Wow, it's been a while.

Reading some topics just for the fun of it, I noticed that you, like me, hate silly rules... but I wanna know what do you consider to be silly rules?

I'll post my silly rules when I organize my ideas a little bit better XD

I hate all those sites where members have to spell their character's name using lots of unnecessary punctuation, i.e. ;;-inochi~~'. Perhaps it's just that I have no sense of aesthetic, but I just think that it looks foolish. And I also think that it's a little silly when sites forbid capitalization. My shift key is lonely.

Oh yeah, I hate when people use those annoying punctuations. They do look silly...even ugly and disturbing.

I was slightly annoyed when I joined a board that required using [sub] sized text. With that font they used...eesh. I had to practically press my face against the screen and squint before I saw what each post actually said. Besides if they wanted the text to be that size....they could have just edited the CSS so the members wouldn't have to constantly put the sub code on each post.

I always consider it a silly rule if IF boards won't advertise proboards. I mean, it's not like you are the owner of that site or go there. You just advertise and might even get members through that.

And on a board I'm an admin at...there is a silly rule. But valid and sensible. You'd think it was obvious racism OOC isn't allowed but somehow we got one bigot who made idiotic, inconsiderate racist remarks...and wasn't joking. We already had a rule on not offending people but apparently that wasn't specific enough. So we had to make a new rule #1 to ban bigotry etc.

I can't think of more silly ones right now though I've seen a lot of them.

To me, "silly rules" are anything that are out of the line of ensuring people know what to do, and ensuring that it's a fun and safe environment to rp in.

I can't remember the specifics, but I was going to be the co-admin at this one site a while back until I saw that the rules were extremely strict. There was this huge process you had to go through to join. And it was supposedly PG-13 but it didn't allow anything that PG-13 rpgs usually allow. If you don't want that, make it PG rated. I got annoyed with all these requirements, and I said, "forget it" to joining.

Advertising. My oh my. I think that it's incredibly idiotic when a site says that you have to post their ad before you can advertise on their site. I mean, who are they kidding? Not to mention that it's an incredibly arrogant gesture.

Oh! I have one that is silly that is about advertising. There is a site that has a rule where you can only advertise on their board IF you put their affiliate button on your front page. So like you can advertise on their board you have to affiliate them, but they wont affiliate you too. AND they delete your advertisement if it gets bumped down to the second page of ads. How silly and wrong is that!

I hate the "no proboards (because they're ugly/stupid)" rule. It makes you look like a jack ass, to be honest.

I've seen sites that required you to write in size 0 font all the time... because it looked "neater." Haha. No.

There is this one board I was a member of that had members pick colours for the text of their character, otherwise they'd assign them one, and every time you quoted another char's line in your post, you were required to use that colour. I couldn't really see the point (especially since everyone seemed tojust have a different tone of blue!) and I was far too lazy to go about searching for the character's colour.

And I'm also not a fan of thread/character number restrictions. I tend to like having multiple chars and multiple threads, and I'm usual able to juggle everything and keep it all active, and I think that it's up to each person to decide if they can do that or not. If they only allow you one-two chars, you might get stuck with thousands of ideas for a site and they can end up short on chars. And that's just plain sad.

Wow, that's a pretty sad rule, Sleepless (the thread/characters one), especially because my favorite threads have included ones that had nearly ten people in them as well as one on one threads. :/ How silly!

Another really, really silly rule I've seen before was a set of rules set up explicitly for birthday parties. I nearly choked when I saw it. First you could only have parties in certain places if the thread was closed and almost everywhere except certain places if the thread was open, and then there was a rule that stated that people could ONLY get food and could only get certain types of food from the kitchens (it was a Harry Potter rpg), as well as a rule that was worded so vaguely that it could be interpreted as an essential ban on decorations. Oh and you couldn't pull pranks either.

All this because people kept asking for permission for birthday parties - doesn't it give you a bad notion about a place if someone feels that they need to ask permission for something as silly as that?

Honestly, what a stupid rule! What's so bad about having ProBoards advertisements? They're not evil. They're not gonna destroy the board. So just get over it.

And size 0 font is the reason many RP'ers go blind.

The most ridiculous rule I've ever run across was on a crime board a few years ago with a plot basically involved the murder of a mafia boss. It seemed interesting enough, except for the fact that the board had a strict 'keeping it clean' board. I basically ran away screaming? How can you 'keep it clean' and have that sort of site? Not really possible.

And ARGH! The 'invisionfree only' rule. It annoys me to no end. Every time I see this rule it just srceams that the board admins are too lazy to change the tags in their advert to fit another host, so they just solve the problem all together by saying 'sorry, you can't post here'. It's funny because I hardly see the words 'no invisionfree' or 'proboards only' on a proboards rp.

Oh, and I was on a board when I was younger (and stupid) that had a strict rule about posting locations. Like you could only post in spot a if you've completed a thread in points b, c, d, and e. It made me want to pull my hair out, especially when my character had no reason to be in location b, c, d, and e.

Completely banning advertising is silly when you advertise your game everywhere. Specially if you do it in all the wrong places yourself.

