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Community Standards
(745 total words in this text)
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Community Standards
After the interface explanations and Iptscrae examples are over, after
you've become confident in your use of Palace and after all the tricks have been taught,
there are still several important topics that cannot be brushed aside, all of which come
down to the way people treat each other in the Palace community.
As a new breed of endeavor somewhere between concrete art and
abstract science, it is certain that the school of virtual environment design still has a
long way to go before it reaches anything approaching maturity. Unfortunately, the same
can be said for a lot of people, even out here on the electronic frontier. It takes all
kinds, right? Anyway, in your travels through the various worlds of The Palace it is not
unreasonable to assume that you'll run into a few troublemakers. These people enjoy
pushing others for a reaction, and their antics tend toward garden-variety spoofing and
gutter-variety profanity. Alone or in small groups, these cyber-brats often hop from room
to room, looking for new people to offend.
If you find yourself in such a situation, there are a number of
things you can do to make it stop (and/or keep it from happening again). But because you
do have real recourse to real solutions, you need to ask yourself whether this represents
truly offensive behavior (i.e., such as most people would find offensive), or whether this
person is simply making momentary use of a Palace feature in a unusually
"creative" way. Sometimes that line can be hard to draw; even harder when your
own emotions get into the equation.
It is important not to react in kind when confronted with rude or
obnoxious behavior; nothing encourages it more. Rather, you should seek at first to
distance yourself from the offending person. There's a lot of room out there, and plenty
nicer people to hang out with. You can always sign off and come back later; disconnection
is the better part of virtual valor. If the person persists in bothering you, open your
log (under the File Menu) -- it may help later to have a record of their exact words.
Of course, you can always call for divine intervention... At most
Palace sites, the operators and owners are creative and dedicated people; they create
virtual worlds to share enjoyable experiences with others like themselves, not to sink to
the lowest levels of human behavior. And since they all want their sites to be popular,
it's in their interest to make sure people feel comfortable during their visit. Within
their own sites, operators and owners are all-powerful; able to create and destroy rooms,
distribute and revoke passwords, and temporarily "kill" or indefinitely
"ban" specific individuals (or entire domains). If you feel that a certain
individual is acting in such a way as to ruin the experience for others, let the local
deities know about it. That's probably all you'll need to do.
The Palace is not the first graphic multi-user domain ever created,
but it is probably the least strict. Many powers possessed by the average Palace member --
painting, spoofing and nickname-changing, to name a few -- would be withheld for operators
and owners only on MUDs of other varieties. The way we decide to handle these powers
determines to a great degree what kind of community we are. These powers have been given
to all of us as a design decision on the part of The Palace Inc., but it is important to
remember that it's all software; should certain powers prove unmanageable or harmful, they
may be crippled or removed entirely from subsequent versions.
In a way, the whole of the Palace community can be seen as a
massive, progressive social experiment in which we are all participating. For this reason,
we invite you to participate in the "Community Standards" Forum. To get there,
take your web browser out to the "Forum" section of The Palace Planet website
(http://www.palaceplanet.net) and click on the link labeled "Forums."
Please post your experiences, insights and suggestions for the
benefit of all Palace users.
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