Howdy, everyone! It's been a while since we've had a major announcement. We know things have seemed fairly inactive from the outside perspective, and we apologize for the lull in activity that has resulted from this. As of recently, the PureZC staff team has been active behind the scenes, planning changes to help improve engagement and activity on the site, forums, and the Discord server. We hope to continue being more active in the community, keeping the energy high and keeping all of you more engaged with all things Zelda Classic. We are excited to announce some of the projects we've been working on and to give you a look at what is coming from PureZC in both the short and long term.
PureZC Community Rules and Guidelines Revamp
It's been quite a while since our rules and guidelines have received an update. Nearly four years, in fact. In light of changing times and recent events, we've given them a much needed once-over and cleaned them up a bit. We ask that everyone take a look at the new rules and guidelines, but we've summarized the biggest changes here for your convenience.
- In general, the rules and guidelines themselves are largely the same, as the goal is not to completely change how everything works on PureZC. Some of the rules with similar concepts have been consolidated together, and rules and their descriptions have been streamlined to bring them more in line with the current days. As a result, each rule has more details as well, helping to better distinguish what exactly the rules entail and the better reinforce the types of behaviors that are considered violations. The Respect Others rule has a greater focus on not tolerating bigotry of any kind and not tolerating intentionally toeing the line.
- More information has been added on ban appeals, reporting content, and the types of actions that staff members take to handle infractions within the community (warning points, bans, staff notices, etc.).
- The maximum number of warning points has been decreased from 9 to 3, and warning points now last 90 days instead of 60 days. Under the new staff actions and warning points system, very minor offenses will result in a staff notice by PM or in the topic, whichever is more appropriate, while repeated very minor and minor offenses will typically result in 1 warning point. Major offenses like harassment and flaming, NSFW, illegal content, etc., or accumulating 3 warning points through other means, will result in a ban. Typically, bans should last between a few days to several months, depending on the severity of the infractions themselves. A member who returns after their ban expires and reaches 3 points again or commits another major offense will be banned again, with the ban length appropriately increased, up to an indefinite or permanent ban.
- Posting probations (where members are simply unable to make topics or posts but still have access to most other site functionality) are being removed as they are unneeded in the new staff actions and warning points system.
- A new dedicated section has been added about the responsibilities and expectations of all staff members, including how they are accountable for their actions just like any regular member, how they should be knowledgeable about what their role entails and not abuse their power, and how their goal should be to uphold the community guidelines while maintaining the best outcome for situations and maintaining healthy interactions with the member base.
We believe this revamp helps provide a better framework for the type of community the staff team is trying to achieve and gives members more transparency about our processes. Our ultimate goal is for PureZC to have a friendly, relaxing, and welcoming atmosphere where people can come together to interact and to discuss, and we believe this change in addition to the other changes below will assist in realizing this goal.
New SotW Hosts and Changes
It's been a hot minute since our last Screenshot of the Week contest. We had to change the contest to biweekly, then to monthly, before somewhat giving up due to lack of participation in the contest and lack of time from the previous host. However, Taco Chopper and Deedee have stepped up to revive this PureZC tradition! More information can be found in the SotW forum, but to briefly summarize, the two previous monthly contests (SotM 190 and SotM 191) will be retroactively renamed to follow the original numbering scheme, and SotW will restart as a contest held every other week, starting with SotW 772. Screenshot of the Month will continue as an every other month contest starting with SotM 190, and Screenshot of the Year will consist of the six SotM winners per year. Initially, each SotW contest will have a maximum of six screenshots, with extras being banked for the next contest. If we have an abundance of banked entries for a particular contest, we will have some the entries spill over into a second SotW, held the week after. Finally, we will soon be better integrating SotW with the PureZC Discord, so announcements and discussion aren't as easy to miss.
Superlatives 2022
By popular request, our annual superlatives are back! You have until Thursday, February 23rd at 11:59 EST to submit your nominations here, though be sure to first read through the instructions for the Superlatives here! Please note, due to the significant decline in entries in these particular categories, we have unfortunately retired Non-ZC Project of the Year and Best ZC Broadcast. We look forward to receiving your nominations and seeing which of them will ultimately be the victor in each category!
Next, we wanted to offer a look ahead at the exciting changes coming soon to a PureZC near you.
Discord Server Changes
We will be announcing more concrete plans in the near future (two weeks, give or take), but wanted to give some advanced notice of the changes we're planning for our Discord server. Ultimately, our goal is to make the server a more fun and welcoming place. While a one-size-fits-all model no longer works for the ZC community the way it did in the IRC days and while we value and support the existence of other ZC community servers, we hope to make PureZC's site and Discord server the centralized hub for the community once again. Specifically, we will be streamlining our Discord rules, much as we have our forum rules and guidelines, and will be cracking down more prominently on toxic behavior and those toeing the line. We're also planning community events, such as quest contests, and are looking into various Discord bots to significantly enhance the user experience. Stay tuned and we hope you look forward to these changes!
New Staff Hiring
We will be posting staff openings in about three weeks (to allow for time to settle in to the new rules and changes). At the moment, we are potentially looking to hire about three new staff members to help with running the forums and the PureZC Discord server. Similarly to last time, we'll open up applications via PM, asking for your thoughts on why you'd be a good fit and what specifically you can add to our team. We hope that hiring some new staff members with unique perspectives will result in a more well-rounded team and help make PureZC more active and welcoming place!
PureZC Expo
It finally returns! For those of you joining for the first time, the Expo is an event, traditionally held in the spring or fall, where users can submit write ups and/or demos for the Zelda Classic projects they currently have in the works. It's a big event to show a sampling of the cool projects in development, the E3 of ZC, if you will. With development of quests often being fragmented across several Discord servers today, we're hoping the Expo will be a chance to show off to the whole community the cool things you are doing! We plan to release more information around early April, so please look forward to that!
PureZC Events
In 2013, we introduced the PureZC Events subforum as a way of hosting contests, events, and the like for community engagement and activity. Unfortunately, that vision was never quite realized. However, the staff team is working on ways to revitalize the forum. As mentioned previously, we are weighing contests and events that will be held over both the forums and the Discord server. Furthermore, we want to open up the floor to everyone to host ZC-related events in the forum. If you would like to create and host a fun event, feel free to post a topic in the PureZC Events subforum, or reach out to the staff team if you'd like a personal subforum set up for you. We'll be happy to help arrange forums, permissions, and other tasks to help you run your event smoothly.
Site Ownership Changes
As we're sure you all have noticed, LinktheMaster, our current site owner, has been caught up in life for quite a while and no longer has the time to dedicate to PureZC. We appreciate the incredible work that he and others in the past have put into making PureZC what it is today, including the wonderful PureZC database that currently houses much of our ZC content. David and Russ have been in talks with him, and we believe he'll be transferring ownership of the site to us. In the short term, this should allow us to more easily fix issues that arise with bugs on the site (such as those pesky validation email problems and database-forum links, both of which should be fixed now). In the long term, though, we're eyeing updating to a newer forum software, as our version of IP.Board is ancient at this point, though this will not be happening any time soon due to the significant amount of backend code rewrites that would be necessary. We do not have a time table on these items just yet, but be on the lookout for more information as things progress.
Thank you all for taking the time to read through these exciting changes and improvements coming to PureZC now and in the future. We truly want to do our part in keeping the site, forums, Discord server, and the general ZC community engaging and welcoming for all our members. We are optimistic and hopeful that more activity, fun contests, and community events, along with revamps of existing systems such as our rules and guidelines and our Discord server, will manifest this vision. Thank you to all current staff members for helping with these changes and improvements, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback and can't wait for what's to come! 
