Announcement
Posting this here for everyone that’s not subscribed to the “BLAEO Announcements!” thread.
The guidelines have been updated and are now pinned in the Discussions section of the Steam group.
The new guidelines are:
1) Be nice.
2) When posting content, it should respect the privacy and rights of others.
3) Piracy, pornography, or any other material that may be inappropriate to a general audience should not be posted to the site.
4) While the site gives you a lot of freedom for writing posts, do not abuse that. Keep your posts related to gaming and try to keep your posts readable. Also, if your post has too many large screenshots, try embedding only one of them and linking the others, or reducing their size, or use HTML to come up with a creative way to alternate between them.
5) Do not spam.
6) Do not double post.
7) Do not beg users for gifts or ask for any kind of donations.
8) External links are fine as long as they do not contain referrals. If you want to promote your own website or any kind of project, you can include it in one of your regular posts only once (see guideline number 5). You can have the link displayed on your profile, but don’t try to circumvent this particular guideline by repeatedly telling people to look at your profile to check out your website/project.
9) Do not enter group-exclusive giveaways if you have not been active lately. If you do, you will be kicked out of the group.
10) Once you apply for Steam group membership do not keep asking for updates on your application.
Got a question with #3 and #6. In English in case someone else wonders the same so they are not confused by the random gibberish :D
#3: I guess it is still OK to just simply mention “I played XY game via emulator” without anything other about it added to it?
#6: I write weekly and monthly “round up” posts. Sometimes the end of the week and end of the month fall on the same day. Is it fine to double post those since they are a completely different format and it is something that happens once in a blue moon (I think it actually happened for the first time to me last month that they where actually one after the other with no other post in between)?
You’re not promoting piracy or help others with it, you’re not saying anything about whether you own the original rom or not, and emulation per se is not piracy, so … still ok.
That’s not what we had in mind with “double post”, we should probably clarify that. The kind of double posts we don’t want to see is “re-post instead of edit” or even “spam the exact same thing”.
If I would own it actually game/console I would not be emulating it ;) but I never plan to go into any more detail than to just say it was indeed emulated.
Different people have different definitions of double posting so I just wanted to make sure I would not be breaking any rules at any point, thank you very much for the answers! :)
3) pornography
Recently I posted review for Sakura Nova with link attached to my screenshots and there was some hentai there (No NSFW pics in the review itself). Is this ok, or are links that lead to NSFW not ok? I posted in bold letter that screenshots there are NSFW as an extra warning.
I always avoided posting links to explicit content because I know there are minors here. It’s actually the reason why I don’t add the vndb page links to the visual novels I review, even though the nsfw content there is hidden by default and has to be manually toggled on by the user.
Really? How old exactly are the youngest people here? If they’re like 16-17 then I don’t really care, the worst NSFW I’m going to post here are screenshots from games with nudity and I doubt it’s gonna be anything they haven’t seen already.
If I’m not wrong, you have to be at least 13 years old to have a Steam account (I’m not counting people lying about their ages), so technically you could have teenagers as young as 13 here. We should assume that there are indeed 13 years old reading. (Unless I’m wrong and there’s a different minimum age requirement here?)
I know that it’s naive to think that a 13 years old isn’t already consuming worse material on their own, but the responsible and just thing to do to limit liability in case anything happens (someone complains, etc..) is obviously to not provide access to pornography to minors.
Better safe than sorry, I chose to do the exagerate thing and avoid all together posting external pages that have the potential to be nsfw.
If the links lead to content on Steam and have a clear NSFW warning, then that’s fine.
I have some questions regarding #4 and #6. For #4 it’s the “keep your posts related to gaming”. I think I’ve only seen Ylthin post posts that are not really related to gaming, but I enjoyed reading them a lot and honestly really like them. I’m curious about why this is added. Same with #6. Why is double posting such a big deal? The immediate person I think would have a problem would be tsuper, who does an one game per post format, and if those games are short will definitely be double posting, but imo it separates discussions really well and is a good format.
Edit: I re-read #8 and have another question. Would my BLAEO review finder be considered as a problem for spamming? :P Just curious since I do mention it almost every time in my monthly post, but then again I’m not getting anything from it and people do tend to overlook it(not that it’s anything that good to miss but ya know).
For #4 it’s the “keep your posts related to gaming”.
