Chat Moderation Rules

The basic moderation rules:
[BAN]  Spam bots and people who are obvious trolls
[TIMEOUT]  Regular chat participants who break the rules
[BAN]  People who come back from a timeout and break the rules again


Distinguishing between spammers/trolls and regular chat participants:
*  If you see a link from a person who has not talked in chat before, it's almost certainly spam.
*  Link shorteners such as "bit.ly" are almost certainly spam.
*  Trolls are usually really easy to identify.
*  Everybody has a bad day, makes a mistake, or loses their temper and says something dumb sometimes.  Please try to distinguish cases where the person is a usually-decent chat participator who's having a lapse in judgement [TIMEOUT] from cases where the person's only goal is to be a jerk [BAN].


What's NOT allowed:
*  Link-shorteners
*  Porn and obviously NSFW material
*  Racist, sexist, orientationist, and other intolerant material
*  Heckling, insulting someone, or starting a fight
*  Advertising your own streams or events without my permission
*  Political or religious debates.  You'll never change anyone's opinion on these matters; don't waste your time.


What is OK:
*  Posting links to stuff that isn't going to offend anyone.  I don't care if it's on-topic or not.
*  Advertising the streams of other runners that I follow/watch, runners of games that I'm interested in, and events that I support.
*  Stream-raids.  I encourage people to send their viewers to me when they go offline.  The raid spam is gonna happen regardless of what you do, so just ignore it and let it pass.
*  Emoticons.  Nobody is getting timed out for using Kappa a little too much.  But there are limits -- if it becomes obvious that a person is going overboard with emoticons just to be noticed then [TIMEOUT].


Notes:
*  Some people are new and don't know yet not to use link shorteners.  Please try to distinguish between the noobs and the actual spam-bots.  Noobs get a [TIMEOUT].  Spambots get a [BAN].
* The "bombch.us" link-shortener is often used legitimately in the speedrun community, though nothing stops a person from using it for spam.  You'll have to try to distinguish based on chat context, if you don't want to click the link itself.