Silencing Guidelines

This thread is an update on the previous Kingdoms at War silencing thread from 2012. It has been reviewed by ATA developers for accuracy. For more information, take a look at the KaW Terms of Use.

Many thanks to Moody, LegendaryHero, Eagle, Saber, and SouthernSweetie.

### Silencing Basics

#### **What is a silence?**

A silence means your ability to communicate in-game has been removed. This is always the result of having broken the Terms of Use or the Rules of Conduct.

These rules apply to Forums as well as WC and Walls. Silences can be done by Moderators or the ATA support staff.

You **WILL NOT** be able to post world chat or walls for the duration of the silence. You **WILL** still be able to post private message and post clan and ally chat.

#### **Types of silences:**

* 1st Offence: 1 day/24 hr silence
* 2nd Offence: 1 week silence
* 3rd Offence: 1 month silence

#### **Silencing notifications:**

Kingdoms at War have a new silencing update system, whereupon you are notified of you silence in pop-up when you open the game and in personal message.

The pop-up gives you a quick glance at the duration of your silence:

The personal message details exactly what you said, and the corresponding rule it broke.

**Note: Moderators do not assign the length of the silence. This happens automatically based on your silencing history.**

#### **Silencing Decay**

Silences accumulate: Silenced (1 Day) -> Silenced (1 Week) -> Silenced (1 Month).

Silencing decay means that each silence will expire over 30 day lots. For example:

* Silenced (1 Month) -> 30 Days Without Silence -> Silenced (1 Month)
* Silenced (1 Month) -> 60 Days Without Silence -> Silenced (1 Week)
* Silenced (1 Month) -> 90 Days Without Silence -> Silenced (1 Day)

Permanent silences can still occur at the discretion of Support. If you are permanently silenced, you will not be able to use *any* of Kingdoms at War chat options, with rare exceptions. Resetting your profile does not remove your silencing history.

#### **Lifting a Silence**

Moderators cannot lift a silence. Only ATA Support can actually lift a silence. ***Don't lie to them***; they can (and will) bring up records of exactly what you said.

If you believe your silence was unfair, please send a ticket in to support with full details. Posting WC or Forums trying to incite popular support will not help your case.

Make sure you start the ticket with:

* *Username: (your exact username)*
* *Game: KaW*
* *Subject Heading: Appealing a silence*

If you are messaging about a permanent silence, you will be given a specific date when you can appeal. It is not wise to send multiple emails before this date, as it won't look good when your case is reviewed.

#### **What do silencing tools look like?**

We cannot just silence for no reason. Moderators must fill out a form describing your offense. Please note the post below is not silenceable, and is merely an example.

First, we spy a TOU infraction, and press the little flag next to your name. This brings us to the silencing tools. Selecting one of these reasons will silence the user, send a pop-up notification the next time you open the app, and issue a PM to the user detailing their infraction. This process is the same when Mods silence for wall posts by following the red flag. After that is done, we press the red dash button and remove the post. However, silencing for a bad status message requires mods to go to your profile, scroll to the bottom, and press "clear status message" as a warning, or press mute.

#### **Reasons for Silences:**

* Bypass
* Indecent Conduct
* Personal Information
* World Chat Spam
* Wall Spam
* Third Party Advertising
* Illegal Activities
* Complaining about Silences
* Impersonation
* Harassment
* Discrimination
* Inciting
* Threatening ATA
* Cash Transaction
* Account Sale

Let's look at these more closely.

### **Bypasses**

A bypass means you have avoided the language censor to make a filtered word show. This also applies to account names. The bypass censor is updated intermittently. A word that may have once been OK may no longer be acceptable. The best way to test is by posting in your ally chat or asking a mod.

Let's pretend Blue is a censored word.

* **Bypass using letters such as í ù è**
	+ *Example: Blùe*
* **Inserting numbers instead of letters (1, 3, etc)**
	+ *Example: B1ue*
* **Using dashes, asterisks, underscores, or other keys to make a filtered word show up**
	+ *Example: Bl-ue, Bl\*\*, Blue\_ue, or (given context) "B Off"*
* **Inserting spaces to make the word recognizable**
	+ *Example: B l u e*
* **Deliberately misspelling a censored word to make it recognizable**
	+ *Example: Bluu*

**Note: If the word is caught by the censor and shows as a blank space (" yeah", for example) it is generally not silenceable unless it is in an indecent context.**

> Tip: Type naturally and you won't be silenced for bypass.
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### **Indecent Conduct**

This section prohibits indecent content, and that which is harmful, torturous, vulgar or obscene (such as referring to sexual violence).

