2015-2016 Season: Rules, Resources and New Features

Welcome to a new NHL season! We wanted to give an overview of r/hockey's rules, resources and newest features to start the season off right.

#New Features

• Charity Committee - hoping to handle larger more involved projects by putting together a group of users to help
• Post Game Threads - Post game threads for every regular season game will be posted here in r/hockey by a bot
• Top Team Subreddit Posts - top 5 listed in the sidebar, all 30 listed here, updated every morning
• Flair Stats - list of the distribution of user flair, updated once a day
• Twitter Tuesdays - thread where you can post any chirps or tweets that aren't allowed as individual posts.

#Resources

Be sure to check out our /r/Hockey Resource Guide for a list of resources.

#Rules

##General

We relax the rules during the off-season due to the low flow of information, but during the season we have a few more rules.

This will remain stickied for a while, but there is also a link to the rules in the sidebar under "Get flair/Posting for begginners" > "Conduct Guidelines". Please note it's impossible for us to comment here on every situation that may occur, but we will try to adhere to these rules as closely as possible.

The one foundation of r/hockey, that governs all conduct issues, is preserving the quality of discussion for our membership. Excluding the more specific situations listed below, quality of discussion being degraded is a result of not respecting fellow r/hockey subscribers. Treat others with respect, and the same will be afforded to you.

r/Hockey gets a lot of submissions and comments on a daily basis, and it's impossible for us to see all of them. If you notice something that breaks the rules, please use the report button. We appreciate you're help in keeping r/hockey a great place to discuss this awesome sport.

##Submissions

We mod submissions stricter than we mod comments.

• Check for duplicate posts before posting
• No memes, no exceptions - r/nhl or r/nhlmemes allow memes
• No reaction gifs
• No error screenshots from websites/tv screens/billboards/etc
• No Vine posts
• No hashtags in titles
• No "Fixed" or "I see your ___ and give you ___" posts
• No editorialize titles (ex: You won't believe these 10 things that just happened!!1!!1)
• No Bleacher Report
• No fantasy hockey posts - they belong in r/fantasyhockey
• No EA video game posts - they belong in r/ea_nhl
• No posts about ESPN having shitty hockey coverage - we get it, they suck
• No tabloid/gossip posts
  • Bieber's shenanigans are not quality posts
• No screenshots of twitter chirps
  • This season we will have a weekly Twitter thread where you can post these kinds of things
• Link directly to twitter videos, not to the tweet itself
• No posts to tweets with a link to an article and no other sustenance, just post the link to the article
• Do not use "Official Thread" in the title of your post unless we've specifically said you can
  • We're trying to save this term for legitimately important posts
• All submissions must have a descriptive title
  • Not allowed: "That reach", "That shot", "That save", "This", "Look at this gem"
• Pictures of memorabilia/views from your seat/tickets/your equipment/hockey-stick furniture belong in r/hockeyfandom or in the weekly Show Off Sunday posts
  • Exceptions - if you've created unique or something that took time and have pictures of the process it's allowed over here
  • Posts ok for r/hockey: example 1, example 2, example 3
  • Best posted to r/hockeyfandom: example 1, example 2, example 3
• Wager post belong on r/hockeywagers
• Weekly Threads have designated posters in order to prevent people racing to post them and us having to remove duplicates
  • List of weekly threads can be found here
• Game Day Threads similarly have designated posters, if you would like to be a GDT poster please message u/TeroTheTerror or u/Sentry07
  • GDTs cannot be posted earlier than 1.5 hours to game time
• No spamming your blog/site/own content
  • Reddit has a 9:1 rule, 9 posts not your own content for 1 post of your own content. We are a little more lenient and ask for a 3:1 ratio.
• List of what is considered low content is found here
• Team-specific content that is not a big news item should go in the team-specific subreddit
• If there are multiple posts about an event (goal/hit/injury) submitted around the same time, we will always favor a gif/video over a self post, even if the self post is submitted first

##Comments

• Memes/reaction gifs/error screen shots/twitter chirps/vines/anything that belongs of r/hockeyfandom are all allowed in comments as long as they don't break the conduct guidelines
• No racist/sexist/ethnic/homophobic comments - examples below in "Banning Policy"
• No hate speech
• No spamming your own content in the comments
• No harassing other users - includes following people around or summoning them with Reddit's /u/.... feature
• Respect others and you will be respected
• Trash Talk is awesome, but please don't cross the line by breaking the above rules

##Banning Policy

For almost all ban-worthy offenses we use: 1st ban - 5 days, 2nd ban - permanent. Situations that follow this rule are:

• Racist, ethnic, sexist or homophobic slurs
  • This includes "OP is a bundle of sticks", "LA Queens", "Cindy Crosby", "Sedin Sisters", "Calgary Flamers", "frog(s)" (a derogatory term used to describe French people) in addition to the obvious ("fag/faggot/faggit/nigger")
• Any other hate speech of any kind is not tolerated on r/hockey
  • This includes using "you can play" in a negative way
• Attempting to disrupt the normal function of the sub via loopholes in design or function
  • Example: what happened last season with users subverting normal flair process to get personalize user flair
  • If you find something like this please mod-mail us so we can fix the problem, thanks

The following situations are dealt with by 1st ban - 1 day, 2nd ban - 5 days and 3rd ban - permanent:

• Arguments that devolve into name calling and disrupt the quality of discussion - likely both users will receive a 1 day cool-down ban
  • This does not mean you can instigate someone to the point where they call you a name and then come running to us asking for them to be banned

Unique situations that may follow either banning scheme:

• User harassment - just a single argument that gets out of hand and it will follow the 1day/5days/permanent version; however, if you're stalking someone around the sub (or into other subs)/PMing them incessantly/using Reddit's user summoning feature to harass them it will follow the 5days/permanent version.

Situations that result in a permanent ban immediately:

• Spam bots/spammers
• Purposely luring people to clicking on NSFW links by labeling them as something innocent

As above, we cannot possibly list every single scenario that may occur, mod discretion will be required in some cases. As a general rule: be a decent human being and you'll be fine.

Why do we use bans as warnings?

1. We can track bans, but we can't track warning messages

2. The impact of a short ban is usually greater than that of a warning message

#Questions?

Respond here or message the mod mail and we'll be happy to answer your questions

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