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I hate rules.

Specifically, I hate rules written by people who think they know how to write rules. Go to any medium-sized forum, or art host, or IRC channel, or whatever. Look at their rules.

There will be some 20 very specific things that you're not allowed to do, and maybe even some lint to prevent particular specific things people have done in the past. And these will inevitably catch perfectly well-meaning people doing perfectly innocuous things, and the people in charge will insist they have to enforce The Rules even though they're arbitrary and they made them in the first place. And everyone has to memorize the contrived nitpicky rules to avoid tripping over them, because acting like a regular human being isn't enough.

This drives me crazy. Feel free to visit #spp for a while to see what I mean.

So. Let's try something different. There is precisely one rule, passed down through my family for at least one generation. Here it is.

Leave it better than you found it.

Forums are about us, not you. Whatever you do, stop to consider whether it makes the place better for everyone else.

Are the forums better when everyone else has to decipher what you type?

Are the forums better after you post "i like arceus" in twenty threads?

Are the forums better with your 800×600 signature image of Sasuke? Ha, just kidding, I haven't implemented signatures.

Simplest rule thread ever. I like it.

In my opinion it should either be posted in a Soapbox forum or pinned so that it's not pushed out of sight by other threads.

Hmm, I decided to try and follow this tenet on my own forums, but I got a little carried away with the enforcement of said rule, and describing why certain actions violate this rule.

http://fourstarmon.com/forum/showthread.php?tid=10

What do you think of this unholy child of the two rule paradigms?