Criteria for Inclusion

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I would reccommend a few simple guidelines that each 'governing member' can look at and make a quick accessment of any board that would wish to join.

Obviously everyone at a board will not write the same, or behave the same way, but if all member-boards have three voting members, then right off the bat we have about 12 opinions. Sure, not everyone will be 'right' but with a big enough pool (but small enough to be managable) it shouldn't be too hard to be pretty fair.

Here's one guideline: The applicant-board should not be TGC or governed by General Ceel.

[Samantha Koortyn]

You might want to make it a little more vague...

(Edit for paranoia.)

Naming names will just cause trouble.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I was merely jesting. :) But I totally agree, naming names is trouble and we certainly don't want any more.

[Samantha Koortyn]

Ah good :]

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Well it shouldn't, as this is a private forum, and if it does we'd most likely be able to track who it was and make their lives miserable.

I even took the swear filter off for this forum. ;)

And I'm sure you've read what Ceel has to say about me. So group:hug and we all know the truth about him.

[Morgan Evanar]

This won't be public unless someone decides to leak it. Ceel's just terribly insecure so he takes it out on everyone else. Eventually momentum will bite him in the bum.

[Dara Shadowtide]

Possible guideline ideas for alliance membership:

1. Community is family-friendly and doesn't allow flaming, baiting, bashing or swearing

2. Community does not allow bashing of other communities or promoting itself as better than everyone else

3. Roleplays are done in the Star Wars era using known Star Wars technology and terminology

4. Community has an established timeline and criteria for character rank promotions and all promotions are earned in demonstrated roleplays on the board

5. Community has established written policies for what is allowed and what is not allowed


Are the charter communities the ones listed in the forum description for here then? And are we going to have three representatives per participating board for the alliance?

[Morgan Evanar]

I think disallowing swearing is a bit much, but I agree, the guidelines should be very clear.

[Dara Shadowtide]

Does SWFans allow swearing though? I thought you all didn't. We only allow the swear words that were in the Star Wars films to be in roleplays StarWarsRPG.net since I figured if it was on screen in the saga, it could be in the roleplays. I personally would be fine with no swearing at all. :)

[Morgan Evanar]

We don't, but I think as long as it isn't abused and the board is well run we could just have a notice about occasional language. It would really stink if there was a board that allowed swearing and was just absolutely awesome and they were really cool, but happened not to care about swearing.

[Tais Voru]

Well SWE for on is rated R. It's clearly established in the rules and guidelines, the first thing if I recall correctly. Swearing, the normal kind even, is allowed and we encourage anyone who has issues with that to move along. That said, I think you'd find us to be among the most polite and well spoken boards to outsiders who happen by for a visit.

As for number four on Dara's list. While we do have an established timeline [unique as we are] we don't promote people per se. At least not in the same manner many boards do. We are not really concerned with rankings or the sort so it's not like we are holding members down as there is no one highly or lowly ranked. The only sort of posting restrictions we've made of late is one that ensures people fully comprehend our backstory. That rule is that we require a set amount of posts in our General RP forum before moving on to our Galaxy at Large forum where our main story takes place. We do this because we have a focused storyline instead of a more open ended style employed in other places.

As Dara has also mentioned. I think we need to select a set amount of members who vote from each participating board. Until we eastablish that limit and get complete participation from all involved we are running an imbalanced council. Once the appropriate people are in place we can then set about establishing the guidelines and policies.

So 2 representatives per board? 3?

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I'm running with three reps, although we haven't picked ours yet. Once the reps are picked I'll finalized the forum access.

Also I think we should allow for board reps going on extended LOA's and needing to be replaced - which would be up to the board they represent, of course.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

Sorry, double posting, but I also think that making ranking systems or timelines part of the criteria limits us unecessarily. Allowing swearing, or not, is okay - we'll be putting our differences into our descriptions, and that would be one of them. SWFans is PG-13, SWE is R.

I think boards that allow or encourage flaming and being hostile to other communities are ones we'll want to exclude, not ones that swear.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

Aye, my main issue as far as being selective was more in tune with how a community treats others. Blatant (to me at least) flamebaiting, disrespect of others, and picking fights is something I'd rather avoid.

[Vega Van-Derveld]

I think that everything I would be concerned about, as far as criteria goes, has been posted.


Originally posted by Lilaena De'Ville
Sorry, double posting, but I also think that making ranking systems or timelines part of the criteria limits us unecessarily. Allowing swearing, or not, is okay - we'll be putting our differences into our descriptions, and that would be one of them. SWFans is PG-13, SWE is R.

I think boards that allow or encourage flaming and being hostile to other communities are ones we'll want to exclude, not ones that swear.

This pretty much sums it up. I know that ranks and such have a strict place here, but I think it's good that there are places out there where this isn't the case - as with SWE. I assume the staff just keep an eye out for godmoding and it doesn't become an issue.

Oh, and 3 reps sounds good.

