Rules people actually read

Nobody reads a wall of rules. They read five lines, once, if the five lines are short and in the place they were already looking.

The purpose of written rules is not to cover every case. It is to make enforcement feel fair when it happens, because you can point at something that was there before the incident.

Five lines, in your own voice

Write them the way you talk. Rules written in legal register invite rules-lawyering; rules written like a person invite a person's behaviour.

A workable set:

• Be kind. This is a small room.
• No slurs, no harassment, no "just joking" about either.
• No spoilers for anything I have not got to yet.
• Do not tell me how to play unless I ask.
• If I ask you to drop something, drop it.

Yours will differ, and they should — the fourth line matters enormously to some streamers and not at all to others. What matters is that each line is a behaviour, not a value. "Be respectful" is not enforceable because everyone believes they are being respectful.

Put them where people already look

Not in a document. Rules live in three places, in this order of usefulness:

• A chat command. !rules costs nothing and is what a mod links when something happens.
• Your panels, under the stream, where someone browsing your channel for the first time actually scrolls.
• Said out loud, occasionally, in passing. Once a month, in a normal voice, when nothing has gone wrong. This does more work than the written version.

The unwritten rule that matters more than the written ones

What you allow in your own tone is the real rule set.

If you make jokes at the edge of one of your rules, that rule does not exist. If you let a regular do something a newcomer would be timed out for, you have a two-tier system, and everyone can see it. Consistency across people is the whole game — rules applied unevenly read as favouritism even when they are applied leniently.

Enforce quietly and quickly

The instinct is to explain. Resist it.

• First offence, minor: delete the message. No announcement. Most people self-correct instantly and nobody else needs to witness it.
• Second, or anything deliberate: a short timeout. Ten minutes. Long enough to be a signal, short enough not to be a stand-off.
• Slurs, harassment, or hate: ban, immediately, no discussion. There is no version of this where a conversation improves the outcome, and hesitating tells everyone watching that it is negotiable.

Never argue with someone who is being removed. You are not talking to them; you are showing forty other people how this place works. A long argument tells them that rule-breaking gets attention.

Do not talk about it afterwards

The temptation after a bad incident is to address it at length. Usually the opposite is right: handle it, say one calm sentence if anything at all, and carry on with the stream.

Dwelling on it hands the person the audience they wanted, and it makes everyone else sit through something unpleasant twice. The people who need to know that you handled it saw you handle it.

If something genuinely significant happened, say something short in your Discord afterwards rather than live. "Someone got banned last night, that's handled, back to normal" is sufficient and complete.

Review them once a year

Rules accumulate. Someone did something odd in 2024 and now you have a line about it that confuses newcomers.

Once a year, read them back and delete anything that is not a live issue. If you cannot remember the incident that caused a rule, nobody else can either.

What to do when you get it wrong

You will time someone out unfairly at some point, usually because you read three words out of context while doing something else.

Say so, briefly, and undo it. "Sorry, misread that, my fault" costs you nothing. Streamers who never admit an error do not look authoritative; they look like someone it is risky to talk to.

Next: finding mods, and telling them what you actually want them to do.