Banning proboards is stupid and silly... you end up looking like a wannabe-snob and kills your chances of properly advertising in more places. Proboards is nowhere near close to bad... it just has different way of doing things.

I don't like it when you need to use weird punctuations either... What for? you go to write and have fun, not to memorize silly punctuation sequences or your own nickname, which well, should come naturally.

The "invisionfree only" rule bugs me. It's not that hard to change the code, because really the only (major) differences between invisionfree and proboard coding are the "align" and "blockquote" tags. How hard is it to take those out?

But "no proboards because those are ugly"... that annoys me even more.

A rule that has always bugged the snot out of me was the character's text in a specific color rule. It just seemed pointless.

Another thing that once got me, on this one site, was the fact that we were all playing adults....but they weren't allowed to swear at all..(not even with @#$%) and they couldn't have kids unless they were married....

It just felt like adults couldn't be adults is all.

i really hate the put dialogue in color/bold/format it different rule. i mean, for god's sake, my roleplay partners had damn well be reading my entire post. so why should i have to make my dialogue bold? they can see quotes, can they?


another one is the limits on homosexual characters, i was recently viewing some site and about to affiliate, but then took a look at their "currently accepting" ad and it said they were no longer accepting homosexual or bisexual characters. "[they] already had four of them!"

on the same subject, multi-genre sites that require you to post your slash and mature roleplays in a seperate section from every other genre. =/

Ha.

I was at this one role play board where their character form was insane.

We basically had to write a novel about their appearance. Me? I just enjoy doing three simple sentences. I go into more detail in the role play.

Oh, and I did all of the requirements, and they didn't accept it. Why?

1, "your character is a teen, but doesn't use slang at all" um. lolwut? Excuse me if my character uses proper english?

2, "your character's mother's name is too unrealistic. Change it." aha. My "character's mother's name"? Are you insane? Sorry, I'm not changing it. Why? Because it has no relevance to any part of the role play.
kthnxbi
You lost a member.

It was kind of stupid.

Heh. My first thought was "Gosh, I thought the reason RPers go blind is because of all the fan-wankery."

The whole non-proboards thing is pretty odd. I delete ads if the site looks like an ass infested hole, but I don't post my ad there either (funny that I usually delete IF ads...)

The worst rule EVER was on this little site on which you COULDN'T plan anything with another member. That means no "oh hey, anyone wanna come play with my character?" Yup, the site died really fast and I thought it was fun to watch. Honestly...woah.

Oh yeah... Me no like it when you make an epic effort to make a sweet post to impress the admins and they come out with that... thing. It's understandable when every character has to be of a nationality, but unrealistic name? What was your character's mom's name? Lollipuddles? WTF. It's completely unrelevant to the story, your name won't change your quality as a RPer.

Lol slang.

I left a board that had default -0 font. I was sick to death of zooming in 150% just to read. I mean, yeah, it looked pretty - but roleplay's about READING, not admiring graphics.

Not a fan of the "no proboards or ezboards" rule either. We're all roleplayers.

I had once been on an anime-based roleplaying board that required your application to be more than 6000 words long. It was incredibly insane. You could write a whol bunch of garbage and get it approved. All the mods did were copy, paste, and run a word-count. That was by far the most pretentiously idiotic system I have ever come across in my life.

i get annoyed with the admins who are sooo strict about grammar. i think i can RP really really well but i will admit i don't have the best grammar. its perfectly understandable all the time and i dont feel the need to be yelled at or not accepted into a site because i dont use perfect grammar. this isnt school.

also once i didnt get accepted for making my character original enough when the board was a rehabilitation center. how many things can one person go to rehab for. the admins were like we already have too many drug addicts...hmmm no kidding?

I see where the admins are coming from though. Rehabilitation does not only imply drug/alcohol influenced addicts. Addiction to sex, gambling, and crime are also commonly known causes of rehabilitation. Although the 12 Step/AA programs are probably the most popular ones out there, you can overlook a few small things which could truly make your character stand out. My pick would be the sex addict. Now that would make for an interesting roleplay!

Agreed. And requiring for you to register completely in lowercase. I refuse to join a board that requires it. It's bad English at a writing board. >__<;

>__<; Discrimination is lame. (And as a side note, two of my characters I rp are homosexual. My characters would be half the gay population!)

Mine would have an addiction to painting wrenches. :D

I overlooked the first few posts in this thread and have just recently reread this. Quite frankly, I have to say only one word. Preposterous. I wonder what aesthetics now fall under. How low must have humans gone to believe that adding unneeded punctuation and improper usage of wording was aesthetic? How does it appeal to one's eyes! Furthermore, the fact that most of the boards that utilize this "aesthetic tool" use size 0 font, making it even harder on the eyes.

Haha, clever remark.

You've got quite the imagination, I'll give you that, haha.

I love the thing about the character's mother's name.

One of the members on my site actually insisted that another member change their character's mother's name, too, because it was too "high fantasy". I'm the admin, and MY character's father's name is Zelhid!

Silly members, making up rules.

I've asked for family names to get changed in an app before, but it was because the whole family was taken straight out of Twilight. But your example is just mind-boggling.