Our Current Rules

**We expect you to behave in a reasonably civil, mature, and non-disruptive way on the SCP wiki.**

This page lists all major SCP wiki rules, and how warnings and bans work. Follow the spirit of the rules, not just the exact letter.

### **These actions will never result in banning:**

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> * Writing an article no one likes.
> * Voting on any article based solely on your own opinion of its quality or merits.
> * Respectful disagreement with users or staff decisions.
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### **These actions can result in an immediate permanent ban:**

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> * Vandalism.
> * Blatant and obvious trolling.
> * Sockpuppetry.
> * Plagiarism.
> * Harassment of site members (see the Anti-Harassment Policy).
> * Other severe misconduct.
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### How To Behave

* **Rule Zero: Don't be a dick.** Every other rule follows from this.

* **Arguments:** You may dispute the actions and opinions of anyone, including staff, as long as you do it in a calm, mature, and civil way.

* **Comments:** You can comment anywhere on the site, as long as you are respectful to other users. All comments must follow the Criticism Policy. Do not troll or make personal attacks.

* **Voting:** You may vote on any article on the site for any reason you like, as long as your reasoning is based solely on the content of the article.
	+ **Upvoting your own article:** You can upvote or even downvote your article as you like.
	+ **Brigading:** Calling for group downvoting (or group upvoting) of an article is strictly against the rules. A brigade replaces voting on quality with voting as part of a bandwagon. Being part of a downvote brigade may also lead to a ban.
		- Note: Not every call to check out an article by someone who dislikes it is brigading. Context and intent will determine whether or not an incident is considered brigading. Rule of thumb: Don't try to push a group of people to vote the same as you.

* **Forum Activity:** Don't make contentless or excessively short posts (spam), don't bump threads for attention, and don't post on threads more than a few months old if you're not contributing substantially to the conversation.
	+ The SCP Wiki is an inclusive environment. Hate speech and slurs will not be tolerated.
	+ Avoid double posting. Edit your previous posts using the "edit" function under the "options" tab to the lower right of every comment.
	+ Every image posted to forum or discussion threads must be collapsed (check the "Formatting" tab of this guide for the code for collapsibles).
	+ Do not make forum game threads without mod approval.

* **Posting Articles:** Do not post a large number of low-quality articles. When staff tell you to slow down or stop posting, listen.
	+ **Plagiarism:** You may not copy any portion of someone else's writing to use as your own work without proper attribution. You may not attempt to pass off another user's article as your own work. Doing so will result in summary deletion of the work.
		- Borrowing narrative or character content from other works is generally fine, so long as there is not a blatant or malicious attempt to deceive the reader into believing that the work is your own. For example, consider the numerous adaptations of Sherlock Holmes: Elementary, Sherlock, The Great Mouse Detective, etc. Your works should be original in style and technique. Contact staff if you're not certain if something is plagiarism.
	+ **Using images:** Images included in your article **must** follow the rules of our Image Use Policy. You must include the source of your images on the discussion page, and this source must comply with our site policy and license. If you have any questions, contact the Licensing Team.

* **Collaborative Posting:**
	+ All posted works must be written by the user that posts the work unless specifically noted as being a collaboration between one or more site users that are current members of the SCP-Wiki at the time of publication. Collaborative works must indicate which site users collaborated in the creation of the article in question.
	+ Surviving articles that are improperly attributed will be given a grace period of 48 hours from notification, where the poster will be given the opportunity to provide correct attribution. After the expiration of that timer, articles that have not been corrected will be subject to summary deletion, regardless of vote count.
	+ Failure to abide by this policy will result in disciplinary action, according to the usual escalation procedures.
	+ This does not exempt articles from deletion via the standard voting process, should downvotes exceed stated thresholds.