* **Prohibits racism and ethnic intolerance:**
	+ *Example: Everyone from \_\_\_\_\_ country should be exterminated.*
* **Prohibits obscene, or sexually explicit content about minors**
	+ *Don't make inappropriate jokes about kids, enough said.*
* **Where the visible information is graphic enough that the meaning is still clear:**
	+ *Example: I will hit you so \*\*\*\*ing hard in your \*\*\*\*ing \*\*\* that your \*\*\*\* will bleed.*
* **Rude pictographs or emojis**
	+ *Example: Don't draw boobies or any other rude parts of your body in public chat channels.*

### **Personal Information**

This silence is done to protect players safety. There are a lot of creeps in online games, so we have these rules to protect you.

#### *What you **CAN** post:*

* Your first name
* Your age
* Your gender
* Your State/Province
* Your marital status

*Example: "I'm a girl, not that it matters!" is permitted.*

**Note: You can share this at your discretion, but you *cannot* publicly request it off another user. You also cannot use it to solicit other users.**

#### *What you **CANNOT** post:*

* Anyone else's personal information, such as phone number or address
* Contact information for third party apps or other games, such as a gamertag, Xbox Live ID, or Line ID
* Your surname
* Your city/town
* Your address
* Your phone number
* Includes soliciting this personal information from other players

*Example: "Girls over 18 wall me”* is silenceable.

**Note: selling/buying accounts is also silenceable under this section because you are requesting personal information.**

### **Spam**

Our public chat channels are intended for people to talk to others in separate clans, so spam posting rules do apply. Separate rules apply for lone spammers, clan spam, nonsense posts, slightly varied posts, or chain posts.

#### **World Chat Spam**

* **Lone Spammers:**
	+ Allowed 2 same/similar posts per 5minutes. The third post and beyond is silenceable.
* **Eb Advertisement:**
	+ Each clan is allowed 4 same/similar posts in 5minutes. The 5th post and beyond may be silenced.
* **Group Spam:**
	+ This includes clan/alliance pride. 4 same/similar posts in 5 minutes is permitted. The 5th post and beyond may be silenced. It does not matter if you are in the same alliance while in a different clan, mods will silence off the content.
* **Nonsense spam:**
	+ This includes keyboard smashing: ie. hdfgajhdgfkjagf or emoji spam.
* **Variations of the same message:**
	+ “volley me”, “Please volley my account”, “I need a volley”
* **Chain Posts:**
	+ 1, 2, 3 or a, b, c style posting where it is a single letter posted in a chain.
* **Wall Spam**
	+ 20 or more same/similar posts on a wall. The wall owner has a responsibility to report this.

### **Third Party Advertising**

* Discussing other ATA games such as PIMD, Perfect Drift, and Smash Monsters is fine. Advertising an app that is not made by ATA is **not** ok:
	+ *Example: "Everyone download RandomApp from the App Store! It's awesome!"*
* Disclosing or asking for information for another app/game which can be used to identify you.
	+ *Example: "My gamertag for RandomApp is Player2015! Let's play!*
* Discussing PlayStation, Xbox, pc games, or social networking affiliated with KaW is fine as long as you are not actively recruiting from them. This example is fine to post:
	+ *Example: Who has bought the newest Destiny game on Xbox?*

### **Illegal Activities**

* Refers to encouraging or promoting illegal activities like cocaine, movie piracy, and prostitution.
* Discussing, encouraging, accusing, or engaging in botting.
* Offering people nobility discounts, asking for udids, or attempting to buy or sell ATA accounts.
	+ *Example: Follow me for cheap nobility, I have internal access to the oracle*

### **Impersonation**

* Calling yourself variations of a moderators name
* Calling yourself KaW\_admin or impersonating ATA staff.
* The deliberate and malicious impersonation of another player.

Normally, we can tell if it's inadvertent by a new player, or an intentional impersonation to defame/mislead people about the owner of that account.

Includes impersonating the Update Bot, such as:

***Examples:***

* [update:] Daphnia has been silenced.
* [update:] I am the true king of KaW.
* \*\*\*UPDATE\*\*\* Daphnia has cast an Astral Ward in BlackHand

### **Harassment**

Harassment silences normally happen when people cross the line in banter.

* Includes threats to harm someone in real life
	+ *Example: "If I ever find out where you live, I will kill you."*
* Includes claiming a player is cheating and making other false claims against them in an attempt to defame them.
	+ *Example: KaWPlayer2015 uses bots to play his purchased accounts.*
* Systematically posting someone's wall with baiting or hateful comments. (If this happens to you, block them.)
* Players making malicious personal references in deaths/suicides in someone's family **Tip: If you are being harassed, please talk to moderator who you feel comfortable with. We can operate as your voice to support. No one should be a silent victim.**

### **Discrimination**

* This refers to using discriminating/offensive language to people based on their gender, sexual orientation, nationality, ethnicity, or disability.
	+ *Example: All unnatural \_\_\_\_ deserve to be shot, I can’t stand them.*

> **Tip: Don't post nasty or hateful things about peoples sexual preference or race. Respect everyone's diversity!**
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### **Incitement**

* Trying to trick, incite, or coerce others to break ToU (often targeted at new players), is against ToU. You can be silenced for this. This includes making it part of a CF condition.
	+ *Example: "I dare the next person to bypass."*or
	+ *"If you bypass in WC in front of the mods I will stop hitting you."*

### **Threatening ATA**

• If you threaten to damage ATA with hacking/reverse engineering, it is the same as threatening a person and is prohibited. Apes are people too... nearly.

