At Scirra, we’ve worked hard for years to bring you the best software we can. We also like to be closely involved with our community, including public bug reporting and suggestion systems, to make sure we are building what our users want. To go along with that, we want to ensure that our community remains a positive and welcoming environment.
To achieve this, we’ve developed a set of community rules we hope will promote the environment we’re aiming for. For our moderators to work successfully and help maintain a positive atmosphere, we've set out some rules that we expect community members to follow. We've also listed any offences and their repercussions in this post's tabs.
Please read the following text thoroughly, so that you know what to expect. Breaking the rules can result in temporary or permanent bans.
- General guidelines
General Guidelines
- Be polite, respectful and welcoming, especially to new users. We’re all friends here.
- Report Construct bugs to the bug tracker and post suggestions to the feature requests tracker. If you only mention these on the forum they may be lost/forgotten.
- Similarly, report any issues with the website specifically to the website bug tracker.
- Please don’t reply to people violating the rules; use the report button to report them privately.
- We have a global community so please be patient when waiting for a response – it’s generally recommended that you wait at least 24 hours before comment again or 'bump' your thread.
- Talking of a global community, we appreciate that not everybody speaks English, but this is an English forum, so please post in English. If you do post in another language, please provide a translated version of what you’re trying to say in addition.
- While not a specific rule, we’d prefer it if you didn’t revive old threads (necroposting). If you come across a thread that has been inactive for an extended period and you feel the need to respond, please create a new thread. This is especially important with technical or help-related posts as our software changes frequently, and these sorts of posts can quickly go out of date.
- Please only post each message once. Don't cross-post the same message in multiple places. This could be seen as spam, and it also makes it harder to follow conversations as different replies get spread out across different places, which in turn makes it harder to help you.
- Please don't use AI, such as ChatGPT, to generate content. It often produces text that sounds plausible, but is actually misleading, incorrect, or otherwise unhelpful. This causes confusion and ends up wasting people's time and making it harder for people to get help. It can also put pressure on more experienced users to have to step in and provide a correction, as it's important to ensure the forum is a useful source of information. So please only write posts that you personally know to be true and don't rely on AI to generate responses for you.
- Be supportive of the products we all use and the team behind it, and make sure feedback is constructive (no pun intended.) We all want to do our best to help things improve!
- Attempt collaboration before conflict. There’s often more than one correct answer to a question, and sometimes, differences in opinions or methods can be a good thing!
- Co-operate with others, including staff when dealing with issues.
- Remember no one person or thing is perfect, and nobody is always correct. Everyone is allowed to be wrong from time to time; we’re only human!
- Things that will get you banned
Things that will get you banned
- Using racist, sexist, homophobic or hateful language.
- Threats of violence or other personal attacks.
- Posting spam or otherwise promoting off-topic deals/offers. Note we routinely ban spammers that sign up new accounts and mention commercial products or services. New users should avoid this in order to avoid falling in to the spam filter.
- Promoting illegal activities, including piracy.
- Linking to or distributing malicious software.
- Linking to scams or otherwise suspicious projects or organisations.
- Posting with an alternative account while banned or otherwise attempting to circumvent a ban/moderator’s decision.
- Posting any other user’s real-life information (aka doxxing), or otherwise displaying confidential information that is not intended to be public.
We have zero tolerance of abuse towards staff or moderators. We have the right to do our jobs without receiving abuse. If you are abusive to staff – or indeed any user – you may be permanently banned with no warning.
- Things that might get you banned
Things that might get you banned
- Harassing or insulting users, moderators or staff.
- Having a persistently antagonistic, cynical, combative, sceptical or complaining attitude. For example, no software is perfect, but if you continuously claim that our products are absolutely terrible in every way, you may quickly wear out your welcome.
- Repeatedly bringing up topics that are known to be controversial.
- Repeatedly bringing up supposed problems for discussion, when the problems don't really exist (aka "concern trolling").
- Attempting to circumvent moderation activity, e.g. re-posting a locked thread. This extends to excessive discussion and questioning of the rules themselves, raising suspicion that you are looking for loopholes or testing the limits, or otherwise attempting to circumvent our rules.
- Complaining or harassing moderators and staff over moderation decisions, or backseat-modding (telling moderators what to do). Please take up any moderation concerns in private.
- We have many young users and intend to keep our forums family-friendly. Please do not post any of the following content, even with a warning - this covers text, video and imagery, including avatars; please keep it clean:
- Pornographic or NSFW material.
- Gambling or betting, unless in the context of developing an app.
- Offensive language, such as swearing.
- ALL CAPS posting or otherwise obnoxious posting styles.
- Registering multiple accounts. If you’re having account troubles, please email support@construct.net.
- Consistent wild speculation or controversial theories about what’s really going on. We know banning you will probably fuel these theories, but it can get really tiresome.
- Nagging staff constantly, especially over weekends and holidays. We’re only human, and we need time off too.
- Constantly “bumping” threads (posting again, so the thread moves back to the top of the forum.) Once or twice is enough, nobody wants to read a thread that consists of just *bump*.
- Being excessively demanding or impatient. We deal with many users, and we usually have a ton of work to do. Plus, if you’re addressing another community member, bear in mind that they come from all over the globe and won’t be online all the time. Please be patient.
- Repeatedly making posts which appear to be generated with AI. Our general guidelines cover why people should not make posts generated by AI like ChatGPT. If you ignore this rule and repeatedly make AI-generated posts which are misleading or otherwise unhelpful, we may end up banning your account.
- Consistently conducting a discussion in bad faith (i.e. with a negative intent). This can be difficult to prove decisively, but if our experienced moderators deem that you are not discussing in good faith, you may end up banned. Discussing in bad faith includes, but is not limited to, behaviour such as:
- Demanding time-consuming explanations or analysis, and then rejecting it out of hand
- Creating difficult or time-consuming discussions while putting in comparatively little effort yourself
- Deliberately obfuscating or confusing issues, so they take longer to resolve
- Shifting goalposts: whenever someone counters a point you raised, immediately bringing up some other contentious issue instead (e.g. “yes but what about…”) so that the discussion can never be resolved. Note that it can still create a bad-faith impression when it’s someone else who shifts the goalposts.
- Trying to portray yourself as a respectable member of the community while breaking the rules elsewhere
- Demanding impractical measures or infeasible solutions. If we say we can’t do something, it’s not because we don’t want to, or we’re being difficult, we genuinely can’t do everything!
- Accusing people of ignoring you or not caring, after they have tried to help
- Reasons we may lock threads
Reasons we may lock threads:
- A discussion is becoming particularly heated or personal, and everyone needs to cool off.
- Chaotic changing of subject or mashing together different concerns, so there is no clear topic of conversation. There should be separate threads for separate topics.
- Minor offences such as situations where moderators deem a discussion to be conducted in bad faith, even if there are no overt signs of rule-breaking. This can be considered a warning.
- Repeating discussion: points from earlier in the thread being brought up again and similar discussion following it.
- Repeatedly making false, misleading or wildly exaggerated statements.
- Deliberately trying to provoke a reaction.
- Telling people to buy someone else’s software, ‘just because’. We understand that one piece of software doesn’t suit everyone, so we don’t mind discussion of competitors, but this is a step too far.