The policies and guidelines we use now are more or less the same as those we used 10 years ago, and they have served us well – no questions about that. But a lot has happened since then, both in Hattrick and the world around us, and it’s now clear that the policies that were made in a different time and situation don’t serve us as well anymore.
So, what we’ve done is asking ourselves what we would’ve done differently if we started Hattrick today when it comes to these questions, taking into account everything we’ve learned during the years. And from that we’ve set a new vision for our rules, policies and guidelines, and updated them to fit Hattrick today and who we want to be in the future.
What we want with this is to become even more customer friendly than we already are, and that our officials’ actions become more transparent and less secretive. We will naturally still have our house rules (and they will not change much) and we will still make sure those are respected, but how we act to uphold them will change. With punishments that are more logical and not overly harsh. Where we rather remove the possibility for a user to use a certain feature (such as the forum) if he/she misbehaves, than letting it get ingame consequences (such as fines for example).
Today we release a first visible step of this whole project,
account status page. Now, we know most of you will never need to check this page at all, but if you happen to violate the rules – this is where any official actions will show, totally transparent and visible for the user (this page is naturally only visible for yourself). And we can also better inform why the action was taken, and what the consequences are. Right now it will only cover forum violations, but it will later cover other game/site violations as well.
Together with this our moderators will “release” their new internal guidelines. We will also clear everyone’s forum ban slate (except those few who’re on a final warning), so we all start fresh. Moreover, there are some things that should be mentioned:
- If you get a ban, your ban track for that forum offense (light, medium, heavy) will be advanced by one step.
- A moderator will no longer decide the ban length him/herself. Mods will “just” decide whether someone violates the rules and what category it is. The system will then advance the ban track for that offense, and hand out the ban connected to it.
-If you get a ban, just respecting the forum rules (behaving good) will automatically clear your ban track with time (how long time depends on the violation(s)).
- If you get banned from the forum, you will not be able to access the forum at all (neither read nor write) during that ban.
You should know that this whole “policy reboot” is not something that will happen over night, it’s a process that will take time (at the very least, the rest of the year). Also, most of this work is internal and something you’ll not really see. But in the end we hope this will show. For everyone, both for those of you that have played for many years and for those who sign up tomorrow.