Wiki Rules

Our wiki is a nice place for visitors, regulars, & admins, largely because we all agree to be good to each other. This page lists the rules we ask you to follow to keep things friendly and keep the admins' stress levels low.

### Common Rules

First off we have the standard rules that border on being universal:

* **Keep it civil:** Do not make personal attacks on other people. If you need to criticize another user’s argument, do so without attacking them as a person. Do not use bigoted language, including slurs which degrade another person or group of people based on gender, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, etc.
	+ We also like to avoid severe profanity. Hell and Damn are generally okay, but please avoid f-bombs etc. Lots of kids play this game!
* **Be a productive member of the wiki:** Contribute to the wiki in line with the established processes and conventions. Need help? Ask an administrator! Disrupting the wiki with “edit warring” over differing opinions of a topic with another user or group of users is not productive.
* **Do not engage in excessive self-promotion:** The wiki is a collaborative community resource for the topic at hand. It is NOT a free place to advertise your related website, YouTube channel, blog, social media account, etc. Have a question about whether your link would be welcome? Ask an administrator!
* **Do not harass other users:** If somebody asks you to stop posting certain content on their wall, respect their wishes. It is their wall.
* **Do follow community guidelines for formatting:** When a community has established formatting, it’s important to adhere to that, especially when spoiler content is involved

### Wiki-Specific Rules

We have several additional rules that basically amount to "Stay on Topic" and "Don't Wear Us Out Please". Remember that we admins are people too and we have day jobs; we volunteer to put in extra work here to help others out, and we dislike things that wear us out and waste our time, like arguments and off-topic rants.

* No Politics
* No Lore Aggression or other off-topic rants
* Stop arguing once things become "intractable"

#### No Politics

Please don't bring up real-world politics here. This isn't the place for it.

##### But Why

We've learned the hard way that political discussions go off the rails fast, and it's best to avoid it here. People get super passionate about their political views, and this often results in arguments, passive-aggressive behavior, and longform rants and flamewars. All of this detracts from our goal of discussing Star Wars X-Wing in a comfortable setting. We don't care which side you're on, we just don't want it here.

There are many places on the internet where discussing politics is appropriate, so please go there (for example, Reddit). Civic engagement is important, but this is not the place. It's too off-topic and too much of a dry powder keg, and the admins are tired of having to put out fires. And frankly it's not fun to listen to people's political jabs all day.

And by the way, needling comments, political jabs, etc count. Keep things neutral and focused on the game.

#### No Lore Aggression

Please don't come here to rant or nitpick about the movies or lore.

##### But Why

Wookieepedia is the place for Star Wars Lore. Also Reddit.

Ranting and arguing about Star Wars is a tradition as old as Star Wars itself, but that doesn't mean the hostility is welcome (and oh, it gets hostile fast). Strong opinions on the lore and movies generate arguments or quickly turn toxic on their own. We admins have to hear it pretty often and we're tired of people's hot takes.  ;) We're just here to talk about the x-wing game, not hear the same rants every day.

Believe it or not, these hot takes have been covered extensively elsewhere (whole YouTube channels and blogs are devoted to why X or Y Star Wars thing is just the *worst*), and we've heard it all before. Honestly it gets **exhausting**, and there's a better place to discuss this anyway: go to Wookiepedia (literally starwars.fandom.com) instead.

**We're here to discuss the game only**, so please go to Wookieepedia. You can discuss your strong opinions on, say, the Disney movies over there; we're not keen to hear it here anymore. We devote a lot of time to answering questions and helping out, and when our activity feed is glutted with arguments and hostility about the movies, we will intervene and redirect people to the proper place.

If you don't like Wookieepedia, or you've gotten yourself kicked off of that wiki too, might I suggest Reddit?

#### No "Intractable" Rules Discussion

When a rule isn't pretty cut & dry or at least well-bounded by precedent, it enters a gray area where the community *cannot* resolve the ruling satisfactorily. This is what we've termed **intractable**. Once we reach the point where admins conclude only the game's developers can resolve the question, we'll ask users to stop arguing interpretations on the wiki and instead reach out to the developers at Atomic Mass Games' Official Rules Forum. Thanks to AMG creating their rules forum, intractable rules problems are way less common now!

If we admins do give a ruling for an intractable rule, it will simply be an imperfect best effort and will usually tend toward the most reserved interpretation (granting the least power to the card's user, just to err on the side of caution). We're only human and we're not an authority on developer intent: only the developer can do that; we only give a ruling to give people something to work with until developers resolve the problem.

Even admins make mistakes btw -- sometimes we'll reply with the wrong answer. It's not malicious, we're just human and sometimes we mistake the question being asked or remember wrongly. But if we're pretty sure and you're pretty sure too, then the AMG Rules Forum is the best place to go to get a final answer.

##### But Why

So why shut down discussion? It wears out admins when our activity feed is consumed by a rules interpretation battle that can never be won. The harsh reality is we, the x-wing community, can't know everything. Sometimes there will be a confusing rule or situation that's too vague to nail down with what we know (and get community-wide agreement), and the only way to resolve that is to ask the developers. At that point, further discussion is not only useless, it's usually going to turn toxic.

