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The Something Awful Forums publish every ban in a public list, the Leper's Colony, next to the rule that was broken. Among the community guidelines examples that follow, that line is the one a template leaves out. A rules page drafted from a template says what is not allowed; the pages that survive a decade of arguments also say what happens next, who decides, and where the decision can be challenged.
Five sets were read on their live pages in September 2026: Wikipedia's civility policy, Stack Overflow's code of conduct, Reddit's content policy, the Arduino Forum's guidelines and the Something Awful rules. The useful question about each is what behaviour the wording was built to stop, and what the page commits to doing about it.
| Community | Enforcement ladder | Where a decision goes next |
|---|---|---|
| Wikipedia | A clear warning, then a block for severe incivility; persistent patterns escalate to a community ban | The Arbitration Committee, the final decision-maker for conduct disputes the community can't resolve |
| Stack Overflow | Moderators review flags regularly and apply suspensions or other penalties | An appeal path to the company; individual sites may set stricter local rules |
| Starts informally, asking nicely then less nicely, before suspensions, removal of privileges, quarantine, content removal and banning communities | A separate Moderator Code of Conduct governs the people running each community | |
| Arduino Forum | Members are told to flag bad behaviour rather than reply; action follows automatically or by moderator intervention | No enforcement ladder beyond the flag; the guidelines call themselves non-binding |
| Something Awful | A minor breach produces a timed posting probation; a ban goes into the Leper's Colony with the rule and the moderator named | A designated appeals forum, separate from the thread where it started |
Wikipedia's civility policy and the code above it
Wikipedia's civility policy is short on prohibitions and long on definitions. It calls civility "part of Wikipedia's code of conduct and one of its five pillars" and reduces the standard to a line: "editors should always treat each other with consideration and respect." Incivility is then defined as "personal attacks, rudeness and disrespectful comments", with a list running from name-calling and profanity through "ill-considered accusations of impropriety" to quoting another editor out of context "to give the impression they meant something they did not."
That last item is the tell. An encyclopaedia written by strangers works only while disputes over sources stay disputes over sources, so the policy targets the moves that convert a disagreement about content into one about a person.
Enforcement is graduated, and the graduation is written down. "An act of severe incivility ... is unacceptable, and the offender may be blocked from editing", while the same policy says users "should be clearly warned ... before being blocked for incivility." Persistent patterns escalate to community bans, and the Arbitration Committee sits at the end of the chain as "the final binding decision-maker primarily for serious conduct disputes the community has been unable to resolve." Above the policy sits the Wikimedia Foundation's Universal Code of Conduct, which applies across every Wikimedia project and separates expected from unacceptable behaviour in its own numbered sections. A local page, a global floor, and a named body for the cases neither one settles.
Stack Overflow's code of conduct, organised by activity
Stack Overflow arranges its code of conduct by what a member is doing. It opens on the mission of building "libraries of high-quality questions and answers", then walks through asking, answering, voting, curating and commenting, attaching an expectation to each. Voting gets its own paragraph because votes are the site's currency: "improperly cast votes undermine the integrity of the platform."
Unacceptable behaviour arrives after that, in six categories: abusive behavior, sensitive content and imagery, harmful political content, misleading information, disruptive use of tooling, and inauthentic usage. Disruptive use of tooling is the category that appears only once a site hands members tools. It covers a member who turns a legitimate privilege, such as mass edits, closes or flags, into a weapon against somebody else, and a board that hands out flagging and editing rights at a post threshold has handed out that weapon by default.
The route runs through flags, not replies. Moderators "review flags regularly, and users who don't follow the Code of Conduct in good faith may face repercussions deemed appropriate by our moderation team, including, but not limited to, account suspensions", with an appeal path to the company. One structural detail is worth lifting whole: individual sites and chat rooms "may choose more restrictive policies for their content than what is allowed here", which is a network floor with stricter local rules layered on top.
Reddit's two layers and its low end
Reddit's content policy is explicit that rules come in two layers. "The culture of each community is shaped explicitly, by the community rules enforced by moderators", and beneath those sit eight platform-wide rules "enforced by us, the admins." Each is one line, among them "Remember the human", "Abide by community rules", "Respect the privacy of others", "Be authentic", "Keep it legal", "Don't break the site." A separate Moderator Code of Conduct governs the people running each community, and that is the document that goes missing on a board whose staff rules live in a private staff channel no member can open.
The enforcement list is unusual for starting below the formal steps. It begins with "asking you nicely to knock it off", then "asking you less nicely", before reaching suspensions, removal of privileges, quarantining a community, content removal, and banning communities outright. Naming the informal step matters, because a page that starts its ladder at "warning" describes a process nobody runs.
The Arduino Forum and the stock guidelines text
The Arduino Forum, running since the mid-2000s, publishes the default guidelines text that ships with its forum software, unedited. That makes it worth reading twice: it is the wording a community inherits when nobody writes one.
The text frames the space as "a Civilized Place for Public Discussion" and then disclaims its own status: "These are not hard and fast rules. They are guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community." The operative instruction tells members to criticize ideas and leave the people who hold them alone, followed by the four moves it rules out: name-calling, ad hominem attacks, responding to a post's tone instead of its content, knee-jerk contradiction. On enforcement it tells members not to engage: "When you see bad behavior, don't reply ... Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention." A separate section, Keep It Tidy, carries the rules that keep threads readable: no crossposting, no no-content replies, no signing your posts.
The disclaimer is doing real work, and it is also the reason the text alone is not enough. A page that says its rules are not rules needs a named enforcement ladder somewhere behind it, and the stock text does not supply one.
Something Awful and the visible penalty
The Something Awful Forums have been online since 1999, and the rules read nothing like a code of conduct. The posting standard is a question the member is told to ask before posting: "Am I making a post which is either funny, informative, or interesting on any level?" Ahead of that come "Lurk before posting!" and a warning against replies that add nothing.
The enforcement design is the half worth studying. A paid registration fee stands between a banned member and a fresh account, so the cheapest evasion on any free board costs money here. A minor breach produces a posting probation, a timed restriction instead of an ending, which gives moderators a penalty they will use on a regular who crossed a line once. Bans go into the Leper's Colony with the rule attached and the moderator named, so enforcement is auditable by the membership instead of taken on trust. Appeals go to a designated forum, which takes the argument out of the thread where it started.
Each of those pieces answers a question the other four pages answer more formally: who pays for evasion, what sits between a warning and a ban, who can see a decision, and where it gets contested.
The lines worth copying
The parts that recur across the five, in the order that makes them easiest to enforce:
- Scope: who the rules bind, staff and moderators included, and whether sub-forums may add stricter rules of their own.
- Expected behaviour: one positive standard, phrased as a test a member can apply to a post before hitting reply.
- Not allowed: named categories in place of examples, including misuse of site tools such as flags, votes and reports.
- Posting standards: where a topic belongs, what counts as a duplicate, what happens to off-topic replies.
- Enforcement: the ladder in order, from a private word through content removal and timed restrictions to a permanent ban, marking which steps the community can see.
- Reporting and appeals: where to flag, and where a decision is challenged once arguing in-thread is ruled out.
Each of the five pages also carries its own history in public. Wikipedia's civility policy exposes every revision through the wiki's page history, and the version of Stack Overflow's code of conduct live in September 2026 records a last update of 31 May 2023.