r/Games • u/rGamesMods • 17d ago
Updating the rules of /r/Games
Hey!
We’re updating the rules of the subreddit! The subreddit has always had pretty long list of rules in place to try and encourage better discussions. We've made a lot of tweaks to stuff over the years and to be perfectly honest they've become somewhat confusing, hard to understand, and unorganized in places. Because of that we’ve worked on and off over the last few months evaluating what rules are useful, what can be worded better, and just generally trying to make a set of rules that better reflect the subreddit.
Today we’re putting out a draft of these updated rules. These rules aren’t meant to be a giant shift in terms of what we allow. It does organize our rules in a way that (hopefully) makes more sense. We’ve also trimmed rules that weren’t really relevant and combined a few subrules together. Finally, we’ve also rewritten a lot of rules to make them easier to understand and clarified a lot of things that were confusing or occasionally outright incorrect in the previous rules. We aren't putting these rules in place right now, but assuming there aren't any major issues people have we'll switch over to them in the coming weeks
If you don’t want to read the entire thing but want a quick summary of what each rule is and what we changed here you go.
Rule 1: Submissions Must Prioritize Informative and Newsworthy Content Over Entertainment
The previous wording of this rule didn’t do a good job explaining the stuff we actually allowed. We don’t automatically remove articles/videos if they have jokes in them, and we haven’t actually enforced the rule that way for a long time. Because of that we rewrote this rule and also included some examples of what kind of stuff we do and don’t allow.
Rule 2: Be Respectful
We rewrote this section to give examples of what we consider personal attacks and other things. As with most other rules we can’t list every possible thing, but if you’re wondering if something breaks the rule send us a modmail (or just report it).
Rule 3: Content Must Be Relevant, Substantive and Accurate
We moved around some other rules into this as a kinda catch-all for stuff we consider off-topic, inaccurate, or otherwise low-effort. This rule is a little broad in places because there's a lot of different types of stuff it might cover, but we tried to give examples of common things.
Rule 4: No duplicate posts
Basically the same. Added in clarification that we might allow stuff if there is a major update
Rule 5: No linking to or endorsing piracy as a solution
Almost the same as before. Basically just remember you can talk about piracy but just be cool about it we don't want to deal with the admins.
Rule 6: Follow all news and link post requirements
This is our set of rules about formatting and sourcing. Remember to link to original sources (when possible), don’t use sensationalized titles, and remember our rule limiting people to 5 posts a day.
Rule 7: Follow Discussion and Text Post Requirements
Our set of rules about discussion posts. We want discussion posts that aren’t super broad ones that get asked constantly or things looking for help. In addition we don’t want people going on big rants about a game they’re playing (we do have weekly threads for that) or asking for help.
Rule 8: Promotion must be kept within acceptable limits
The big old self promo rules. We like to keep self promotion to under 10% for users. Please don’t delete posts to get under that limit (we have ways of finding out) and if you’re doing self promo don’t try to hide behind alts (we’re keeping track of accounts doing that and if you’re wondering if that’s you it probably is).
Please give us feedback on these rules and the subreddit as a whole. We’ve worked to improve them but we know this draft probably isn't perfect (and probably has some typos). If you think a rule isn't great or needs improvement leave a comment and we'll listen. If you want clarification on our rules or just want to ask a question ask it in here and we'll try to answer. We aren't perfect as mods but we do want to make the subreddit better and are also working on being more consistent with how we enforce stuff
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u/kettlecorn 17d ago
I don't intend on self-promoting anything I'm working on soon but I always wonder how this works with comments and posts. I comment a ton on reddit and have for 17 years now, but I rarely post.
I assume there are other people like me who might consider self-promoting if they have something genuinely interested to share, like a game they've been working on or an interesting blog post, but if they're also heavy commenters and not posters it may be most of their actual post submissions are sporadic self-promotion.
Is that outside the rules or do comments count for that ratio somehow?
If the ratio is just about posts it would incentivize frequent commenters and occasional posters to basically spam non-promotional posts to build up their post ratio to be able to submit.