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CWSP Rules & Guidelines

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This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 17 Sep 2020, 14:07.

[comments] [history] cwsprules Official Sahar Documentation (5 articles)

[Public] ? ?

1. CWSP Borders Guide ? ?

2. CWSP Rules & Guidelines ? ?

3. Geographic Origins of Species on Sahar ? ?

4. How to draw CWSP claims ? ?

5. List of Partially-Claimed Lands ? ?

+ Write new article in Official Sahar Documentation

[back to rules & resources thread]

This is a reference guide for expected and tolerated behaviour for CWSP members and prospective applicants. Please abide by them at all times. Those who are found to willfully break the rules will be suspended or removed from the project, as will serial accidental rule-breakers (so please do read them). The rules may be updated at any time (but there will probably be an announcement if they are, so you won't be without warning.)

Membership criteria.
1. You are at least 13 years of age.
2. You must be proficient enough in English that we can all understand each other. (Perfect grammar is definitely not a requirement though!)
3. You have not previously been banned from the project. (Obviously.)
Activity. Before joining, it is important to know that there are activity demands to be part of Sahar. We host quarterly Activity Checks to see that you are doing something with your countries, but we expect you to be around more often than that for your neighbours to ask questions and collaborate with you. Please join the CWSP Discord, where most collaboration and planning takes place.
1. Startup ("Base activity"). After being accepted, you must make a country page on the planetworkshop subdomain and on the CWSP Wiki. It is also recommended to make a thread on the CWSP Countries board.
  1. To participate in the Wiki, you will need to register (preferably with your CWS username) and be approved in order to edit the Wiki or add pictures.
  2. There are many quick-create links (country, language) on the homepage if you scroll down. Please also create a country data template [example].
  3. If at any time you change your country's name, please create a new Wiki page and a redirect page from the old name.
2. Activity Checks (ACs). We do quarterly ACs: January, April, July, October. During ACs you will have approximately 20 days to fill out a form indicating that you have, in fact, been doing things around Sahar, and intend to stick around.
  1. ACs are per country, not per user. If you have multiple countries, you have to fill out multiple ACs.
  2. For your first AC, you must only show that you have completed the Startup Activity (listed above).
  3. Thereafter, you will have to show some form of activity, such as writing a 200+ word article (grammar, in-country news, history — anything), making a detailed map, or adding at least 50 new words to a language spoken in the country.
  4. If you fail an Activity Check your country will be slated for removal. This will also impact Sahar staff when voting on any future claims you may make.
  5. Much more information about ACs is available within the Sahar clan.
Joining, claims, & the map
1. Countries.
  1. Claiming new countries is to be done on the latest CWS Planet Application Thread on the General Discussion board.
  2. When joining, you can claim one country (or a few small adjacent countries with a shared history, e.g. former Yugoslavia vs its successor states).
  3. You are free to claim any unoccupied area on the map. The general geography, climate, etc has already been decided and will not be changed; you can decide small-scale geography such as minor rivers, lakes, and islands, microclimate variation, more specific elevation, and man-made structures like canals, reservoirs, etc.
  4. New countries have an upper size limit of around 3mil km² and an upper population limit of 300mil or 300/km² (excluding metropolitan city-states like Singapore), and we would prefer you keep it much smaller than that.
  5. You can no longer claim overseas territories or other colonies. You may work with other users to establish that other countries were former colonies of your own (e.g. England vs British Commonwealth).
  6. After you have completed the base/startup activity for one country, and a minimum wait of 30 days after being accepted, you may be permitted to take a second solo country. After you have proven that you can maintain activity with two countries, you may be permitted a third. There is no cap on the maximum number of countries you can own, so long as you can maintain them through the Activity Check sytem.
2. Collaborative countries are countries with multiple users in charge.
  1. There is currently no hard limit in how many collabs you can be part of. However, they are subject to all the other rules, including activity, of other countries. If you are not very active, you may not be permitted to help start up a collab.
3. Unclaimed territory.
  1. Blank spaces on the map are inhabited. In-world, everything should be assumed mapped out and accounted for. Keep this in mind when creating your borders and working on your history.
  2. There may be uncontacted tribes in especially remote areas, but if you want to have a people like this, you still need to register a country (e.g. many uncontacted people live in the country of Brazil) and also work on its official government structure etc, or find another user with an existing country to collaborate with.
4. Borders: please make them realistic. We even have a tutorial.
Changes to the map. Please keep in mind that any change to the map – major or minor – is extra work for our mapmakers. Changes like annexations, secessions, minor border alterations, or renaming the country all require work on our part, so please try to keep them to a minimum.
1. Any requests for changes to the map (border alterations, labels, etc.) are to be made on the latest World Map and Requests thread in the Rules & Resources board in the CWS Planet clan.
2. Moving a country will need to be approved by staff on a case-by-case basis.
3. Cooldown: After successfully claiming a country or failing an Activity Check, you must wait 30 days to claim another country. Willfully giving up a country will not incur such a timer.
4. Some exceptions to the above three rules, in extreme cases, may be allowed.
Earth vs CWSP & MetaOut-of-universe standards and names that do not reflect in-universe knowledge
1. The world's meta-name is Sahar.
2. It is identical to Earth in terms of size, rotation (day length), revolution (year length), general laws of physics and biology, etc. Only the geography and history are different.
3. Sahar has most or all of the same species that Earth does, including bacteria and viruses, with a few additions. You may invent some realistic flora and fauna. Some animals that went extinct on Earth are still extant on Sahar. (Vice versa, some that are extant on Earth may have died out—or never existed—on Sahar.) See also nonhuman sentient species (below, under Languages & Cultures).
4. Technology is roughly equivalent to that of Earth, plus or minus a few years (cheaper supercomputers, better cancer treatments = ok. Faster-than-light travel, robot apocalypse, immortality = no.)
  1. Nuclear technology exists on Sahar, but only for energy purposes. The nuclear bomb, and other weapons of mass destruction, have not and will never be invented (to keep things fair for all participants).
  2. Magic does not and never has existed on Sahar (except in terms of religious or spiritual practices that are considered "magical") ; this is not a fantasy world.
5. The meta-calendar is the Gregorian calendar. The current meta-year on Sahar is the same as the real world (2020, as of this article's last updated). In-world, however, this calendar doesn't actually exist.
6. The meta standard for units of measurement is the Metric/International System, and Celsius for temperature.
7. The meta currency is USD.
Collaboration. You are expected to collaborate extensively with your neighbours in terms of your countries' history, international relations, new conflicts, etc.
1. We strongly encourage you to contact users in the region(s) you are considering joining before applying, and making a language and/or culture related to theirs, instead of importing a premade isolate.
2. There is no worldwide Lingua Franca for the entirety of Sahar. You are free to work with your neighbours to decide on a regional one.
3. The world map represents present-day borders. Feel free to work on historical country maps in accordance with your neighbours.
4. Wars are fine, both present-day and (encouraged) historic, so long as everyone involved agrees.
  1. Please don't have countries in highly populated areas that have, for some reason, never had conflicts like wars & never had them in precursor states.
5. Ultra-powerful, unrealistically rich, socially flawless countries should not exist. Your country can reflect your political views, but should not be a perfect utopia. Corruption, violence, human error, and natural disasters occur.
6. Out-of-character conduct
  - If another country doesn't get on with yours, that's fine. Don't take it personally.
  - If you don't like another member, that's fine. Don't make your country hate theirs for no good reason.
  - If a user is refusing to collaborate or causing other problems with regard to CWSP, please submit a formal complaint to @[Deactivated User] including signatures of all plaintiffs and an explanation of the problem. The staff may then intervene.
Languages and Cultures of CWSP. There are some fairly strict guidelines about what types of languages may be spoken on Sahar and the conpeople who speak them. In general, they must meet a certain standard of realism.
1. No a posteriori languages based on natural languages are permitted. This includes reconstructed natural proto-langs like PIE. There are grandfathered exceptions.
2. Conlangs where the majority of the lexicon is transparently imported from natlangs, and conlangs which are ciphers of natlangs, are disallowed.
3. No joke languages.
4. While you can use any natural script for meta purposes (and please do also have a Romanisation available), they cannot exist in-world. There are plenty of existing conscripts already on Sahar for you to choose from or modify, or you could create a new one.
5. Your people must originate on Sahar. They are not aliens or teleported Earthlings or extradimensional beings.
6. As with your language, we encourage your country to have similarities to neighbouring cultures. Consider this SVG.
7. Nonhuman sentient species. No new species are allowed, but there are the following: Astalvi (small fluffy carnivorans), Dalar (long-lived hominid), Kavs (birdlike people), and Vodholk (polar hominid). See the Dominant Species and Native Species maps for distribution. Contact the owner of a species if you wish to include some in your country.

