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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
Must be pop (MBP) is a lj-based role playing game. 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 to enter_mbp with:
-your journal username
-the celebrity's full name
-the category your celebrity should be listed in
You will get a comment back within 24 hours to let you know that your journal is on the masterlist. You can only have one journal per character and one character per journal. The journal cannot be used for any other game than must be pop, nor as a civilian journal.
Note: Only members of the main community are allowed to vote on rule changes, if you want to participate please join must be pop.

2. Characters that will be admitted onto the MBP masterlist:

- actors/actresses
- musicians
- tv personalities
- athletes
- models
- socialites
- royalty
- relatives
- industry professionals

Please stick to these categories and register with the line of work your celebrity is best known for.
Only people over the age of 13 may be portrayed in MBP (as per 04.09.2007).
Apart from relatives and socialites (which are not professions), the celebrities need to be professionally active in their field of work. That means: no College football stars, no members of high school drama clubs, etc.

3. Abandoning a character
a) Deleting
This is the easiest and fastest way to let go of a role. If you delete a journal, you automatically lose all rights to the role. You may not pick a replacement. Anyone can register a new impersonation of your role as soon as your journal is deleted.

b) 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: Under certain circumstances, we will put a role on "hold," which means that the role cannot be taken over, even if the journal goes without updates for more than six weeks. One example of these circumstances would be serious health issues that require lengthy hospital stays and/or rehabilitation. If you are facing serious issues that will keep you from updating, please contact the MBP administration team. 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 stays), we can also put you on "permanent hold." Please work with us and keep in touch.

c) Giving up a character with or without picking your replacement
In case you don't want to delete your journal, please leave a comment in enter mbp and tell the lovely folks that you are leaving. IF you want to pick your replacement, please also announce so in enter mbp. Your journal is considered dead 6 weeks after that or when it's been last updated 6 weeks ago (see 6 week rule), whichever comes first.
Note: Only a comment in enter mbp is a valid form of leaving the game.

4. Anonymity and privacy policy (Major crime)
Do not implicate who other people are out of character (OOC). This includes all sorts of OOC information on a player. Also do not implicate who their second characters are or that they may have a second character. This includes 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.
Note: OOC problems can be easily avoided, just don't tell anyone ANY OOC information or about your second characters.

5. Harassment policy" Do not harass other players. Do not make death threats. (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.

6. Plagiarism policy (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 user information 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.

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. Exception: Administrative posts are not locked.

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 disable 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.