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Ye olde MBP rules

Game rules:
1. Official impersonations
2. Six-Week Rule
3. No implicating who other people are OOC, who their second characters are, or that they may have a second character
4. No harassing players and no death threats
5. No plagiarism

Community rules:
1. Fulfill all the requirements
2. No posting in the community more than five times in one day
3. OOC posts must be locked for friends only
4. No GIP's
5. No posts that disallow comments
6. No posting quiz results, surveys, memes or lyrics-only posts

Punishment:
Punishment scale for minor infringements
A major crime gets you kicked out

Suggestions:
Go here to read the suggestions.

Characters that will be admitted to the masterlist
Characters fitting into these categories are eligible to be played within the must be pop universe.

Rules for the game:

1. Official impersonations
In order to be considered an official impersonation within the Must Be Pop universe, you have to be on the masterlist. Before you can start playing, you need to update at least once and then register by leaving a comment with your journal username, the celebrity's full name and the category your celebrity should be listed in at enter_mbp. You will get a comment back within 24 hours to let you know that your journal is on the masterlist.
Note: If, at the moment of registration, your journal has last been updated six or more weeks ago, it is considered dead and will be treated like a journal that has no updates at all. You need to write a new update before you can register and become official again.

2. Six-Week Rule
When a journal is not updated for 6 weeks in a row, the role is considered abandoned, and anyone can step in.

Exception I: Under certain circumstances, we will put some roles on a "safe list," which means that the role cannot be taken over, even if the journal goes over six weeks. One examples of these circumstances would be serious health issues that require lengthy hospital stays and/or rehabilitation. The safe list is posted in every weekly administration post in must_be_pop, and the celebrities are marked on the masterlist. If you are facing serious issues that will keep you from updating, please contact the MBP Moderation team. Don't ask to be put on the list if you're just going on a family vacation, though. Remember that you have six weeks to come back from your holidays anyway. We require a valid reason and a return date. The return date can be pushed back later. If your case is particularly serious (for example if you have a chronic disease that frequently leads to spontaneous hospital trips), we can also put you on a "permanent" hold list. Please work with us.
Exception II: A player who is giving up a character ONLY has a right to choose his or her successor if they explicitly announce that they will be doing so at enter_mbp. This means that if you make a good-bye without commenting to enter_mbp that you want to nominate a new player (don't forget to comment with the journal user name of the replacement), if you let your journal die, or if you delete, then your ex-character is freely available to whomever would like to play.

3. No implicating who other people are OOC, who their second characters are, or that they may have a second character. (Major crime)
This includes all sorts of OOC information on a player, as well as sentences such as "gee, you sound familiar," or "gee, you sound an awful lot like ___." You guys aren't dumb. You know when you're dropping hints. Don't do it. Do not, do not, do not. This is a cardinal sin. This is an evil practice and not something that anyone else wants to know.

4. "No harassing players" goes hand in hand with "no death threats are to be made on other characters." (Major crime)
This sounds basic, doesn't it? It's not. In Character threats of violence are one thing. It's part of the drama. But if you threaten a player or say outright that you're going to kill someone, whether it be in or out of character, that's taking it too far. And furthermore, it is illegal in real life. If someone threatens death on someone else, it's likely an argument in which the participants have just gotten way too carried away. If you're doing it as a joke, like if AJ said to Nick "Nick, I'm gonna kill your ass" and Nick laughed, that doesn't count. Same for harassment: it's against LJ rules, so we put it into our set of rules, as well.

5. No plagiarism (Minor infringement)
It's against the rules in the academic world, and it's against the rules in MBP: taking other people's words and passing them off as your own.
Now don't get nervous. We're not going to monitor all of the interwebs to see if "I love you" has been said by anyone before, just because you wrote that in an AIM conversation. Like all the other MBP rules, this one will only be enforced when and if we get a really, really, really valid complaint.
A bad complaint would be someone saying "so-and-so stole a nickname that I use with my significant other to name their cat!!"
A really, really, really good complaint is when someone shows us a website/journal/something of the like where an entire paragraph or entry was lifted from.

