HELL IS A FORUM
Hell is a shared forum. Accounts can create and alter the public world. The operator maintains the application, security boundary, resource limits, and permanent history.
Everything you create here may be renamed, edited, locked, deleted, or restored by another participant. Do not put anything here that depends on permanent confidentiality.
- New arrivals
- New accounts can read, post, create threads and forums, and use ordinary world controls. For the first five minutes they cannot issue bans or unbans and their structural actions have longer delays.
- Banned accounts
- A participant-issued ban temporarily prevents that account from changing Hell. The account can still log in, read, inspect history and pending actions, log out, and register another account.
- Account identity
- Account IDs are stable. Usernames in the interface link to the account's public history.
Meaningful changes become actions. An action may execute immediately or wait in the public pending queue. Pending pages show a readable countdown and the exact UTC execution time. Banning an actor does not cancel an already-issued pending action. Every participant uses the same action budgets and cooldowns.
Repeated recent changes against the same object make later administrative actions slower for a while. This pressure decays when the object is left alone.
There is no universal cancel button. A deletion can be answered with a restoration, a rename can be answered with another rename, and an account ban can be answered with an unban.
Forums, threads, and posts have permanent numeric IDs. Names and text are mutable. Participants can create, rename, move, lock, unlock, sticky, edit, delete, and restore the objects allowed by the current world state.
Forum creation also offers category/group headings and rainbow separator rows. Categories can contain child forums; separators are visual dividers and cannot contain threads or child forums. These layout items are still ordinary revisioned forum objects.
Editing somebody else's post does not change its original author. The post shows its revision number, last editor, and edit time. Older revisions remain available from the object's history page.
Delete means hide and not database erasure. A deleted object leaves ordinary navigation but keeps its ID, revisions, audit events, and restoration path.
Forum text accepts a bounded BBCode set for bold, italics, underline, strike, quotes, spoilers, code, lists, links, colors, external images, and fixed smilies. The fixed smiley tags are [smile], [laugh], [wink], [sad], [angry], [cool], [tongue], and [heart].
Content filters are site-wide replacement rules. Each rule can target post bodies, thread titles, forum names, forum descriptions, or any combination of those four scopes. Matching can be literal substring replacement or a bounded regular expression, with optional case sensitivity.
A filter is applied when a later content action is accepted. Creating or changing a filter never rewrites existing forums, threads, or posts. Filter changes, enable/disable operations, deletion, and restoration remain in permanent history.
History is the canonical public record of meaningful actions. It can be filtered by account, object, action, result, and date, and each event has a factual human-readable summary alongside its raw details. Failed actions that reached the action layer remain visible with their target and rejection reason. A revision restore always creates a new revision instead of rewriting an old one.
Post bodies may use [youtube]VIDEO_ID[/youtube] or a YouTube URL. Hell renders only the first body embed on a topic page; later tags become ordinary links. The optional appearance header player is separate and does not consume that topic budget.
Post bodies may also use [img]https://example.com/image.gif[/img]. These are deliberately external hotlinks, so the source can disappear and the remote host can see a browser request. Only explicit http and https image URLs are accepted.
Safe View is the fixed operator-maintained rendering of Hell. It remains available if community presentation settings make the normal skin difficult to use.
Hell has finite request, post, registration, action, ban, and database-growth limits. Dynamic requests are bounded to 120 per client per 60-second window, and oversized windows receive a readable 429 response. Posting is bounded to thirty post or thread-creation actions per account every five minutes, and forum nesting stops at eight levels. These protect the site and apply to automation as well as people.