Day to day · Chapter 11

The house rules.

Anyone running a server for other people ends up with rules. How much may someone request, how long do titles stay, who do you message when something is stuck. Usually those live on a pin in a chat, in a voice note or nowhere. The house rules are a text you write yourself and your people can find in Nexview at any time.

Writing the text

You find them under “Settings › House rules”. There are two pages, “Write” and “Overview”. On “Write” there is an editor with a toolbar on the left and “How it looks” on the right, so whatever you type appears beside it at once. There is a “Heading” for the text, the tools “Bold”, “Italic”, “Code”, “Heading”, “List”, “Numbered”, “Quote”, “Link” and “Divider”, and images. If you do not want to start from nothing, take “Insert a template”: it brings a short text titled “How things work here” that you can change, with sections such as “What you can request”, “How long things stay” and “When something does not work”.

1. Write

   Write your rules on the left. The text is Markdown, and the buttons above set it for you.

2. Images

   With “Upload an image” you store images and put them into the text with “Insert”. Only images from your own installation can be inserted. Nexview will not show a foreign address, otherwise every view of the house rules would report your people’s address to somebody else’s server. Images that are not used in the text stay until you delete them. If the text points at an image that does not exist, everyone sees a placeholder there.

3. Publish

   With “Published” you release the text for everyone. While that is off, only you can see it.

The § button

Your people see a round button with a section sign at the bottom right, and the text hangs in the footer. Whoever has never read the house rules sees a dot on the button, the same way the bell works. The button does not pop open by itself. Whoever opens it reads the text. If you have switched on “Allow marking as read”, “Accept” and “Decline” appear at the bottom. Once someone has decided, they no longer see the button, and the text stays reachable through the footer. With it off, the window closes like any other and the button stays for good.

Nobody is locked out. There is no dialogue at sign-in that you have to dismiss first, and the button stops no one. Even a “Decline” has no technical consequence, you see it and decide for yourself. Anyone who wants to ignore the rules still can; they just cannot claim they never found them. Child accounts see neither button nor link, and administrators are not asked to accept the house rules.

Making everyone read it again

When you save, you decide whether everyone has to read it once more. A typo bothers nobody. A real new rule brings everyone back: the tick “Everyone has to read it again” makes the button reappear for all, and beside it stands how many accounts that affects. Whoever accepted an earlier version then counts as “Open” again in the list.

Who has decided

The “Overview” page shows, per account, whether the person has “Accepted” or “Declined” the current version or is “Still open”. Filters for “All”, “Open”, “Accepted” and “Declined” show at a glance who is still missing. In “Settings › Users” each account also carries “House rules: …” with the date or “not read”.

Already with the invitation

In the invitation assistant the “Onboarding” step has the tick “Show the house rules”. Whoever redeems an invitation then sees the text as one of the steps, and accepting is not required there either. If no house rules are published, the tick is locked and says why.

Deleting

“Delete house rules” removes the text and all images. The button and the footer link then disappear for everyone.

Next comes signing in: Sign-in and OIDC. How the house rules relate to rules and quotas is in the chapters Rules and Quotas and storage.