h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"But it looks to me like the new rules are against impersonating others, posting for Researchers who have been suspended, and abusing the complaints system."

The only new one is the middle one - posting for suspended Researchers. The other two you mention have been there for months, if not from the very first version of the House Rules!

The under-18 section hasn't changed since the very first version either...

Conclusion: not everyone reads the House Rules. Not sure what we can do about that!

Oh, BTW, the musical note smiley shorthand is o / ~ not < o / ~ >

The latter will look like <> not )

Cracking read, as always!

Erps! *sigh* You really shouldn't have to run around correcting me. But bless you for doing it anyway.

I'll go ahead and correct the article. The fewer people read it the old way, the better.

I'm made that correction now.

In my defense, I probably forgot some of the rules because there wasn't an ice cube's chance in hell I was ever going to violate them anyway. But I will say that, yes, people will tend to forget the specifics after several months. I'm probably not the only one.

Please? Tell me I'm not the only one?

Erp?

I *very* much doubt you're the only one. I wrote the House Rules page (and then the lawyers re-wrote the bits I got wrong ), and *I* have to keep refering to it to remind me of what I said, so I'm sure everyone else does too!

The only problem is that often the reason that rules get broken is that people forget that there *are* rules about certain things (or they never read them in the first place). It's not malicious - h2g2 isn't full of people just waiting for the opportunity to break the rules - but it can escalate. It's quite common for people to post to the Moderation Help Desk along the lines of 'Why on *earth* was my entry removed?', only to have the rules pointed out to them that make the reason perfectly clear.

We also get quite a few people claiming they know all about copyright law, only to find that, unfortunately, they don't.

But it's not a massive problem, just a bit odd when the rules are there for everyone to see, in black and white... but as you say, who goes to read the House Rules on a regular basis? It's just a good job they don't change much (and when they do, like in the election, we'll flag it on the Front Page).

Not much more we can do except to keep working towards less stringent rules, I guess.

The fewer rules there are, the easier it is to remember them all.

Can't argue with that.