* **Editing:**
	+ **Responding to edits of your articles:** You may alter the text of your own articles at will. However, please do not remove technical changes to your articles, such as an added rating module or a corrected page name.
	+ **Editing others' articles:** You may correct grammar, spelling, or formatting errors on other peoples' articles. Please put a summary of changes in the 'Short description of changes' box. Any further edits require permission from the original author, the current curator, or the Rewrite team. Any unauthorized edits may be viewed as vandalism and subject to disciplinary action.
	+ **Collaborative logs:** You are free to add original content to open collaborative logs. These pages are tagged as "collaboration". Content may be removed by the page owner or the Maintenance and Ancillary Staff Team (MAST). Please do not fix unauthorized or bad edits — contact the original owner or MAST about additions that you feel are inappropriate or low-quality. Alterations to the structure of a collaborative log are not permitted.
	+ **Updating tags:** Don't add or change tags unless you know what you're doing. If you have any questions about implementing new tags, please contact a member of the Technical Team. If you have any questions about the tagging process in general, please contact a member of MAST. Do not remove Staff Process tags from any article (in-rewrite, in-deletion, \_cc, or \_image).

* **Donations:** Read and follow the official donations policy.

### Interacting With Staff

* **Moderative Posts:** If you see a "Staff Post", "Mod Post", or "Admin Post", do not reply except in the following circumstances:
	+ *Call for Rewrite:* Only reply if you want to volunteer to rewrite the page, or to discuss the rewriting of the page.
	+ *Deletion Vote:* Only reply if you want to ask to rewrite the page, or to request a stay of deletion.
	+ *Open:* - Anyone may respond to this post.

* **Staff Requests:** If a staff member asks you to change your behavior, whether by Private Message, Staff post, or other means, you are expected to do so.

* **Ended Discussions:** Do not try to continue a conversation that has been given a Stop Order.

* **Staff Decisions/Appealing:** If you disagree with a Staff decision, you may appeal to a different staff member. The decision of the other staff member is the final decision on the issue.

**If you feel a user has violated any of the rules on this page, please contact a staff member.**

### Other things that can get you in trouble

* **Behavior that is indistinguishable from trolling:** When it comes to trolling, staff take an "if it looks like a duck" approach. The end result is the same and we don't want that kind of behavior here.

* **Raiding another site:** Do not use the wiki or related platforms to organize disruption of the normal operation of another site. If someone else is doing this, don't take part in it.

* **Stirring up shit:** This means "a pattern of constantly toeing the line of unacceptable behavior". Negative patterns of behavior that are established and determined to be a detriment to the site or community are never tolerated for long.

* **Art Plagiarism:** Any art you post to the wiki must be compatible with the site's CC BY-SA license (for example: a CC-BY or a Public Domain license). If you trace, recreate, or heavily reference an image, it must also be compatible with this license and you must cite it. Failure to cite your sources in the above cases is grounds for disciplinary action equivalent to literary plagiarism. In addition, artworks which are made by using references non compatible with CC-BY-SA must be modified past recognition from said references.

* **Vandalism:** Making malicious edits to pages without proper authorization will result in a ban, the length of which will be decided by the Disciplinary team. Unauthorized edits without malicious intent will result in a revocation of membership, with ban implementation at the discretion of the Disciplinary team.

### The Disciplinary Process

The normal steps of punishment are as follows:

* Warning
* Membership Revocation
* Short Ban (usually week-long to month-long)
* Long Ban (month-long to year-long)
* Permanent Ban

If a staff member warns you about your behavior, and you do not follow the instructions they give you, you will be revoked or banned.

Additional violations equal longer bans. Especially severe violations may result in skipping to more severe punishments, including being permanently banned immediately.

Users who receive permanent or year-long site or chat bans can have their cases reviewed by the chatop team or site disciplinary team respectively, who may decide to enact disciplinary measures if they feel it is warranted.

After your ban has been served, you will have to reapply for site membership. If you want to rejoin the community, you must follow the same process as all new members.

**Content Posting by Banned Users**

Users currently banned from the site may not submit new articles or other works to the site in any way.