This website was created with the intention of helping people fight their backlogs. If you check the “So, what’s BLAEO about?” section of the main page you can read what the main purpose of this website is.
It’s fine if people want to include some details about their own lives in their posts, but at its core this is still a gaming website so a guideline about keeping your posts related to gaming makes sense to us.
Why is double posting such a big deal?
Check mandrill’s response to MouseWithBeer above, I think that explains it well.
Would my BLAEO review finder be considered as a problem for spamming?
Repeatedly posting BLAEO tools for visibility soon won’t be necessary anymore because we’re working on a master list that will be posted on this website and in the Steam group. Having your BLAEO review finder there will reach more people than including it in your posts. :)
Oh alright. I thought double-posting is like posting two posts back to back since I remembered someone jokingly yelling at another person to not double post. :P That makes perfect sense then!
Omg! Looking forward to the master list. :o Alternatively I’m also looking forward to the tag feature that mandrill mentioned that he’ll “eventually” get to implementing. xP
Ok, I thought this might apply to me as well, so just checking:
8 - my offer do paint stuff and my links are affected by this right? I shall remove them?
Oooooor is it more about my personal stuff?
Or is it in general my updates? Which sometimes don’t have reviews but just what I’ve been playing that week?
Sry and thanks in advance <3
8 - my offer do paint stuff and my links are affected by this right? I shall remove them?
Yes, your offers to paint are covered by 7 and 8 and should be removed.
Oooooor is it more about my personal stuff? Or is it in general my updates? Which sometimes don’t have reviews but just what I’ve been playing that week?
Check my response to 86maylin’s post.
So basically everything that’s not about gaming is to be removed from posts.
Honestly? That sucks. I mean, yes, I know, we are about gaming. I for one tend to mostly read the personal stuff and not so much about games. I might read about games I’ve played, but not on a regular basis rly. I might as well just go to steam and only read the reviews there. For me this is also about sharing stuff and making a connection with other ppl. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But it would take a lot out of the whole thing for me.
I think it’s pretty sad you (as the team) want to exclude that part. We already have the option to only see ppl we follow, so nobody has to see everything if they don’t want too. So I really don’t get that.
But I’ll do it. If this is how you want it, no more personal stuff on my part.
8 I get, will not happen anymore - if you want, I can remove it from my last post right away.
If you re-read my post, you might notice that I said “It’s fine if people want to include some details about their own lives in their posts…”. There’s a difference between posting a blog post that’s entirely about someone’s personal life and a post that’s 50% about gaming and 50% about something else. One of those is okay on a gaming website, the other one is more suitable for a website like LiveJournal.
Eh, ok. I’m sorry for overreacting there.
That’s fine by me :)
if you want, I can remove it from my last post right away.
What do you think? And I’m quoting skanda’s answer for a hint:
Yes, your offers to paint are covered by 7 and 8 and should be removed.
Have we had problems with all of these, or are some of them just included for completeness? It makes me appreciate what site/group admins have to deal with behind the scenes that most of us don’t see. I’ve never seen issues with #2, #3, #5, #7, or #8. I also don’t have a problem with #4 and #6. As far as #9 and #10, I’m probably in the minority, but I think there’s merit in simply dissolving the SG group. BLAEO would run just fine without GAs, and it would get rid of those folks who are just trying to win games. How many active users of the site (those who read and/or write updates) would stop doing so if there was no BLAEO SG group with giveaways? Anyway, just a thought. Thank you to the admins for all of your efforts in keeping the site up and running!
Some of them have been problems before, some of them are there to prevent potential issues in the future. :)
Yeah I keep having to point out to people that being in the Steam group doesn’t really offer any benefits or extra features compared to just being on this website. I personally think that keeping the group active is still beneficial, though - especially for posting announcements and keeping the discussions about the website in one place.
Except for access to the giveaways, right? Hmm, I guess I forgot that the only way to remove the SG group is to dissolve the Steam group. Then maybe just a guideline somewhere that this is not a giveaway group…ask people not give away games to this group. I mean, I looked at a couple of the recent BLAEO-exclusive giveaways, and I didn’t recognize half the members…
And by extension, I take a look at the Steam group memberlist, and I don’t recognize half the members.
It’s a bit problematic to say that while they promote the website on Steamgifts.