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When you registered for the site, you agreed to a big, scary blob of text. That agreement is this document and it is posted here for everyone to see and reference as needed. If you are one of the eight people who registered before we wrote this, that was an agreement from a time before time, which is why it might not have made any sense.

This topic will remain open for any suggestions or questions.

[Calamity Refuge]

Overview:

Calamity Refuge is an online community island in the digital sea of the internet. It is a home and refuge to people who need it and a place to create and share things with their friends. This Code of Conduct is the set of rules and guidelines designed to protect this community and members' quality of life within it. This document extends to all areas that the Refuge and its Network administrates.

Rules:

• Members of this community are expected to be here in good faith. Using the community for data mining, excessive self-promotion, or schemes to the community's detriment will result in your ban.
• Discrimination is strictly prohibited, including but not limited to race, gender identity, orientation, and disability.
• You may not harass or bait other members, nor engage in bad faith arguments.
• Do not post pictures of a pornographic, erotic, disturbing, or disgusting nature. We already know where to find those.
• Links to where software can be illegally obtained, piracy sites, threats of violence, and promotion of hate groups is not permitted.
• Advertisement of other community servers is not permitted unless authorised in advance by an administrator, as it may be viewed as an endorsement we do not wish to extend.
• Commercial advertisement, such as requesting cash-equivalent items in exchange for anything, is not permitted.
• Doxxing in all forms is prohibited; you may not reveal the personal information of another member without their express permission.
• NationStates posturing and military gameplay swipes are considered unproductive or caustic and are not permitted.
• If you pose a threat to Calamity Refuge or any of its members, you will be banned instantly and permanently.

Information:

Calamity Refuge is legally owned by the Arch-Administrator, the lead developer. This is currently Luca McGrath, who is responsible for all blame. Administrators are the second level of authority, able to create or destroy entire services, their primary purpose is to ensure the continuity of the Refuge. Global Moderators are charged with enforcing the Code of Conduct and ensuring the well-treatment and equal protections of all members. Local Moderators carry the same role, but with a specific scope or area of focus within the community.

It is up to each staff member to interpret the Code of Conduct to the best of their ability and apply it to the situation at hand to reach the best outcome. Member should observe and respect staff warnings and advice if such should be issued in an official capacity. Failure to abide the rules listed herein will result in disciplinary action up to and including account termination. Appeals about a moderator decision may be made with any administrator. Appeals regarding any administrator decision may be made with the Arch-Administrator.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to send a private message through the forums. We love PMs, please send us PMs so we are not depressed. If you do not wish to send a message through the forum, send us an email. All administrators have an email of name@calref.cc. The current authority roster is located here, along with its history.

Legal:

By registering at Calamity Refuge, you agree that:

You are at least fourteen years of age. No service or content in this community is designed or intended for children under the age of fourteen and requests for membership by people below that age are denied outright. You must maintain the security of your user account and password. You are responsible for your account and its activities in this community. It is up to you to decide what information you disclose about yourself, in case it is seen by every identity thief in the world immediately.

This site is a community. The views expressed herein belong to their participants and are not necessarily those of the management and staff of Calamity Refuge. All information posted is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You may use or adapt any material that is found within the grounds for your own purposes so long as you attribute credit to the original creator and release your work with the same Creative Commons license.

Privacy:

Any information submitted to this site, including user information, comes under the stewardship of Calamity Refuge. This information includes, but is not limited to IP addresses, email addresses, hostname, your activity within this site, and the messages submitted to it. All information is securely maintained and encrypted.

Information submitted to the site may be released when, and only when, a relevant law enforcement agency with the necessary legal authority and jurisdiction compels us to do so. User information is never sold or released to third parties and unknowable scripts such as ads, dataminers, and tracking scripts are strictly prohibited. Refuge Administration retains the rights to terminate member accounts just as members may terminate their own accounts at their discretion.

This forum's software places cookies, (text files containing your session information), in your browser's cache. These are used only to keep you logged in/out. The software does not collect or send any other form of information to your computer. These cookies are not chocolate chip.