Users banned for harassment concerns may not request content edits to their articles or submit any new content to the site **in any way**. Users banned for disciplinary matters may request content edits to existing work so long as proposed edits are not intentionally provocative, rule-breaking, or be so universal as to constitute a *de facto* new piece. Proposed edits will be considered on a case-by-case basis with no guarantees of acceptance.

Attempts to circumvent this policy will be seen as justification to deny any future edit requests.

All banned users may request deletion of their existing work or works, and staff will comply as soon as they are reasonably able to.

### Appeals

Any user that has received a site ban lasting longer than 24 hours is granted an opportunity to appeal that ban immediately. They may, at their discretion, choose to wait as long as they wish to appeal the ban or waive the appeal opportunity entirely. Users who have been banned for longer than a year are granted an additional opportunity to appeal upon the anniversary of the initial ban date. Users that have been permanently banned may appeal annually until such a time that the Disciplinary team decides to revoke their appeal privileges.

Exceptions to this are as follows:

* Users who have been banned for being underage may not appeal this ban. Such a ban will expire when they reach the minimum age required to join the site.
* Users who have been banned for blatant severe trolling may never appeal.
* Users who attempt to hack, exploit, or otherwise gain control of or damage SCP Wiki-related servers or accounts may never appeal.
* Certain anti-harassment bans may never be appealed.
* Users who have had their appellant privileges revoked may never appeal. In other words - you can lose your ban appeal privileges in certain circumstances.

Chat bans are usually **separate from site bans** and do not always mirror each other. An exception to this is that someone permanently banned from the site may be permanently banned from the chat as well. This does not apply in the reverse, however. Chat permanent bans are only mirrored on the site in the event of blatant trolling. Chat bans follow a similar process as outlined below, with the exception that they are handled by Chat staff rather than the Disciplinary Team. There is cross-over between chat-staff and Disciplinary, but the bans are usually separately dealt with.

**The Appeals Process:**

An appeal is defined as a request to commute and/or reverse a disciplinary decision.

Users may appeal by reaching out to any member of the Disciplinary Team in any way they feel comfortable doing so, provided that a record of their appeal can be provided. (Voice conversations cannot be accepted as an appeal.) This can be through Site PM, discord, email, etc.

Users may also appeal by appearing in #site17 on our IRC network and requesting to speak with any member of the Disciplinary Team.

A user may request clarification of the reasons for the ban before appealing, and staff will accommodate any request for clarification by outlining the reason for the ban and providing a link to the 05command record of their ban.

The user may then outline their reasoning as to why they believe the Disciplinary decision should be commuted (ie. having a ban length shortened) or reversed (ie. having a ban removed). Any appellant will be granted a reasonable length of time within which to make their appeal. Once the appeal has been made, it will be presented to the entirety of the Disciplinary Team for discussion. This might take anywhere from a few minutes to a day or so, depending on members’ real-life availability.

In the case of an appeal for a site ban, the appeal will then be added to the user's 05command record and the Disciplinary Team will voice their opinions upon the appeal by voting to accept, to deny, or to commute. Any decision requires a minimum of three votes in support in order to be confirmed. (ie. 3 votes for denying, 3 for a shortened ban, etc.) Once made, the decision stands unless overruled by a supermajority (60%, rounded to the nearest integer) of the Disciplinary Team or by Administrator's fiat.

Appeals of chat bans, on the other hand, are discussed amongst available chat staff and are decided internally.

Whenever possible, votes on appeals should include a statement declaring the reason for the vote. A statement of support for prior reasoning is acceptable.

**General notes on appeals:**

* Take the appeals process seriously. Rule 0 still applies, especially in appeals.
* Abusive language will not be tolerated in appeals and will be grounds for immediate rejection of the appeal.
* Consider your words before you say them. Do they adequately respond to the reason for the initial ban? Stay on-topic.
* Once a decision on appeal is made, it is done. Continuing to hassle additional staffers is generally frowned upon. We will know if you go to multiple staff to ask.
* Take the time to read through the 05 thread(s) that led up to the ban. If you don’t understand what something means, ask for clarification. We don’t want to hide information, we want everything to be as clear as possible.