SportsTalkSocial (STS) is a community built around sharing sports related content within the Steem ecosystem. This enables anyone to share their views and opinions and have the opportunity to be rewarded in our native token, SPORTS, as well as the traditional Steem token distribution that exists within the Steem blockchain.
While the goal of our community is to organize and advance the writing of sports focused content the token system introduces a number of incentives for users to produce content in any form to be rewarded with tokens. While we encourage users to share as they see fit we find it imperative to create a set of guidelines and enforcement procedures that help to keep our community aligned behind it’s vision.
The following guidelines are what we would consider worthy of a downvote on a #sportstalk post.
This one is most obvious. Any content shared under #sportstalk should be in relation to sports in some fashion or another. Any posts that don’t tie back to our vision will be considered spam and should not be supported.
Each post created through SportsTalkSocial.com, and it’s associated sites, is that of the user who published the post. We do not allow users to share any content that violates someone else’s intellectual property or trademarks. If a copyright claim is reported by a rights holder, or their authorized representative, we will remove and potentially restrict that user’s future ability to use our platform. Users found repetitively plagiarising may lose their ability to utilize the platform.
There are instances where copyright material may not require the copyright owner’s permission for use. Only the court can determine if the use of copyright works was within fair use but they often consider four factors for determination. The four factors US courts consider are:
For more information on fair use visit Copyright.gov. Please note that each country has their own laws governing intellectual property rights. Please consult legal representation for your jurisdiction if you have questions to how those laws may affect you.
We want #sportstalk to be a home for everyone. We will not tolerate users using our services to harass others and will take actions available to stop such behaviors. If a user has said they would not like to interact with you then you should provide the courtesy to not interact with them.
We will also not condone any actions that call for harm to anyone. This includes the threat of release of private information about users such as their phone numbers, physical address or electronic addresses also known as doxxing. We encourage users concerned for their safety to immediately contact authorities.
We do not allow hate speech within #sportstalk. No user should make any direct attacks on another user based on the means of race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender, disease or disability. We are all humans and should all behave that way.
Users should not engage in activities to farm rewards including comment and vote farming.
Content on the platform should be safe for work. Any content that is deemed not safe for work may be removed.
Users should not pose as another person or organization with deceptive means. Users will be removed from the system for violation if your profile does not clearly state it is not affiliated or connected to any similarly named individuals or organizations.
To help with aligning the rewards to users who are participating in the community in a fair means we’ve devised a system to allow for fair moderation of the #sportstalk community. This is accomplished through a few means that are detailed below.
We’ve been fortunate to have a community that’s willing to curate the good and the bad of #sportstalk. If you see any content that you personally feels violates any of the above guidelines please consider giving it a downvote. Every user has effectively 2.5 free downvotes each day that will not have an effect on your voting power so there’s a lot we can do ourselves.
Sometimes you need dedicated people to focus on moderation beyond what the community can provide. When this team works together they will have the ability to remove rewards from users and limit their interactions with the platform.
There are nine referees (
If a post is visited by multiple referees then that becomes a slightly different story. If four of the 
For now the referees have been assigned by 
To compensate referees for the time they will be dedicating to the platform we will be distributing 5% of inflation rewards to be split among the team.
There is a daily report that is being published by 
If a user has 3 strikes from 
From here any referee can create a post with the title of “Penalty Box {
While this is a very serious infraction against an account it is not irreversible. Just like a referee can nominate a user for the penalty box they can also nominate a user to have the suspension be removed. Once they are removed they will be unmuted from
We want to meet our users where it is most comfortable for them to discuss abuse. That’s why we support reporting violations to us in a number of ways.
If you’d like to report content to the Referee Team you can always leave a comment on the daily Referee Decision report published by
We encourage users to join our Discord group for a number of reasons. One of the most notable is the ability to quickly speak with other #sportstalk users. If you have any reports on violations of our community guidelines please leave a message in #replay-room.
We don’t have all of the bells and whistles tied in but additional means of contact will be provided in the future.
This post will be updated as changes are made to our policies.
