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+--- Thread: Jellyfin Forum Rules (/t-jellyfin-forum-rules)
Jellyfin Forum Rules - joshuaboniface - 2023-06-13
These are the rules that all users shall abide by at all times while using the Jellyin forums and other Jellyfin spaces.
1. You shall abide by our Community Standards at all times.
2. You shall not do any of the following things:
- Antagonize, flame, insult, demean, abuse, or harrass other users or those outside of the community.
- Dox or otherwise share others' private information.
- Post offensive, sexual, or otherwise inappropriate content - keep it "Safe For Work" in all forums.
- Discuss, encourage, or facilitate piracy in any form. Please see the Piracy Policy below for specific details.
- Spam the forum in any form, or post off-topic anywhere except the designated off-topic forums. Accounts found spamming will be banned and purged on sight, and the IP and registration email reported to StopForumSpam.
- Post verbatim replies from "AI" Chat systems (e.g. ChatGPT) as answers.
- Post information that may violate the ToS (Terms of Service) of other services; if a ToS is unclear, you should assume that it is against the ToS.
- Post technical misinformation i.e. information about a technology that can be objectively proven wrong.
4. You shall ensure you are posting in the correct (sub)forum before making a post. Read the descriptions to ensure you're in the right place.
5. You shall respect moderator decisions at all times, though you may appeal decisions. Disputes shall be handled by the Core Team who will have final say.
6. Please write in English if at all possible, as English is the working language of the Jellyfin project. If you cannot, please write in your native language (with or without attempted English) and ask for a translation if required. Replies to such threads shall be in English, or in English + Original language, for the benefit of the wider community. Thread subjects must be in English.
7. You shall not abuse the attachments feature. Limits are high for troubleshooting and guide purposes, not as a personal pastebin. Excessive users without good reason will be curtailed.
8. If you are using Jellyfin for commercial purposes or within a business setting, please review the Commercial Support Policy below.
Failure to abide by these rules will result in a warning. Subsequent failure to abide by these rules will result in a ban.
Piracy Policy
Piracy is a very tricky matter for software like Jellyfin. We want to ensure our users can have useful, productive discussions about their media with respect to Jellyfin, while also ensuring that we are not seen to be encouraging piracy. In the past, our enforcement has been extremely strict, but we have decided to further clarify and soften our position slightly for these forums.
The following guidelines should help define where the line sits and what crosses it for the purposes of enforcing rule 2.4:
- We do not care where your media comes from. This is our "golden rule". Don't be explicit about it; it's never relevant to the issue at hand, with the caveats below. For example, "Yea I got this movie form GreatTorrentSite.net" is disallowed.
- Directly referencing or linking to piracy websites (including torrent sites, forums, etc.) is, of course, prohibited. Do not do it; this is very much on the far side of the line.
- Selling, trading, or otherwise providing access to your Jellyfin instance(s), in any form, on our forums is prohibited. Instances of Jellyfin that are available to the public, either openly or by invitation, containing media that the owner of the instance does not have legal permission to "distribute" or "perform" (as per local and international laws), are piracy and will not be supported here.
- Often, the format of the media can contain info that points towards a pirated source. This is fine as-is, but do not elaborate on it. For example, saying it's "a WEB video" is OK, but not any more than that. Saying it's "a WEB video ripped from Netflix" is not OK.
- Unsorted/direct filenames should generally be scrubbed in any logs, commands, etc. that you post, with exceptions. Further to the first point, we don't really care where it came from, which filenames like "
MyMovie_2023_xVid_RipCrew-SCENE.mkv" are all about. Just call it "MyMovie_2023.mkv" or something similar instead to avoid mentioning the source. Note, however, that issues about media scanning, file access, etc. should preserve the actual filenames for troubleshooting, but if you are having these problems, the filenames are likely the cause in the first place and you should rename them sensibly (shameless plug for my mediasorter tool).
- References/guides to related tools that may or may not facilitate piracy (Sonarr, Radarr, etc. collectively "The *ARRs") are discouraged but are not prohibited as long as they are directly relevant to an issue with your Jellyfin instance. A guide on "the ultimate piracy setup to download every movie you want ever", discussing in-depth how to use those tools, is not suitable for our community, and should be a part of their communities instead (or a 3rd party community).
- References/guides to ripping physical media you own are discouraged but not prohibited. This is a very grey area. At this point, we believe that this knowledge is public enough and widespread enough that repeating it for the benefit of our userbase is not a negative, but this is a rare occurrence and should be carefully considered. We already have a comprehensive guide, so further discussion in this area should not be needed.
- References/guides to ripping publicly available media (e.g. YouTube) are discouraged but not prohibited. This is also a very grey area. Tools like "
youtube-dl" and the like have their own communities better suited to this discussion, but like above, we will accept a single comprehensive guide should it be written.
Commercial Support Policy
Jellyfin is an explicitly anti-commercial project; that is to say that we:
- Are volunteer- and best-effort-only.
- Will not commercialize the software ourselves.
- Do not provide payment for development.
- Do not support bug bounties or other such systems of paid support.
- Collect donations purely to cover infrastructure and other incidental costs.
Thus, while Jellyfin is a GNU GPL-licensed project which does not prevent or preclude commercial uses, please be aware that some members of our community do not look kindly on this and, as is their choice under our volunteer-only policy, may not be willing to provide support for commercial implementations. Not everyone feels this way, and such discussions are allowed here (subject to all other rules), but we want to ensure this is explicitly stated to avoid any misunderstandings or misaligned expectations.
In short, if you are expecting support for the commercialization of Jellyfin, please do so respectfully and with the mutual understanding that this is not something everyone might wish to endorse, and no member of the team nor forum community is under any obligation to assist if they do not want to.
Changelog
2023-06-13: Initial version.
2023-06-22: Add piracy policy.
2023-09-30: Explicitly ban sharing instance access; explicitly mention signatures and profile fields along with names, and add piracy, in appropriate content rule.
2023-10-01: Add commercial support policy and related rule entry.
2023-11-03: Clarified filename scrubbing rule and altered suggestion of when to scrub.
2023-11-13: Add that thread subjects must be in English. Improve spam section.
2024-10-11: Add TOS and misinformation rules to bring Forum rules into standardization with Chat rules.