban) include, but are in no way limited to, the following:

• Political posts that do not fall within the Shacknews editorial coverage space.
  • Shacknews.com is a source for gaming, technology, and financial news and will cover political topics when it intersects with that coverage space.
• Personal attacks or insults.
• Propagating misinformation that could result in harm to community members intentionally or through willful ignorance.
• Intentional or admitted trolling.
• Spam or link-farming.
• Sharing or linking to pirate sites, and leaked or stolen media. (Discussion of piracy as a topic is fine.)
• Gross, disgusting media including gore.
• Posts about moderation decisions.

Complaints about moderation should be done via Shack Message to Duke Nuked for transparency. This will appear in the shared Shacknews moderator space where the team can address further actions.

No one can reply to a nuked post, nor will it be visible in the comments. A ban prevents you from posting in the comments and using LOL tags. A future website update will allow for users to ban other users from messaging them on Shacknews.com in the interest of preventing harassment.

The moderators also have the ability to freeze discussion threads. This will allow the content to remain visible, but no further replies will be permitted. Again, the intent of these community guidelines is to maintain a positive and engaging community and the thread freeze tool is used at the moderators’ discretion for such a purpose.

Shadow bans also exist but will only be used for spam accounts that continue to break the Shacknews community guidelines.

Filters

Moderators may tag posts based on content. Users can then set filters to customize what posts they will see. Tags exist to categorize, not to punish. Moderators are able to tag posts Interesting, Stupid, and Tangent. Posts are all tagged On Topic by default.

If a post is tagged with Stupid or Tangent, you will not see these posts by default. You can change your filter options on your Shacknews Account Settings page under the Comment Options. Also, your post may have been nuked or merged because an active thread already exists on the topic (there is no ban associated with an organizational nuke).

Shackpets Community Guidelines

These guidelines are in place to ensure that a positive experience is had while using Shackpets. Any violation of the above will be met with a stern ‘bad boy’ and possibly a squirt from the ban gun.

• Stealing and reposting another user’s pet image
• No copyrighted material
• Hate imagery or offensive symbols
• No posting memes or political images
• No selfies, this is an app for pets
• NSFW media including pornography and gore
• Any non-pet related information in your Shackpets bio within reason
• Do not name your Shackpet an offensive word
• Shackpets moderators are given the same discretion that they have in moderating the Shacknews Chatty forum in determining images and bio data that may not be deemed offensive and removed in the spirit of maintaining a positive and engaging community.

If you have any questions or concerns about moderation of the Shacknews community, please send a Shack message to the Duke Nuked user account.

The Moderators