Mycena Cave - Forums - Announcements - [Update] Rules Revamp and TOU Update

Hi everyone! We have finished up the rules revamp and TOU update! We haven’t made any major updates to them in a number of years so it was past time to look them over. The changes we made are outlined below:

Rules Revamp

Reorganization - The major change with the rules was reorganization. We organized the rules into three major sections, conduct, content, and policies. With this, we were able to combine areas that were repetitive or harder to find. We also added a short version of the rules toward the top.
Adding context - We added context to the rules by writing out our statement of purpose, community philosophy, moderation policy, and moderation trajectory. We think it’s important for the community, ourselves included, to have a good understanding of why there are rules in the first place, and to reflect on what the rules are meant to help us achieve.
Changing wording - We made a number of smaller changes to wording of various rules. Usually this was done to further clarify areas we felt were poorly worded before.
Adding in clarifications or rules - There were some areas that needed to be added to or further clarified. One major thing we did was to add the trading policies that were only listed in the trading forum to the actual rules. We added in clarifications about shared accounts. We spelled out more types of unacceptable content that, while unacceptable before these updates, were not clearly outlined in our rules.
Changing rules - There were a few rules that were altered to better align with how we’ve been moderating in practice. We loosened grammar/spelling content rules and generally made the rules surrounding language friendlier. We changed the bumping rules to better reflect the pace of our forums.

Revamped rules here!

Terms of Use Update
We have updated our terms of use with respect to copyright assignment. In particular: we have removed any references to the transfer of copyright to Mycena Cave. We have replaced this with two clauses: first, that you be aware of and follow US Copyright law with regard to derivative works of Mycena Cave properties, and second, that you grant Mycena Cave a perpetual right to host, display, modify, or otherwise use any content that you submit.

When does US Copyright law assign copyright of a derivative work to Mycena Cave?

There is no cut-and-dried answer to this. However, there has been a fair amount of discussion about this topic in the past here which you may find helpful if you are concerned. If you still have questions after reading through the examples in that thread discussed by glitch, we recommend discussing your question with an IP lawyer. We cannot provide you with legal advice.

Why does Mycena Cave need the perpetual right to host, display, modify, and use content I submit?

The right to perform those actions on any of your submissions is necessary in order to operate and moderate a forum. Requiring the perpetual right is to protect Mycena Cave from people operating in bad faith, wishing to cause damage or undue burden to Mycena Cave (e.g. banned players demanding we scrub their contributions, etc.)

The weakening of terms around submitted content is retroactive, meaning that it applies to all previously submitted content as well as any content submitted to Mycena Cave in the future.

TOU here!