The must_be_pop community rules:

1. Fulfill all the requirements
In order to be eligible for membership to the must_be_pop community, you need to be on the masterlist and have at least three updates, and your journal needs to be at least one week old and appropriately disclaimered according to LJ Abuse guidelines. Check the must_be_pop userinformation to find out what exactly that means.
Every character journal must fulfill all the requirements to get into the must_be_pop community. This means even if you've changed journals without a name change token, you have to wait a full week and write three entries before the new journal will be admitted back into MBP. There are two possibilities to achieve membership status: either you get one of the reccers to recommend you or you apply for membership.

2. No posting in the community more than five times in one day. (Minor infringement)
This is just because it would be really annoying if you did.

3. OOC posts must be locked for friends only. (Minor infringement)
We have an illusion here, and anything that's OOC likely isn't something everyone who comes along should know anyway.

4. No GIP's. (Minor infringement)
GIP's, in case you were wondering, are Gratuitous Icon Posts. In other words, don't post in the community with the sole purpose of telling us that you have a new icon. Find something to say along with it.

5. No posts that disallow comments. (Minor infringement)
This is a community. It's for community interaction. Everyone should be able to comment on what you have to say.

6. No posting quiz results, surveys, memes or lyrics-only posts. (Minor infringement)
Use your own journal for that. A lot of people have MBP on their friends lists and that's a lot to scroll through when you're reading. If you want to include some lyrics, that's fine, but don't make it only lyrics. There should be a post to go along with it.

Now, what happens if you break these?

Well, if you're committing a "minor infringement" for the first time, there's a warning, i.e. "hey, Christina Aguilera, you badass, you just did a Gratuitous Icon Post in the community, which is evil of you as per community rule #3."
And then there's the punishment scale:
- if you break a rule again after the warning, we take away your posting rights for one month (it's your responsibility to remind us that the month is over and that you should get your posting rights back).
- the third time, the character is "kicked out" for a certain amount of time (again, our suggestion is a month), then has to be recommended back in.
- if a character violates the rules four times, he or she is kicked out with no possibility to get back in.

If it's a real, big bad "major crime," then we kick yo ass out as soon as we see the mess. Even if it's outside of the MBP community. No harassing or threatening people, no giving out or hinting OOC information - it's as simple as that.
NB: Harassment is a slippery subject. Don't come running to us every time someone calls you a big meaniehead and expect us to kick them out. There are extremely few cases that are serious enough for the person to be kicked out. If you and another person get into a personal argument and get all messy on one another, then we suggest you just ignore them.
On the other hand, if someone gets seriously scary, please inform the police and not your friendly volunteer mods.

Suggestions:

Now, suggestions, as the name suggests, are different from rules. This is just some friendly advice.

-It would be nice if your first post here included a bit of an introduction, i.e. talk about what we may know you from, so others can learn that little bit more about you.

-Multiple posts should be kept a minimum. (e.g. posting the same entry in 8 communities and your journal)

-One-liners ought to be kept a minimum, if not avoided. I understand the value of them, and to quote Natalie Portman, a lot can be said in a one-liner, but if would be nice if we didn't see 10 of them in a row.

-To make things less confusing, keeping other characters in different RPG's off your friends list would be nice. (i.e. the pop_stars_anon thing. It's your journal. You do what you want with it. But it would start a mass of confusion.)

-It would be nice if you didn't post AIM conversations without the consent of the people involved, particularly if it's just to start an argument.

Those are just suggestions, i.e. things that didn't make it to the "rule" level. Nothing happens if you break them. It's just stuff we thought we should mention. Oh, and my own personal suggestion? Don't be an idiot.

Characters that will be admitted onto the MBP masterlist:

- Adults in the entertainment industry (music, movies, TV, theater).
- Adults in professional sports.
- Child stars.
- Children of famous parents.
- Other relatives, friends, etc. of famous people.
- Agents, managers, other industry people.
- Royalties.
- Politicians.
- Socialites.

So if you want to play a comic figure, a criminal, or someone who's dead, then find yourself a different game, please.

As per 04.09.2007, only characters 13 years or older may be portrayed in MBP.