This rule comes from me, and it originates from a few places. Wow, it feels really weird to be talking like a historian now but HERE WE GO 🎉

Before Subeta, there were two major online communities that were similar, both of which I'm sure a lot of people here came from! They were Gaia Online and Neopets, and to me (at ... 14) they represented the two polar opposites of how to build a community (things I had to think hard about... at 14!!!).

On Neopets, you couldn't say that you were gay. You couldn't talk about anything, and couldn't swear. That made the forums ONLY about Neopets, because any real life discussion almost always made it to the realm of being against the rules.

On Gaia, it was the wild west, or felt like it. Some of the early Subeta users remember the drama squads on Gaia (and.. we replicated some of them here 💀), where someone being banned became THE TOPIC of discussion of the entire buying and selling forum for days. It could literally take the wind out of the sails of the in game economy for someone "famous" to be banned or have some kind of dramatic event on the site.

Neither of those were how I wanted Subeta to work. I wanted you to be able to talk about Subeta, your life on Subeta AND I wanted you to be able to make real friendships, right here on the forums. I also wanted you to be able to use the forums without the drama-of-the-day bleeding over and FWIW I think we've done an incredible job at this over the years. Yeah, you can go to an offsite tumblr to ask questions, but at that point 99.5% of the Subeta users aren't going to see it, and it's not disruptive (except to the people who center their lives around drama on a virtual pet site, in which case no amount of moderation is going to help them or the issue).

If someone gets banned, we just don't talk about it, we keep going on in our cool Subeta world. If someone self freezes, hopefully they told their friends. Maybe we can make the option to leave a comment or something when you self freeze, but this rule is unlikely to go away/.