Welcome to the monthly /r/boardgames town hall. This is an opportunity to discuss the subreddit, make suggestions and observations, or ask questions. No topic is off-topic, the mods will be popping in and out, and we’re happy to engage in any and all discussion. The only thing we ask in return is a little politeness and respect up front. Remember, we’re volunteers.

This month we've got a handful of announcements to run through:

Rule Changes: Intellectual Property

After discussing some challenging rulings lately, we've decided to clarify our stance on intellectual property and reproducibility:

Out of respect for designers and publishers in our hobby, we do not allow any posts that enable a full or significant reproduction/recreation of any game

• Effectively you can share pics of your retheme in play, but not any of the raw images or files you used to make it
• This is not a legality judgment, and will stand even if the images are public domain or "fair use". Legal protections for game concepts and mechanisms are actually notoriously weak or nonexistent, hence one of the reasons the community tries to be self-policing about copying ideas without permission.
• Offering or suggesting to provide files via PM or commenting on such posts asking for files is also clearly not in the spirit of the rule.
• We may allow reproducible materials when there's clear approval from the designer/publisher. However verifying this approval can be a tedious task for us, so ask first and assume that we're not going to allow it.

Issues with copyright and other intellectual property violations should be handled through Reddit's official channels.

• Assuming the post follows the reproducibility rule, we're not going to try to determine if there are any other IP infringements, i.e. in the case of a retheme using characters or content from a book, movie, TV show, or video game. The mod team is simply unequipped to evaluate legitimacy and reddit already has full procedures and mechanisms for handling such problems.
  • Of couse we still reserve the right to intervene if something seems "obviously" wrong or objectively bad for the sub, though these scenarios are likely to trip other rules.

Rule Changes: Promotional Posts

Continuing from the discussion in our last town hall, we will be implementing our revisions to promo rules as follows:

r/boardgames is a community, not an audience. Our rules are designed to promote community engagement, rather than being purely a conduit to promote a blog, podcast, Kickstarter, YouTube channel, or similar. In order to ensure this is maintained, /r/boardgames limits promotional posts or activities for which one could receive a financial benefit to these guidelines:

No more than one post per-user, per-week (7 days) from a single source.

Multiple posts linking the same source require a 10:1 ratio (or greater) of comments between posts.

Sitewide Reddit karma must be above 100 to share links.

However, sharing content should hopefully not be your primary interaction with /r/boardgames, just as dominating a conversation would not be acceptable in other social engagements. Reddit sitewide guidelines suggest only 10 percent of all your activity should be about your own products. We support similar expectations. r/boardgames is a community, an opportunity for conversation with others who share a similar passion, not an audience.

This is the same basic idea we presented then—to loosen the restrictions on users who are posting from a variety of sources, while compensating with a small karma barrier to limit spam—but slightly revised to handle a few perceived weaknesses. Note that, aside from sub-100-karma accounts, all posts complying with the old rules would still be valid under the new ones.

It may take a little bit for us to get all of our ducks in a row, but we're going to start transitioning to using this guideline immediately.

Upcoming User Flair Changes and Voting

First of all, we'll be holding a flair suggestion voting thread next week, so get your ideas churning. However things will be a little different this time around:

• Switching to "redesign-style" flairs: Old reddit implements flair icons with CSS hacks, new reddit supports them as emoji. With this flair update we'll be transitioning some-to-most flairs to the new system. This isn't a statement that we're throwing our weight behind the redesign in general. The emoji are backwards-compatible, whereas the CSS isn't forwards-compatible, so using redesign for this gives us the best overall support. The new system also gives us built-in controls (instead of a 3rd-party script a select few can run) and higher-quality images.
• Flair count limits: Our tool previously limited us to 350 flair slots, while new reddit is limited to 300 emojis. However, based on what reddit devs have said publicly, we do expect the limit to be relaxed in the near future. For now, I'm going to cap us at 280 game flairs so that we have a few slots for generic icons and experimentation. For now we'll still use the 350 limit as the threshold for "bumping off" old flairs. At the time of the vote thread, I'll post a table of all the least-used flairs that are on or near the chopping block. Note that in the past, we've had vehement fans of low-usage flairs successfully rally and save them from the purge.
• Resolution upgrade: Emoji can be uploaded at resolutions up to 128x128px. Even though our flair displays at 16x16 in CSS pixels, on many devices with higher pixel density you will see a higher-resolution image. For example, my computer sees the revised and old Agricola flairs as below.
  • We do have permission from BGG admins (thanks BGG!) to continue to use their microbadges in our flair system. However their badges are limited to exactly 16x16, so if folks are interested in helping to upgrade, we'll have to coordinate the creation of new images, as well as permission to use the corresponding source material. I'll have more details on this later.

We also have some visual tweaks available on new reddit, like choosing the background color for default flairs (just this week they added a transparent option, too) or upping the flair size. I personally think having larger-than-text-size looks clunky, but on the other hand, it could enable us to use some images that were previously too small to be recognizable.

Subreddit History Mystery

/r/boardgames is coming up on its 10th anniversary in a little over a week! In celebration, we've been exploring our archives and finding some interesting historical posts, #modsarenerds, but there's one glaring omission in our discoveries: who actually created the subreddit? Nowadays reddit records the original creator of each sub, but this wasn't true in 2008. Reddit duplicators and generic web history tools don't reach back far enough and only reveal more mysteries. For example, the first post that didn't later get deleted wasn't submitted until 11 months in, but by then there was already a team of several mods?

We're not looking for you to message users for us. We've already reached out to a number of folks, and we don't want anyone swarmed with inquiries. It's probably annoying enough when one internet stranger asks what you were doing a decade ago! We are looking for either: people who were around in the old days and have any clues or interesting details about the early sub, or suggestions of other techniques we can explore.

This isn't high stakes, just looking for some fun trivia as we approach year 11 and several other milestones. \cough** 1 million users \cough** top 100 sub \cough**

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Whew; that's all I've got right now. Let us know your thoughts, and again, you're welcome to discuss any topics here. Game on!