We reserve the right to deny your language, culture or country if we feel it goes against the spirit of CWSP. (We will only do this for good reasons.) If your language has been denied, it is now forbidden on Sahar. You cannot merely tweak a denied language/culture/country slightly and resubmit. If this does happen, you are welcome to submit another application with another language of your choosing. We may also require that you make a few tweaks to a language, culture, or country's history (or borders), before allowing them on Sahar.

Have a question about the rules? Please ask on this thread instead of using the comments section below. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article

Comments

Edit history

on 14/05/20 03:24+306[Deactivated User]removal of country cap, reworded section on activity, changed a few other lil bits

on 21/07/19 14:47+797[Deactivated User]added section on ACs

on 14/07/18 18:00-5[Deactivated User].info -> .com

on 09/07/18 02:49+203[Deactivated User]remoob fals

on 11/05/18 20:010[Deactivated User]clarified some wording, added astalvi link, and encouraged smaller country sizes/pops

on 11/05/18 19:58+28[Deactivated User]clarified some wording, added astalvi link, and encouraged smaller country sizes/pops

on 22/02/18 10:22+58[Deactivated User]trwarfetryutiuhoij

on 13/02/18 19:24+10[Deactivated User]cooldown change

on 13/02/18 18:37+191[Deactivated User]modified "moving a country" rules

on 07/02/18 19:02+815[Deactivated User]added age rule, out of character conduct, no more colonies