Quote:
Originally Posted by Demisis_P2P
-- this is vague aswell, I've not seen Graal attempt to ever cater to the needs of all user communities. They have Christmas events but no hanukkah!???!!!!!
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I know, totally. It freaks me out how on Classic, (particularly when Classic was the only server,) there was a christian church (complete with roman-catholic priest - in static graphic, head, body5 makes a fair Collar...) and a few satanic shrines (primarily in the archives, I think Voluran's and Ebon were bending in that direction a few times) but nothing to represent any of the other religions. I comissioned Bar Giora to make us a synagogue, but he never did...something about it looks just like a church without a cross, I can't remember the precise details.
But yeah - all religions, no religions, or only fake religions. Note that the default chapel graphics avoid the use of real-religious iconography - just a Graal at the top. If there's a Church of Graal, that's fine. If their priests look a little real-priesty, I don't see that as being necessarily a problem - as long as they aren't carrying any blatant markers of Who Worships Whom, it's still basically balanced. But if there's an official Jesus Fish Church, then the buddhists get one too, so do the mormons, so do the jews, so does the church of the flying spaghetti monster (I was touched by his noodly appendage, arr).
In my administration I was always very careful to "misspell" it as X-Mas, the Holiday of Capitalist Gratitude. Santa, reindeer, snowmen, all sufficiently divorced from their religious roots that it's no more a bludgeoning by christianity than the old Frosty the Snowman claymation they play every december - and certainly less sectarian than Merry Christmas Charlie Brown.
Thus I propose another thread - should we invent an official mythology for Graal, so we can still have a midwinter festival without excluding certain religious groups unduly?
And as regards the main topic - yeah, nobody's read the EULA. Nobody pays attention to these things, especially not the admins that wrote it years and years ago. Technically if you read all the rules I'm still the LAT Admin, just On Extended Vacation - but nobody reads all the rules, not that I'd rampage across Classic on a whim anyway.
So - what defines Legal? There are International Laws regarding internet behavior, though they're ill-defined, scattered, and somewhat hard to find. I'd say we should defer to the largest international legislative entity, the United Nations, but as the president of my country has unfortunately declared, they don't have jurisdiction over the United States (which is funny, as the UN was Woodrow Wilson's idea if memory serves...might have the president wrong...)
-thus, should we write up hard and fast rules? I don't actually know. I think I'd advise against it, in all honesty. It's a question of ratios - the admins would spend maybe a thousand man-hours (human-hours really, since I imagine the burden would fall equally on both genders, but human-hours sounds like I'm an alien talking, so I use the old gender-inappropriate phrasing) writing waterproof rules, then carve them into stone and show them to all the world...which would then spend infinite hu/man-hours chipping away at them, finding loopholes, exploiting new technology.
"You said we can't use any of these programs to edit the memory, but you never said I can't use Norton's new ActiveGhost program to RESTORE the memory state from a few seconds ago!"
"You said I can't call anyone a n***, n*****, w**, f**, f*****, c***, c*********, or a b****, but you never said anything about Mekraub! Or the translations of these words into various native languages!"
Scarily enough, I recommend the EULA reflect the following:
"Based on the judgement of the admins, your access may be terminated at any time and for any reason, with or without warning." Then to smooth things over, "You may appeal any such decision to a panel of no less than 6 global admins of your chosing, with a 2/3 majority needed to overturn. Alternatively, you may request a partial refund (deducting time elapsed prior to restriction), with a simple majority sufficient to pass." Nevermind how impossible it is to find 4, let alone 6, global admins, nor how unlikely it is to get them to listen to a banhammered newbie over the admin that banned them; principally, it would allow Graal to move forward with impunity.