📢 [PSA] [Forum] A Turning Point for Rules & Guidelines

Jedi Sarith LeKit·9/13/2021 in Announcements

Wookieepedia has lots of pages dedicated to itself as a site and how it functions, and logically a wiki page for this forum exists too.

We recently worked with the administrators on rewriting that page to be more informative to editors and casual users alike, concluding with a proposal for policy change on the wiki’s consensus forum.

CT:Officializing Discussions RulesWookieepedia

It passed, and the changes were made. The Discussions wiki page now contains a more in-depth overview of the forum and a more concise list of rules to follow. Those rules were adapted from what we used to call the guidelines.

DiscussionsWookieepedia

The guidelines page is now empty, as the rules are now located on the wiki page. This is fitting, as they were never really guidelines and always enforced as hard rules.

Discuss Everything About Wookieepedia | Fandomstarwars.fandom.com

We need new guidelines now that are more accurate to their common dictionary definition: non-rules that are worth practicing nonetheless.

TL;DR: we rewrote the original guidelines and moved them to a more official page. The rules themselves haven’t changed. We’re rebuilding the guidelines now to serve as community resources, and we want your input on what to add.

This is a good exercise for users to show what they know about how a forum works. We want suggestions for how users can best conduct themselves beyond just following the rules.

What should we see more of on the forum?
What should we see less of on the forum?
How can we as a community take actions to further improve Star Wars discourse?
What do our best users and posts bring to the table?
What are the resources and permanent threads all users should easily access?

Obviously we mods can veto anything that's contrary to the rules or the principles of a forum, but I don't foresee much trouble there. Can’t wait to start this next phase of the forum with everyone.

(Edited by Jedi Sarith LeKit)

Wookieepedia

Jade Moonstroller·12/1/2021

^^Look, an unpopular opinion

Shreekomandar·9/18/2023

Been a while, just wanted to share my two paise

The banning of VS polls didn't go far enough in hindsight - "who is better" polls are their new stand-in, especially with "character tournaments" that keep recycling the same point over and over again without any new conclusions. A simple cursory look through the site will reveal results that negate the need to create a new set of those. Maybe limit them to one every three months or something?

Personally, I would go so far at to ban any memes on the public feed, simply because there are obvious, more efficient threads to post them in. However, I would also concede that suggestion goes too far in the draconian side.

SpicetimeContinuum·3/26/2024

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but I'm still new to posting and figuring out the inner workings of this site.

Recently I posted a poll. That's going great, but one of the responders has a username that clearly uses an especially hateful racial slur, and just switches a couple of letters around to bypass rules. It doesn't look like the user has actually posted anything with their account, so I don't know how to report this. What should I do?

Dark Lord of the Pith·3/26/2024

I don’t propose anything specific (at least at this time), but I have found the “Tournament” polls to be quite the irritation, especially when posted by the same user and which features the same recurring characters every other day.

Whithin the past few weeks I have seen back to back dueling “tournaments”, all posted around the same time of day, heavily suggesting a single user posted all of them, but just switching between different sock accounts. An obvious attempt to find a loophole around the three poll daily limit.

Any new guideline or rule to mitigate that type of abuse would be appreciated.

StillFlyingHalfAShip·2/15/2025

I would just like to inquire as to why there is no rule regarding "necroposting". Every now and then, I get a notification from a 4-month old post that I replied to because another user has replied to it. It's not that much of a bother, but I have seen other users complain and I just want to know why there is no rule, and if there should be one. Thanks!

And yes, I realize the irony of this post.

Jedi Sarith LeKit·2/15/2025

You've definitely answered your own question. Why should I have stopped you from replying here? Even if this wasn't a designated permanent thread, you're asking a legitimate question and contributing to the conversation no differently than you would have if you had asked this question years ago. I really appreciate that.

On principle, threads on the forum should be able to last as long as possible. We used to call this the Continuance Protocol. Longer threads usually explore their topics more thoroughly, encourage patience from the forum as a community, and are just more fun to read. If we gave them an expiration date, people would just have to start over if they came across an older topic that they wanted to continue discussing. As others have stated above, it's bad enough that we see so many mindless polls as-is.

[TRP] Continuance Protocol | FandomAs many of you know, Wookieepedia is full of many…starwars.fandom.com

It's also wholly unfeasible to enforce locking down old threads after a while. There are a hundred thousand posts on the forum. I literally built an archive of them, and it's still hard to navigate, so it's unreasonable to anticipate that the average user would come across an old thread and disrupt it. No troublemaker would go through all that work.

Discussions index archiveWookieepedia

For that matter, I never did announce that this archive was made, and I think people would find it fun and a good reminder of what kinds of posts we should value and preserve here. If we're lucky, we might even get to revive something like the Telosian Restoration Project.

[TRP] Announcing the Telosian Restoration Project! | FandomSome great discussion posts have been lost to the…starwars.fandom.com

To answer your question, though, you can always just unfollow the thread or report the reply if it's made in bad faith. Got a link to it?

StillFlyingHalfAShip·2/15/2025

Thank you, Sarith! As for your question, there haven't been any recent examples of necroposting in my feed, it just popped into my head and I thought I would ask. But thanks anyway!

(Edited by StillFlyingHalfAShip)

Givinname·2/19/2025

Wow @Jedi Sarith LeKit ! I had no idea you did a Discussions Index on the wiki. I just took a look and that thing must’ve been a heck of a task. It was something that was high on the wishlist back in the day. Nice work, my friend!

Jedi Sarith LeKit·2/19/2025

Thanks, @Givinname, I was hoping you'd come across that at some point. Linked somewhere on the main index page is the actual program I wrote to put it all together, which I got working about a year ago, but still have to run locally on my computer because of how large of a text file it prints out. The whole project was approved a few months ago, but since pages kept having to be split up for size, none of it was ever announced to the forum.

CT:Indexing & Archiving DiscussionsWookieepedia

I just fixed up the last page titles today, but I'm going to hold off on announcing the completion of the project, because there's one last policy vote happening right now that can be announced too once it passes. I think you'll like it.

CT:Codifying Moderator AppointmentWookieepedia

Also, @Atat2009, I just deleted your reply to another thread telling a user that commenting on old threads isn't allowed—because it is allowed. See my reply above about how there's nothing wrong with keeping old threads going.

Atat2009·2/20/2025

@Jedi Sarith LeKit Oh, okay, cool. I thought necroposting wasn't allowed here, but looks like I'm wrong. Good to know for the future!

What do you think?