Not a bad suggestion at all, but the pessimist ghost that lives between my ears is telling me that our chronic shitposting/spamming/plagiarizing population is just going to ignore it, just like they fail to read everything else that might keep them from getting banned or put on ignore lists.
It doesn't matter if they ignore it but if the rules are there and are also shown upon sign-up then at least they have no excuses. A lot of people genuinely are oblivious to the rules, and it's one of the excuses that is commonly used (though obviously there's no excuses for copy and pasting but at least they've been told about it so can't use this excuse).
The rules need to be updated IMO, particularly with respect to plagiarism--what constitutes plagiarism and what doesn't, and I suggested this in another thread. There also needs to be more enforcement of certain rules, like not making zero-value posts, not making consecutive posts, and not necrobumping threads. I think if those improvements would require more staff members, Theymos ought to hire some. Flying Hellfish is doing a bangup job in P&S, and I think we need more mods like him in sections like Bitcoin Discussion and Economics. I'm not disparaging the current mods of those sections, because I know it's got to be a crazy job, but I think some help is required.
Well it depends on how theymos wants the forum to be run. He's stated he's against strict rules and probably wants as much freedom as possible with as little mod intervention as possible, but you can't have things both ways. As much freedom as possible is obviously good, but when you let people do largely what they want and staff take the backseat it quickly becomes very messy and theymos might be mostly ok with how the forum is now or accepts that's the price you pay for freedom. I think a middle ground can be found either way though. It would be easy to hire more mods to clean up the forum or crack down on signature campaigns but if that was what theymos wanted he probably would have done it by now. Boards like Bitcoin Discussion need a dedicated mod regardless of how much theymos wants to crack down on things though.
There's a reason why the rule thread is titled as unofficial:
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I actively disbelieve in the idea of a "rule of law" where hard rules exist and are strictly applied across the board as if we're all robots. Every case should be considered individually in the context of the forum's mission.
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My thoughts on the sentiment aside, I really doubt the thread's going to receive any more recognition beyond a sticky.
Don't call them rules then. Call them guidelines or community standards. Not having the rules or 'guidelines' displayed is what's causing a lot of the rules breaking in the first place. If people were made aware of the basic standards expected here then most wouldn't break them. We don't have to explicitly say
do not copy and paste or you will die. You can just give a few examples of will
likely get you banned.