The problem with intractable rules is they can become battlezones. People who want the rule to work one way, and have either their personal pride or the success of their fleet design hinging on getting their way, will sometimes argue passionately in their side's favor. People who don't agree or have their own playstyle at risk will argue just as passionately. Ultimately this leads to a flamewar, and those of us who remember the FFG forums know just how ugly, toxic, and unproductive that can get. A 12-page flamewar over incredibly specific and nuanced interpretations of individual words from various linguistic points of view does not bring the community closer to agreement on how the rule works, it's just people loudly spinning their wheels. Some communities may have a tolerance for that (or simply a lack of moderation), but here we like to end the discussion before it goes nuclear.

Thankfully, Intractable Rules have become quite rare in Second Edition, doubly so with AMG's rules forum. The rules language was cleaned up significantly and developers are much more responsive to questions about how rules work, especially when the differing interpretations have major implications in power levels and player experience.

### What Happens If I Break A Rule?

**Death**. But everyone dies and that can take a while. More immediately, admins will follow this sequence to resolve infractions.

1. If it's a minor infraction or a misunderstanding, the admin will remind you of the rules and ask you to change your behavior going forward, possibly posting a link to this page to so you can see why.
	* We start this way to be as nice as possible, when appropriate. Everyone makes mistakes and we admins aren't interested in being mean about rules enforcement.
	* For something serious like racist attacks, we'll skip right over this step. We may also choose deleting/editing the post to remove the problem so it's not stinking up the comments section.
2. We issue a firm warning, and instruct you to change what you're doing.
	* For something serious like racist attacks, we can skip right over this step.
	* In serious cases, we will recommend you edit your post (or we'll edit it for you) to remove the offending behavior, to fix the issue and/or avoid further escalation. Or we'll delete your post altogether to simply remove the problem.
3. In serious cases, or if you refuse to follow rules, we'll suspend your account for a day or week or whatever to give you time to cool your head, or just leave in disgust. You have many alternative places to go if you don't like our rules.
4. If you still won't follow rules after your suspension is up, or if your infraction is serious enough, we'll ban your account.
	* This takes some doing and is quite rare, but it remains an option for users who are not willing to follow rules.
	* We also skip straight to this step for spam bots, but they're usually not offended.

### Frequently Asked Questions

Users' responses and questions we've seen often enough to address here.

**"I received a warning, but I didn't mean to break rules! Am I in trouble? Will I be banned?"**

Relax, you're probably fine. Warnings happen when you've made a mistake, and everyone can recover from mistakes. We like to be pretty nice here. As long as you correct the behavior that led to a warning, you've got nothing to worry about.

**"I received a warning but I still want to argue and rant about lore/politics/rules/etc, and I'm doing it *here*!"**

Then we'll suspend you for a few hours/days/weeks to let you cool your head and/or direct your inconsolable rage somewhere else.

**"I have strong off-topic beliefs and I'm exercising my freedom of speech by ranting about them here!"**

They're off-topic here, so go rant about them on an appropriate forum, or somewhere with no rules. While you're here you'll have to follow rules.

**"I'm an American [and/or Duke of Sealand etc]! I have rights!"**

That's great, exercise them on Reddit! They'll love that!

But here on Fandom we have additional rules you'll need to follow, just like on *nearly all community websites*.

**"You've suspended me but I'm still gonna argue when I get back"**

I wouldn't advise that, because then we'll ban you.

**"I'm upset about getting told to stop, or suspended/banned. I want to talk to your manager!"**

Fandom has an established process for reporting admin abuses and getting conflicts resolved. Visit this page for an explanation and a list of options.

If you feel an admin treated you unfairly, you can post on our user wall to talk about it. I *suggest* you be calm and composed instead of angry and abusive, as mistreating an admin or just continuing the offending behavior on our wall will make things much, much worse (for example, converting a suspension into a ban).

If we cannot resolve the dispute and you truly feel you've been mistreated, you could try seeking help on Fandom's Community Central, which will guide you on how to report the issue to Fandom staff. Fandom staff are our manager, so to speak. They have access to stuff like edited/deleted posts and the full history of your interactions, and the authority to act on the behalf of users and admins in response to serious disputes. They have the tools and authority to figure out if the admin overstepped their bounds and fix it, and they can reprimand an admin who's clearly abusing power.

They can also figure out pretty quickly what you've been up to, so this isn't a wise step if you're obviously in the wrong and just angry there were consequences.

### Discuss These Rules

Want to talk about these rules? Make suggestions for refinements? Give feedback? You can use the comments section below this article. We also have a main Discussion thread which starts with our initial reasoning for these rules, in case you want to know more. Stop on by and ask any questions you have and give feedback. But obviously, *keep it civil* just like everywhere else. If you disagree with these rules, you can do so without personal attacks and strong language, for example.