Hi everybody.

For patch 2.4, Fury of the Sunwell, EJ imposed a Public Discussion-specific rule that stuck for the 3.1 and 3.2 patches in various forms. Basically the idea was that since the speed at which content comes out for this game has generally been pretty slow, people wanted to relish the small trickle of high-end content without necessarily "spoiling" it or filling the forum with dumb posts from people who hadn't tried a given fight. So for a varying amount of weeks after the release of the fight, discussion of that fight was "locked out" on the EJ Public Discussion forum.

I think this policy worked well for its time, but to extend it indefinitely would be unwise. Content seems to be coming out at a faster pace now, and mechanics for many hard-mode fights are clearly revealed by their easy-mode or 10 man versions, making the discussion lockouts sometimes ineffective. For these reasons we're going to try something different for this patch and see if it works.

For patch 3.3, no content discussion is explicitly locked out for any length of time. The hope is to get a healthy dialogue about the fights that Icecrown will throw at us, some of which will hopefully be up to the high water mark set by the game's previous end-of-expansion instances. Feel free to discuss your experiences from the PTR, the intricacies of mechanics, strategy variations, and whatever else you like.

All of our other rules and regulations are still in effect. Please review our rules if you can't remember or are unclear. In particular, threads about bosses in the past have tended to fall victim to posts of the following sort:

* "Just killed Supremus, here's the comp we used." This type of post is a violation of rule 6 and usually of rule 2 as well. Don't do this. Talking about whether a fight rewards class stacking or strategy variations is fine, but readers don't generally care in a vacuum that your guild killed a boss.
* "We're about to pull Kael'thas, what are some tips?" This type of post is a major violation of rule 7. Gurgthock has summed this up pretty well:
* "Does Onyxia deep breath more?" Generally this sort of post will get a rule 6 infraction. If you think something has changed or been hotfixed, post evidence.
* "What if you hid behind C'thun's gong?" This is also usually a rule 6 infraction, or a "misinformation" one. If you have a great idea for a new strategy for a boss, explain why it would work, with reference to your own experience. Even if you're "right" about an approach, if your explanation is specious or poor you will probably get an infraction.

This might seem like onerous restrictions, but they're not. It's really not that complicated to make productive posts about boss discussion. If you don't, infractions will be meted out pretty mercilessly, as the moderators are exposing themselves to a greater load of possibly infractionable posts with this new policy. If you do the exact opposite of what this post says, well, I'm just going to quote this sentence when I ban you.

The moderators want to try for a level of discourse in these Icecrown threads that matches those that drew many readers' attentions to EJ in the first place. Let's see what we can do together.