Guidelines Update

Cover art by @j_sasum

Background art by @nonamenosocks

Greetings RPA ! This is a pretty large update about a lot of different Roleplaying Amino stuff, so we’ll get to it. As usual, if you have any suggestions, please make use of our suggestion form, since it’s the best way to make sure your suggestions don’t get buried in a PSA’s comments or a staff member’s PMs. We will be trying to answer as many comments as possible, but please be aware that it won’t be instant.

Contents

Guideline Changes

Changes to Featuring & Art Crediting

Changes to Official Chats

Changes to Forms

Buying Titles Changes

Miscellaneous

Guideline Changes

Format Changes

The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the [guidelines] have been almost entirely rewritten. We’ve tried to focus on organization and readability as the previous guidelines were a bit unwieldy. Ultimately, the new guidelines are about one-fourth the length of the previous set of guidelines (according to word count, at least). We hope this makes them much more accessible to everyone! There’s no way we could list every single change, so please check them out for yourselves and let us know what you think.

Much of the information that was previously in the guidelines but wasn’t exactly rules has been moved into our new community Wiki folder of guideline clarifications. These wiki entries are linked at the end of each of the guideline sections and contain definitions, explanations, common examples, and more information relevant to the rules. They shouldn’t be necessary to read to understand our rules, but if you’re not sure if something you’re about to post is allowed or not, it’s a good place to start.

Rule Changes–Sexual Content/NSFW

Our rules on sexual content have been drastically simplified. Our guidelines about sexual and violent content both now closely follow Team Amino’s guidelines, with the exception that we apply these rules to private content as well as public.

Our priority with the sexual content guidelines has always been to protect our youngest s, for whom sexual interactions are unsafe and can lead to grooming, assault, or other traumatizing experiences. However, in recent times it often felt like some content which didn’t really pose a risk to anyone was being treated as if it was. With these new guidelines we hope to focus more on the kinds of content that can actually harm minors (or adults), and punish fewer things which aren’t likely to cause problems.

This means that rules now only specifically prohibit sexual content intended to arouse. Most of the highly specific rules from before have been deleted, like bans/restrictions on underwear, swimwear, side/underboob, sexual jokes, etc. We still may consider some of these factors when deciding if something is NSFW or not. However, we felt the blanket bans on many of these topics weren’t adequate, and could both potentially ban content that wasn’t truly unsafe for young s, and possibly not cover some content that is.

Similarly, our artistic nudity guidelines have been updated to exactly follow Team Amino’s, with the additional requirement of a trigger warning.

The exception to all of this is any content involving minors. Even if it doesn’t appear intended to arouse, any kind of sexual content–images, art, jokes, etc.–involving minors is still strictly prohibited.

Our section on violent content is similarly shortened to follow Team Amino’s guidelines. That is, most content will be allowed as long as it is fictional, e.g., not photos of real-life violence or roleplays of real-life tragedies. We still require trigger warnings for any potentially triggering topics.

Threats, Wishes of Harm

We now allow for much more flexibility in determining how to handle threats and wishes of harm depending on the circumstances, such as whether the s are friends joking with each other, joking with non-friends, threatening a bot, threatening a troll, etc. Serious (and especially actionable) threats towards other s will likely still see the same punishments as always, but jokes or angry messages towards bots will usually be treated lighter or possibly without punishment, except in some rare cases.

Miscellaneous Changes

• Spam applies to anything spammable now, from posts to voice chat invites, and will be determined on a case-by-case basis

• Age regression is not treated as a kink (this was previously due to a misinterpretation of Team Amino’s requirements); it’s been moved to banned roleplay topics to prevent fetishization of it

• Notes in wikis count towards the twenty word minimum for creative posts

• An ’s first minor violations (like off topic, not meeting the word minimum, etc.) won’t count towards punishment policy

Changes to Featuring & Art Crediting

Starting in March, we are going to be requiring all featured posts to credit the artwork that they use (or at least make an attempt to). We generally encourage this for all posts, but especially since featured posts are supposed to be highlights of RPA’s greatest work and examples for other community , we believe they should do their best to credit artists for their work. We’ve created a guide to finding art sources to help with this! Both staff and FeCo will let you know if we’d like to feature your post but it doesn’t have art sources, and if they’re added in the post will be featured. We’ll also all be around to help you find sources if we have time. If you ultimately try and can’t find a source, you can leave a disclaimer stating as much and your post will still be eligible for a feature.

Additionally, in an attempt to concentrate more on roleplaying, we’re going to be shifting a little focus away from general photography posts on the featured feed. Photography isn’t going to be impossible to feature of course and we and FeCo will absolutely still review posts for features, especially if they’re roleplay-related!

Credit will start being required for featured posts on March 1st, 2022.

Changes to Official Chats

Art Chat

Chat Link

The Drawing Chat has been completely redone and is now for all forms of art, including figure painting, 3D modeling, cosplays, etc. The new rules on artistic nudity apply to it as well, so art with underwear, swimwear, exposure, etc. won’t be deleted unless it’s sexual and intended to arouse.

New Official Chat: Guideline Update Chat

Chat Link

While a lot of changes come in large update posts like this, smaller updates are made more frequently. Staff will use this chat to post about whenever smaller guideline changes are made so anyone interested can keep up with them. It will be in view-only mode so only staff can send updates.

Lounge

Chat Link

The lounge is back for a trial period. The second lounge has been deleted.

Forms

We’ve added an option to check if you’d like to receive follow-up on your suggestions in the suggestion form. If you submit a serious suggestion with this, we’ll do our best to let you know the result of the discussion we had about your suggestion. If the suggestion form receives too much traffic we may have to remove this in the future, but at the moment we should be fine.

After five long years, the “Unban Appeal Form” has been renamed properly to the “Ban Appeal Form”. No one knows how everyone missed this.

Buying Titles Changes

You can now buy titles for your friends! You may receive up to two gifted titles. You can buy these here.

Miscellaneous

We have added Verified Roleplay Creator to the Verified Titles List if you’d like to request it! It has requirements similar to other verified titles.

The Ongoing Challenges and Events Post has been moved to a Wiki so that it can be updated more frequently. If you have an event you’d like to add, you can pin the post, edit it in, and submit it to the wiki, and it’ll update the pinned wiki automatically! We love when Amino actually has useful features

written by Captain