[Samantha Koortyn]

We don't have a promotion system. The freshest newbie to our site can be a Sith Lord or Jedi Master, or command a whole armada, if their bio is good enough. No one on Epics godmodes because we all work together on the stories.

And we don't care about swearing either. Our roleplays vary from PG-13 to R, and in the roleplays we use only SW swear words anyway, heh.

OOC we don't really care. And we never really had to, because our members don't swear that much anyway.

[Morgan Evanar]

It was an issue because we had a lot of younger roleplayers :| My personal stance on swearing is very different than official one. But I enforce the rules because that's my job and such.

[Tais Voru]

And that's exactly what all good boards do [and what this alliance needs to do too] establish sensible rules and then take personal feelings out of it.

[Rama: 2nd GIG]

Originally posted by Morgan Evanar
It was an issue because we had a lot of younger roleplayers :| My personal stance on swearing is very different than official one. But I enforce the rules because that's my job and such.

I'm in the same boat. I don't like the restrictions on swearing, but I also understand why they are there and I do my job and enforce those rules.

That being said I don't think the swearing thing should be an issue for inclusion, and that it should be up to the indivudal board to set it's own limits on what is and isn't allowed in that reguard.

[Dara Shadowtide]

Hey there, Rama. Nice of you to drop by. :D

So would the main criteria just be really simple - that each member community doesn't allow bashing of its own members or other communities and promotes quality Star Wars roleplaying? Simple and to the point sure works for me. :) I would think a probationary period where representatives of the alliance here would lurk on the petitioning or prospective board and read their OOC forums and IC forums for a period of time to make sure that the petitioning board would fit in with whatever the alliance in here decides the criteria for membership in the alliance to be.

It sounds like there might be a board rating next to each community's description that would pretty much indicate what kinds of things are allowed there - in addition to reading the board’s FAQ, of course - so that would alleviate my concern over different communities allowing different degrees of swearing and other content, etc.

What about the alliance itself? Would it be a link to a created main alliance page hosted somewhere at the footer or sidebar of each of our board's then? Or would we just make little icons for each of our board's to put in the footer or sidebar that provides direct links to each board in the alliance? Maybe both?

Also, if we are in an alliance, would character ranks automatically transfer to one of the fellow boards in the alliance? I'm not sure that would work as a blanket rule if not everyone has the same procedures for promotions is all.

I'm just tossing out ideas here to get things going again with our discussion. ;)

[Lilaena De'Ville]

I believe we do want to create an alliance page for detailed descriptions of the boards involved in the alliance. I don't know if we want only one page, or if each board involved would be hosting their own alliance page (that way it could match the overall look of your board if you wanted?).

[Samantha Koortyn]

I'd rather it be just one Alliance page.

[Tais Voru]

Good post Dara, nice to get things moving again.

My first point, as it has been all along, are all members equal partners all of which must have voting representation, or are the individual boards going to be allowed to decide if they prefer to vote or not? That's a major sticking point for SWE. If we aren't all going into this as equal partners sharing in not only the benefit of the joint advertisement but also the work involved, then it's simply of no use to us. I don't want this to be just a fancy affiliation page, I want it to be a true work in promotion of all member boards. If all boards aren't doing equal work, then it is simply not fair to the rest. Can we establish this first thing please? Some places are saying they don't want to 'judge' and such and that pretty much kills the point of the selective process.

As for the page itself, I'm fine just having one 'big' page that describes every board in the alliance. I think it's simpler for all involved. I don't think there should be any rule to preclude a board from having the exact same page on their own domain though so long as the informational text is exactly as it is on the 'master' page.

I do not think transferring ranks will work though. SWE has a non-canon backstory and I try my best to dissuade new members from bringing over 'retread' characters from other boards. I know we all grow attached to the characters we play, but for some boards it just won't fit their stories to have a new Jedi Master show up out of the blue. Perhaps there can be some preferrential treatment of members from other boards in the alliance when they apply to the new board though, exactly what I'm not sure. We're selective with our Jedi and Sith on SWE [or we are starting to be finally] so maybe if a character who was a Master on one of the member boards wanted to join SWE as a Jedi or Sith we could give them preferrential treatment. Just a thought anyway.

Further thoughts could be that maybe we could categorize the boards. Maybe Pre-OT, OT, Post OT, and Original. Something to that affect anyway depending on how many boards actually join.

[Samantha Koortyn]

I offered my services in other ways to make up for not voting but Epics will vote if it becomes an issue.

We won't be allowing Alliance members free transfers either. We treat all newcomers equally, and give the same respect to our 10 year old newest member as we do to the writer with 20 years of experience.

I also agree that including a rating (PG-13, R, etc.) and a setting (X years before or after the Battle of Yavin) are good ideas.

[Loklorien s'Ilancy]

As far as the Alliance page itself is concerned, what if we had different skins for it? That way each board could submit a few designs that are based off of their own stylesets.

[Tais Voru]

I tossed out a couple polls hoping we could come to some sort of minor resolutions so we can move on to other facets. Just strikes me as the easiest way to establish some ideas so we get this thing rolling.