Am I the only one who thinks Rule #6 is...vague?

This post is not intended to lash out at site staff or get mad at anyone, nor is it intended to be complaining about comments of mine that may have been removed quoting rule 6.

That said, I find very often when someone’s comment is removed for rule 6 (Mine or someone else’s) I always have to stop for a minute and wonder, “Wait, what does that have to do with rule 6? What did they do wrong?” From the outside looking in, it almost seems like a “catch-all” rule to just basically say “Don’t comment like this because I said so.” Clearly not the intention, but that’s how it feels sometimes.

Rule 6 covers lots of major topics. Most of it is cut and dry, like downvote abuse, sockpuppeting, roleplay, staff impersonation, etc. It’s the other half of the rule’s “title” that sometimes leaves me scratching my head. I think that the majority of time when a comment is nuked due to Rule 6, it’s for one tiny little part of the text that’s really minuscule compared to everything around it.

“[don’t] put off-topic content”

So what am I doing here today? What exactly constitutes “off-topic”? To put it bluntly, certain types of comments that would have no issue being present on other website are nuked here for being off-topic, but at what point does something become off-topic? I was told once that it means any kind of comment that has nothing to do with the image itself…but I’ve had “off-topic” comments removed even though I’m talking about the artwork in at least some capacity. It’s also apparently off-topic to talk about the artist themselves if we’re not talking about the specific picture…except sometimes it’s not? It’s kind of confusing to know where the boundaries are and I think a lot of us are unclear about when we’re overstepping them…

Could we maybe expand the definition of rule #6 on the rules page? Make it more clear what types of “off-topic” comments are not allowed. Again, I’m not here saying “FREE SPEECH DONT CENSOR ME”, but just again tying back to that point of making comments that would usually be fine on other websites.

@NightStalker
Rule #6 gets a lot of action because:

Classic example is someone seeing an American flag in a 4th of July image and just goes off about the US occupation of Panama, which triggers someone else into a “if you don’t like it here then leave!”, which derails into a screed about the country being overrun by immigrants, which devolves into a manifesto about Trump and Putin, and so on.

Alternatively, a very innocent and uncontroversial image gets posted, and somewhere down the line someone remarks that the artist is a Bad Person because they were once photographed at the con booth of another Bad Person, and now the discussion is about that person and why they’re bad…

Basically, image comments are not meant to be a place to discuss absolutely anything that could potentially be related to the image, but to talk about the image itself. The art style, if a joke landed or not, the general theme, etc. They’re not supposed to be where people discuss some tangential “meta”; that’s why the forums were created, so people browsing comments would get comments about the image, and if they really wanted to have a discussion about the impact of AI generated images on the environment or the like, there’s the forums.

Maybe it shouldn’t be #6 and be its own number, idk. Was likely put there because of how often pt3 is involved and because, ultimately, using the image gallery as a space to rant about not-images isn’t the purpose of an image site.