I have a question for you and I need time to work it out, myself, so I thought I'd make a topic for it. If you were to make a timeline of games, not necessarily the most popular game by year, but the games that most defined you and your gaming life in those years, what would they be?

Mine is like... I'm not sure but it probably starts with:
1997 - Freddi Fish Maze Madness
1998 - Frogger (PC adventure game)
1999 - Centipede (PC Adventure Game)
2000 - Bubble Bobble (NES)
etc. I'll have to think about the rest of my list.

I'm glad you're all here, especially if you've lost your other online community home. But, the good news is that we can build everything from scratch to be the kind community that's just for us. And you're always going to have my love and support 

A thread on this subject is probably overdue by now, but it only just occurred to me that I could write a post on where things are and where I hope they go, at least from my perspective. Part of that delay is just putting my nose to the grindstone and doing my best to remake the infrastructure that we can use to make a community. Part of it is me being sick recently. Mostly it's just my habit to live inside my own head. I forget that I can talk to people, I forget that I can ask for help, and I forget to remind people that I'm here and I care a lot. And I do.

I hope that this iteration of CalRef can be a replacement for all of the communities that have come and gone before it and, more importantly, be an alternative to what still remains. I didn't want to be an administrator, and I never really did. But I know that I can and I know that the internet is in a dark place right now. It needs something stable and dependable that you can hold onto. It needs a community that cares about people because they deserve to be cared about. So it's something that I want to do because it's something that I need, too.

I'm not a queen and members are not subjects to pass on praise to me. Respond to any topic you want, including this one, with whatever ideas or criticism you have, even if you think I won't like it. I want as many people to be a part of making and growing this place as possible. If you think we need to add something or something's not working, I'm not very bright but I'll do my best to make or fix it. Right now, there's not much here. Anything that remains of what was a much bigger internet island is washed away, and it's going to take some time to rebuild. But the good news is that we can start fresh, from the beginning, and you can watch and be a part of where things go. We've got the time.

So, I think right now, something I need to work on is how it looks and feels to be here. This theme is mostly fine, but it doesn't feel "us" enough. I'd like something that's a dark theme that's easy on the eyes, but still has some upbeat optimistic feel to it and retains some kind of "this is the refuge" vibe. Which sounds kinda difficult, but I think I can work at it. I have a jobs list that I carry on my phone so I can write things down as I think of them and then do them as I figure out how. Example: one of the things on here is an email server portal. That ranks pretty low on the list because I'm not sure how immediately useful that would be over the default, and also it would take a moderate amount of monumental work to put it into practice, so that'll have to wait.

Ranking a little above that, though, is board banners. There are going to be new boards that we haven't had before, and also, you know, the boards we have with the same names are kinda different from how things were forever ago, so maybe I need to freshen those up, too. I might be able to get them to switch out with light and dark themes with some smf functions, but I'm not sure yet. Right now, I'm kinda thinking that the writing board can have some sort of a hand-written theme to it, something written on old parchment with old ink. Announcements, I thought would be pretty neat if I could make something that looked like it was chiselled into a rock and has some kind of paintball splatter to it so it's not as grey. I don't remember why paint splats, but it still seems like a fun idea. I don't really have ideas on the rest, but it's going to take me a little while to get re-acquainted with After Effects and someone will probably have an idea for them by the time I need it.

I'll post another rambling when I have different things to ramble about. Until then, if anyone sees any bugs or things that don't look like they've been set up right, send me a message or send Valkyrie a message, or send Natalie a message. We're all getting familiar with things, so if something comes up, we'll figure it out together. 

Hi Rea! It's good to meet you and talk to you for more than two seconds

I'm Wisdom or Luca. I'm usually a housekeeper for Hilton. I used to create graphics, now I create websites. My goal for this community is to make a safe, reliable space for people to talk and create things, to have some positive feature in their life that remains constant despite everything else changing or breaking down. People should be free from neo-nazis, free from weird authoritarians and free from jerks who collect and sell your data.

