TLDR:
Devsupport’s rules appear to exist in two places, the FAQ page and the User Guidelines page, and they are not in sync with each other. I think that, based on my previous Discourse experience and looking at Discourse’s documentation and own forums, the rules should be in one place only, the FAQ page.
The long version:
A few weeks ago, a user posted in the forums asking a question in Spanish that clearly didn’t belong in devsupport. Trying to be helpful, I replied in Spanish, and told them to visit forums.flightsimulator.com, and to speak in English in those forums because English is required there. The following day, I found my post flagged and taken down.
The consumer-facing forums clearly state in their Code of Conduct that English is the only language allowed there. However, if you go to the same page on devsupport, the FAQ page, the word “English” never shows up on the page. (And yes, I checked before writing my reply.)
Furthermore, paragraph 2 on the FAQ page says:
So I was surprised, and to be perfectly honest, a little angry to be punished for violating a rule that wasn’t documented, all while trying to help another user.
Today, I discovered that the rules on devsupport exist in two places:
- The aforementioned FAQ page.
- The User Guidelines page*, which unlike its FAQ cousin, does have hard and fast rules, one of which is about English.
In my opinion, the rules should exist in only one place. It’s less confusing for users that way. And I believe it is Discourse’s intention that you use the built-in FAQ page for rules, as Discourse’s documentation refers to that page as a place to outline community rules, and their own forums put their rules on their FAQ page. It’s also linked off of the left sidebar, unlike the User Guidelines page. You could link to the rules from the User Guidelines page so the rules aren’t maintained in two places.
Final thoughts (I’m sorry this is so long):
This is just my opinion, but I don’t like the term “FAQ” for a rules page. I like that the main forums calls their page the “Code of Conduct.” I don’t think that this site has to be identical to that site, but I wouldn’t mind calling the FAQ page “Guidelines” or something like that. If you were to do something like that, I would also rename the User Guidelines page to “Welcome” or something similar so there’s no confusion. Any links to the existing User Guidelines page would remain intact, as the site only looks at the topic number (7) in the URL.
* Note: I’ve read the User Guidelines page, but a long time ago, and I stopped because the top is a how-to, and I have some experience with Discourse already. So I was never aware of any extra rules being on that page.