Why the 'apples' system on the forums?

Below are links to the kind of threads I'd most like to chime in at this early stage in my permaculture journey - since I don't yet have a project of my own to discuss, yet have experience in thinking about these areas of thought - yet access to them is restricted to those people who have accumulated apples on the more practical threads. This seems a rather odd barrier to entry, if you ask me. What's the reason for it?

https://permies.com/t/31739/Ethics/Surplus

https://permies.com/t/30166/uf/Permaculture-Antipoliticism

https://permies.com/t/31044/Politics/Free-Market-Option

The apples are explained in this thread - What does the apple next to my name mean?

For many years permies has had topics that we simply did not allow to be discussed as they were a hotbed for trolls and bad behaviour. We've recently created the cider press so that these more controversial topics can be discussed, but only by members who have proved themselves capable of contributiing sensibly to the forums. So far it seems to be working, though it is still in the experimental stages.

Thanks for the explanation.

However, in my experience on other forums, accusations of 'trolling' are almost always unjustified (assuming the forum is of a certain kind of intellectual level).

Rather, they have been a way of the admin imposing a certain worldview.

I'm not saying that the admin here would do such a thing, but as a steward, could you please tell me what are the absolute no-nos? I've not managed to find any guidelines or whatever.

The reason I'd like to double check is that the last forum I used to post at would give you infractions for the most innocuous things, like not linking properly or something.

I very much doubt anyone here is that anal, but it would be useful to know if there are certain philosophical viewpoints that are frowned upon. That's usually what irks people about me - that I have radical views and want to express them. Silly me, I thought that's what fora were for!

The main rule is 'Be Nice'. Anything that breaks that is likely to get deleted.

We also focus discussion on positive things we can do to make the world a better places. To further that aim we generally don't allow discussion of toxic chemicals as there are already plenty of other places on the internet where such things can be discussed. We want to focus on better ways. We used to delete any post that made any suggestion that toxins were acceptable, but these days we have a probation system where can hide that post from public view and ask the poster to edit out the offensive bit, then we can re-instate the post. It's a new feature and we're still getting used to it.

Some topics are hot and get people all worked up and the board turns into slanging arena, so we restrict those topics to the cider Cider Press. Ethics, politics, religion and toxic-gick are the main ones.

New members often arrive full of bad habits from other forums, or terrified to post as they've had bad experiences with moderators on other forums. We're used to dealing with that. Please don't worry. If any post is too bad we will delete it or put it on probation and so long as you don't freak out and start sending out hate-mail or annoying Paul by telling him he's an asshole and doing it all wrong you're really not very likely to get banned. If a post needs modifying we'll let you know what's wrong - it's usually because of toxic gick references or something 'not nice' that could be worded differently to make it acceptable.

We welcome different views, but we do object to people insisting that their own view is the only correct one. Words like 'truth' and 'fact' ring alarm bells as they tend not to allow room for other people's viewpoints.

As for not posting links correctly, just do your best. If the staff see a link they might investigate and post it up, or embed a you-tube video if it hasn't been done properly. If we restricted all posts to the fully computer literate we'd miss out on an amazing amount of invaluable information from all the gentle souls who spend their time on the land and who have a totally different type of understanding. The staff want to encourage those people to share their views and experiences, not alienate them.

Here's a link to a thread about our publishing standards.

And another one about corporate trolls.

Thank you so much for taking the time to explain the rules to a newcomer. You can go ahead and close this now if you want