To be perfectly honest, I'd like to build a relatively large site with a host of services and features that are built just for us and a community with a rich culture of works and ideas.

That's going to take a really long time.

But if you're willing to give it a chance and help make it, I'm willing to learn how to code it. The internet needs positive places now more than ever.

Welcome to everyone.

It was a particularly bright night.

The sun was up, birds were chirping, and Talamaeus Laraxius III, first of his name, emperor of Fyrom was feverishly surveying his domain. The wind swept though the trees, a white poofy cloud floated mindlessly through a bright blue sky... it was surely midnight. A young man of only sixty three, already he had a reputation as a great uniter. It was only a few months ago, when he was fifty seven, that he ventured outside of his mud hut to a small barn in the middle of the woods and proclaimed "You can be in my empire!" And so the story began of this great military and political powerhouse.

The emperor stood just behind one of the boulders on the rocky terrain at the base of of Mount Abandon, his brown linen robe flowed in the breeze, the holes in the lining of the robe, a display of the traditional culture of the realm. Mostly, he was satisfied with the survey today. The one hundred and thirty six large boulders on the eastern slope had, indeed, heeded his warning to seek a permit before moving to a new location; fortunately, the permits had been neither filed nor necessary. It was fortunate because the political and ideological significance of even one boulder being rotated, even slightly, was incalculable to even his wisest sages, crows.

He peered across the top of a boulder, spying one such crow just now. His left eye twitched every now and then, a curse of the tremendous power associated with the majesty of his station. The crow sat in a tree not more than five metres ahead. An adult male, black as day and reasonably groomed. It was making some impossibly loud squawking at least twice a second. Occasionally, it stopped, surely to absorb some of the emperor's own frustration with it as fuel to continue squawking for another few minutes. The emperor furrowed his brow in disgust. By now, his courier field mice must have been throughout the realm to pronounce his edict that day should become night and night day, but lo! This crow acts as though nothing has changed and disregards even basic respect for the laws of Fyrom as it hides behind its *birthright-status* as a imperial sage, well. That ends today.

The emperor reached into a pocket on his robe and withdrew a bag that seemed too large to be able to fit. It was made of buckskin, as deer were enemies of the state for not consulting him on a standardised number of horn points. The bag was tied shut with hair. Lots of hair. A small black cord extended out of the side of the bag. The emperor held the bag up and positioned the cord between his eyes. In the old days, before things were ruined by one of the eastern slope stones deciding to shift position, his stern look and strong reputation alone would have set this cord alight. Certainly it had happened only once before, but Talamaeus Laraxius never forgets. He produced a small tinderbox from the linings of his robe. The emperor's robes always contained the precise materials needed for his success because he only left his fortified earthen palace for highly specific reasons and only with the latest scouting reports from his spying turnip.

The emperor ducked behind the boulder and sat down in the small rocks interspersed with grass. These rocks were not enumerated because they were only allowed ninety-day tourism visas. He got to work preparing a fire from sticks and brush. After a moment, he popped his head back over the boulder to gaze upon his enemy. It stopped squawking, if only for moment. They long stared into each other's eyes, at least four seconds. The passion, burning. The hatred, mutual. Bored, the crow looked away and began to squawk again. The emperor sat back down and resumed working, muttering to himself about the rule of law. A flame formed in the box. He set the black cord of the bag to the fire and it began to smoke and sizzle.

"Night isn't a time for crowing," said the emperor. "It's a time for sleeping!" He roared as he threw the leather bag over the boulder at the winged fiend. The bag exploded in air, as bright and red-hot as it was terrible and great. The tree was engulfed in flame and the hundreds of leaves began crackling as water turned to steam inside their living cells. At the base of the tree, the crow lay motionless. It was now asleep. It was very, very, very asleep. It was also on fire, but the edict had been enforced, and that was what mattered most. All creatures in the realm would learn something this day:

Order would reign, thanks to Talamaeus Laraxius III, the great emperor of Fyrom.