### **Cash Transaction**

* Don't offer money for things, and don't try and get real money off people through farming or otherwise.
	+ *Example: I'll give you $50 Itunes card if you join my clan*

### **Account Sales**

* Accusing people publicly of buying and selling accounts, or trying to sell your own (or someone else's) account is strictly prohibited. That information should be sent directly to support for investigation.
	+ *Example: "KawPlayer2015 bought his account off K98279! He didn't even build it!*

### **Complaints**

* Complaining or protesting a silence is silenceable too. Silences are strictly between the player and Support. All the WC posts in the world aren’t going to change anything. We don't like to enforce this one except in extreme cases, but it is silenceable.
	+ *Example: #FreeKaWPlayer2015*
* This includes making a forum threads protesting silences:
	+ *Example: Why was I silenced!!?*

### **Forum Violations**

Forums are subject to the TOU, so all of the above rules also apply in forums, in addition to forum etiquette and Code of Conduct. Forum etiquette encourages players to post in a friendly and positive manner. The Code of Conduct includes:

* Excessive off-topic threads
	+ *Such as when two players derail a thread with a personal dispute.*
* “Flooding” the forum with similar meaning messages
	+ *This is basically the forum equivalent of WC spam.*
* Post-Count farming
	+ *Posting meaningless, low-rate posts throughout forums to raise your post count.*
* Inciting a forum war or riot
	+ *Depending on the context, this is used for incendiary religious or political topics that provoke rage in the community. These topics are best avoided.*
* Messages without content
	+ *These are normally opening posts in forums with only 2-3 sentences and are generally rubbish. If they are found to be spam, they can be locked at a Moderators discretion.*

* Fraudulent activity (Pyramid schemes, chain letters, etc.)
* Pirated Materials, Cracks, Multiplayer Hacks, Keys, and Key-Generators

> **Tip: If you want to be good forumer, post well-thought out threads. Clogging Active Topics with half-thought out ideas will be poorly received.**
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### **Forum Moderating**

* A thread will be locked/moved/merged/split at a moderators discretion if it is does not comply with the Code of Conduct or the Terms of Use.
* Once a thread has been locked, it will show this padlock icon. Please do not repost a thread that has been locked by a moderator or Support, as it may result in a forum ban.
* Protesting a thread lock, removal, or ban of an account is against the rules. Threads such as these will be locked and graveyarded. Persistent reposting may result in a longer ban.

### What is NOT Moderated?

There are some things beyond the reach of a moderator, like providing a refund or investigating botting. We can help you communicate with support, but otherwise cannot take action. The applies to:

#### **Private Messages**

• We DO NOT silence for private messages. If someone is being horrible, don't have them in your pm. Keep them on your wall where we can help.

#### **Ally Chat**

• We DO NOT silence for Ally chat. In extreme situations, Support may take action at their discretion.

#### **Game Mechanics**

• We Do NOT silence for stripping or farming.

#### **Screenshots**

• Only the support team can silence off screenshots. Moderators can't and won't.

### **Current Moderators**

See the Current Moderators and Valiant Knights for the most recent list.

#### **How to Contact Moderators**

* Wall (this tends to be preferred)
* Private Message
* Ask for a mod on WC.

#### **Moderator Myths**

* Mods have no lives and are online 24/7
* Mods don't sleep
* Mods are responsible for stopping people from farming each other.
* Mods are "paid" to do their job
* We all live in a basement (this myth is yet to be debunked)

#### **Moderator Facts**

* We are highly active, but are not online 24/7
* We don't enjoy silencing people, but it is our duty uphold ATAs policy to ensure a safe gaming community for everyone
* We tend to encourage people to learn all game mechanics (which naturally includes farming and war)
* We silence irrespective of whether someone is a friend or not
* We are community volunteers and are not paid. We only receive a silencing toolkit and speakers in order to moderate.

### If In Doubt...

* Ask us!! If you are unsure on any of these points, please do not hesitate to contact a moderator to explain it to you. Or, go straight to the top and ticket the friendly ATA Support team.
* The fewer silences, the better. Most of the time, if you type naturally, you should be fine.
* Do you understand these rules better than anyone, and think moderating Kingdoms at War is for you? Reach out to ATA to see about any openings! Support@athinkingape.com

Happy KaWing!