Hello. I mod the Warhammer 40k community. I just got to my PC to have a sit down and read the new TOS.
I don’t want the community to run afoul of the rules, and I hope I can get some signoffs.
TOS part I’m a bit worried about:
5.0.6: No visual content depicting executions, murder, suicide, dismemberment, visible innards, excessive gore, or charred bodies.
While I will endeavor to clean up anything beyond the pale (and so far the community has been very well behaved), some community members may break the letter of these rules without trying. For example, an official Warhammer 40k model, (caution warning etc etc but I figure I have to show it to talk about it) link for reference has “visible innards”. This is just one example. The whole in-game faction is kind of like that, so enforcing this rule to the letter would mean punishing community members for engaging with official 40k content.
Similarly, depictions of dismemberment are going to pop up in a universe with chainsaw swords. If dismemberment is going to include severed heads, then there’s a problem since a huge amount of 40k miniatures and art includes those. As examples, browsing the miniatures on the games-workshop site should quickly show impaled heads on armor.
I hope that I can get some communication on Admin understanding about the fantastical bent of these elements within 40k, and that I do not believe they violate the intended tone of the instance, but that I don’t want a sword hanging over the 40k community.
That’s the result when you ask people with no knowledge of the product to draft your legal documents. More worrying, it also mean that no one internally actually reviewed those documents.
I sympathize with the intent of the rules, which I presume is not to let this place turn into Liveleak. Writing universal rules that are both effective and fair is difficult. I don’t think the kind of content in the Warhammer 40k community was in mind when the rules were written. The solution, to my mind, seems to be relying on judgement calls to allow artistic expression that is while seemingly gruesome in description, as I see it harmless and not contributing to creating an “unsafe” online environment. As imperfect as it is, I think for some thing like a hobby community the difference between hobby and gaming content, and irrelevant shock gore will be obvious.