Denied [Website & Forums Suggestion] No advertising on other people's threads

Not sure why you feel this is necessary - I have seen very little of this in the almost 6 years of being here. Yes, it does happen at times, however, for the most part the "intruder" is simply ignored by all.
If this is an issue between yourself and another player, harassment can be dealt with individually by rules already in place.
tl:dr Please no new rules

 

I'd rather let the free market regulate this than implement a rule. Vote with your wallet and don't deal with businesses/individuals that utilize this tactic.

 

I am assuming it would be considered "bad form" or inappropriate for me to post I have many items for sale in skyblock here?

 

"There is to be no trolling, harassing, or attempts at annoying / prodding another user into breaking the rules or to a point where they feel uncomfortable/necessary to get staff involved. Should staff deem your post trolling or harassment, you will immediately receive a forum warning and possibly a forum tempban."

Any rules that such an action would violate would already be covered by the rules quoted above. And considering that the posts you're probably referring to were already deleted, rules are clearly being enforced for this.

If we start making new rules every time someone does something stupid, the rules themselves will become pointless as no one reads overly long rules.

 

Then that's their fault. If you can't realize that advertising on someone else's thread is inappropriate behavior, that's totally on you. And it isn't like you get an instant forum ban for breaking such rules either - Your post gets deleted. If you're genuinely unaware of such rules, then you'll see your post deleted and think "Oh well, guess I can't do that". Obviously trolls have always tried to rule-lawyer their way out of things, but we have rules against that too.

That's how moderation works, though. The reason why we're selective about staff picks is because a moderator's judgement matters just as much, if not arguably even more, as whatever the rules say. It's largely up to the staff member at hand to determine what "trolling" or "harassment" is and there's generally a consensus among staff (and normal users) about it. And, again, it seems rather clear that advertising on someone's thread is just trolling.

I've been on staff for four times (and a GA 3 times) for a total time of a year by now and haven't ever heard of such an action being considered "abuse of power". Also talked to an SA about it as well, and she (who's been on staff for far longer) can't recall anything like that either - at least anything that was justified. So I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but now there seems to be at least a consensus that deleting such posts isn't "abuse of power", especially when we've been enforcing rules against derailing forum threads for literally more than half a decade. Worth also noting it was Andrew who preformed the action in this case, and, well, he's the boss.

And as far as "one more rule can't hurt" goes, you could say that about any useless rule. But aside from it being useless, where do we stop? And that's how you do get super long rules that no one reads.​

 

We probably should cut back on the rules and if you look at past suggestions made/their discussion, I've been supportive of that for years (Nicit even made a suggestion a while back in mid to late 2016 that would replace the current rules with far more simple ones written by him, Dewsy and myself). So you're not wrong there. But even with rules as-is, why make it even more long/needlessly complex? Just because rules may be less than ideal doesn't mean you need to make them worse.

Oh no, don't get me wrong, I have no reason not to believe you - Rather just that occasionally staff can make mistakes, miscommunications happen, etc. (and past SA does remember something along those lines happening but was due to misunderstandings regarding the rules, hence "justified"). And if communication is the problem, that on its own can be easily solved by simply having Andrew notify the staff-team that you ought to delete such posts - No rule change at all there!

 

@UnitedStates2 pretty much covered everything.