Guidebook Revisions

Over the past 6+ years (!) of Wolf's existence, our guidebook has gone through a lot of changes for a variety of reasons! Many of these have been the result of shifts within community opinion; others have been in response to various situations that have occurred on the site through the years.

It's come to the team's attention that, as a result, we've ended up with policies in our Guidebook that we don't believe in or enjoy enforcing. While there are things that can still change depending on community preference, the fundamental goal of the site should remain consistent. We've drifted away from that in a few ways.

There were a few major goals in this rework, and those informed every change that was made:

• Simplify our rules to involve less "technicalities"
  
• Encourage player agency
  
• Organize so that the most important rules are easy to find
  

This new guidebook represents the type of place we'd like to move Wolf towards; one that enables players to develop their characters in the way that best suits them so long as it has no adverse impact on the others around them doing the same.

Here's a summary of the ways that the new differs from the old:

• We've introduced a Code of Conduct clarifying our courtesy guidelines as well as how certain situations may be best handled.
  
• Optional guidelines and any additional contents have been moved to Help articles.
  
• Dogs, coyotes, and other "canis" members can now be registered as Lone Wolves and can join packs. (The group name will be updated to better reflect this).
  
• Within packs, individual members now count towards forming/retainment, regardless of who plays the character. This better reflects the idea that a pack is the sum of the bodies in it, not some arbitrary OOC specification.
  
• Pack leadership no longer has a mandatory "cooldown" period. While you still must meet requirements to form a pack, members can be promoted regardless of their longevity, and PMs may be re-promoted immediately so long as other PMs (or membership, if they are sole PM) agree this is the best course to take.
  
• There's now a clarified guide for communication preferences within the Game Management section.
  

We are aware that our current Breeding guidelines run counter to the sentiments expressed above; we do have plans to revisit these! However, we did not want to introduce changes on the tail end of the breeding season as we did not feel that would be fair to those we have enforced policy on from the beginning. Those will be posted when we've finished reflecting on the season and finalized how that section should appear. If you see any changes in these guidelines that refer to the breeding season (such as minimum age), know that those do not apply for the remainder of this season.

Thanks everyone for being awesome! We hope that this is our last update for a long while to our core guidebook, and that it can become something agreed to on joining and counted on to hold true throughout your duration as a member here. As always, feedback is always welcome!