SportsTalkSocial (STS) is a community built around sharing sports related content within the Steem ecosystem. This enables anyone to share their views and opinions and have the opportunity to be rewarded in our native token, SPORTS, as well as the traditional Steem token distribution that exists within the Steem blockchain.

While the goal of our community is to organize and advance the writing of sports focused content the token system introduces a number of incentives for users to produce content in any form to be rewarded with tokens. While we encourage users to share as they see fit we find it imperative to create a set of guidelines and enforcement procedures that help to keep our community aligned behind it’s vision.

Community Guidelines

The following guidelines are what we would consider worthy of a downvote on a #sportstalk post.

Lacking Sports Focus

This one is most obvious. Any content shared under #sportstalk should be in relation to sports in some fashion or another. Any posts that don’t tie back to our vision will be considered spam and should not be supported.

Plagiarism

Each post created through SportsTalkSocial.com, and it’s associated sites, is that of the user who published the post. We do not allow users to share any content that violates someone else’s intellectual property or trademarks. If a copyright claim is reported by a rights holder, or their authorized representative, we will remove and potentially restrict that user’s future ability to use our platform. Users found repetitively plagiarising may lose their ability to utilize the platform.

Fair use policy

There are instances where copyright material may not require the copyright owner’s permission for use. Only the court can determine if the use of copyright works was within fair use but they often consider four factors for determination. The four factors US courts consider are:

• Purpose and character of the use, including whether the use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
  -- Did the post include commentary or additional context on the subject?
• the nature of the copyrighted work
  -- Was the work factual or creative?
• Amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
  -- How much of the work was copied?
• Effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work
  -- By copying the work will it harm the potential market for the copyrighted work?

For more information on fair use visit Copyright.gov. Please note that each country has their own laws governing intellectual property rights. Please consult legal representation for your jurisdiction if you have questions to how those laws may affect you.

Harassment

We want #sportstalk to be a home for everyone. We will not tolerate users using our services to harass others and will take actions available to stop such behaviors. If a user has said they would not like to interact with you then you should provide the courtesy to not interact with them.

We will also not condone any actions that call for harm to anyone. This includes the threat of release of private information about users such as their phone numbers, physical address or electronic addresses also known as doxxing. We encourage users concerned for their safety to immediately contact authorities.

Hate Speech

We do not allow hate speech within #sportstalk. No user should make any direct attacks on another user based on the means of race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, disease or disability. We are all humans and should all behave that way.

Farming

Users should not engage in activities to farm rewards including comment and vote farming.

NSFW

Content on the platform should be safe for work. Any content that is deemed not safe for work may be removed.

Impersonation

Users should not pose as another person or organization with deceptive means. Users will be removed from the system for violation if your profile does not clearly state it is not affiliated or connected to any similarly named individuals or organizations.

Guideline Enforcement

To help with aligning the rewards to users who are participating in the community in a fair means we’ve devised a system to allow for fair moderation of the #sportstalk community. This is accomplished through a few means that are detailed below.

Our Community

We’ve been fortunate to have a community that’s willing to curate the good and the bad of #sportstalk. If you see any content that you personally feels violates any of the above guidelines please consider giving it a downvote. Every user has effectively 2.5 free downvotes each day that will not have an effect on your voting power so there’s a lot we can do ourselves.

Referee Team

Sometimes you need dedicated people to focus on moderation beyond what the community can provide. When this team works together they will have the ability to remove rewards from users and limit their interactions with the platform.

There are nine referees (@referee1, @referee2, etc) that you may see voting on content. If they downvote on a piece of content then that means they feel that it violated our community’s guidelines above for some reason. These accounts have 0 SPORTS and a limited amount of Steem Power so they alone have little effect on a post’s rewards.

If a post is visited by multiple referees then that becomes a slightly different story. If four of the @referee# accounts downvote a post that will trigger a downvote from @referee. @referee currently has 5M SPORTS Power to curb abuse and will be able to substantially remove a post’s rewards. It will take a group of trusted referees to revoke anyone’s rewards and no one person should be determining @referee’s downvotes.

For now the referees have been assigned by @patrickulrich to users that either showcased community moderation skills or came at a substantial enough of recommendation to warrant placement on such a trusting team. In the future it is a desire that these positions will be elected by staked SPORTS token holders.

To compensate referees for the time they will be dedicating to the platform we will be distributing 5% of inflation rewards to be split among the team.

Referees Decisions

There is a daily report that is being published by @sportsinfo that details the articles that have been voted on by a referee. This report will detail which referees have downvoted a post and give a link for users to review.

Penalty Box

If a user has 3 strikes from @referee on different daily reports within the same calendar week they will have the potential of being moved to the SPORTS Penalty Box. When a user is moved there they will be muted by the @sportstalksocial account and will lose the ability to influence the SPORTS distributions.

From here any referee can create a post with the title of “Penalty Box {@offender}” that will nominate a user for suspension. The body of the post will need to contain links to the 3 strikes from the @referee account while also linking comments from the referee team notifying the offender of their infraction. It would be highly recommended for referees to links as much data detailing their Penalty Box request as possible. If this post then receives a 60% supermajority of the referees upvoting in favor of a suspension the account will be moved to the Penalty Box.

While this is a very serious infraction against an account it is not irreversible. Just like a referee can nominate a user for the penalty box they can also nominate a user to have the suspension be removed. Once they are removed they will be unmuted from @sportstalksocial and will be able to utilize the platform again. Their reinstatement requires a 60% supermajority of the referees to upvote a post from the nominating referee entitled “Remove {@offender}”

Report Violations

We want to meet our users where it is most comfortable for them to discuss abuse. That’s why we support reporting violations to us in a number of ways.

Leave a comment on ‘Referees Decision’

If you’d like to report content to the Referee Team you can always leave a comment on the daily Referee Decision report published by @sportsinfo. This report is monitored by a number of referees and any reports will likely be seen there.

Join our Discord

We encourage users to join our Discord group for a number of reasons. One of the most notable is the ability to quickly speak with other #sportstalk users. If you have any reports on violations of our community guidelines please leave a message in #replay-room.

Additional Options TBA

We don’t have all of the bells and whistles tied in but additional means of contact will be provided in the future.

Additional Information

This post will be updated as changes are made to our policies.

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