Housekeepers

With it being well into summer now in the northern hemisphere it seems a bit wrong to call it "spring cleaning", so we've opted to go wtih "housekeeping" regarding some lingering issues for things we've been cooking up behind the scenes. None of these things by themselves are worthy of a standalone front page post, so we decided to do the classic streaming platform/cable thing: the good ol' bundle. Enjoy this bundle of random things we've been working on.



VPN Rules

It hasn't exactly been a secret to anyone we haven't been keeping up with things on the VPN enforcement front, and this has been due to a change in policy and a conscious decision by staff. Effective immediately, you may browse and seed from whatever type of IP for the site with no requirement of manual approval from staff, whether it be a VPN or not. To be browsing the site with a VPN/proxy you must have 2FA enabled.

There are some caveats to this new policy change:
1. You may not browse or seed via Tor and any Cloudflare and related IPs-- this includes iCloud Private Relay. This latter is a part of the decision we've made as a site to ditch Cloudflare. iCloud Private Relay unfortunately utilizes Cloudflare's infrastructure. The site will block access from that IP if you try to access it from either of these.
2. You may not sign up for the site behind a VPN, which includes if you're joining via official recruitment from another site. This is to prevent recruitment abuse and to stop invites from being fenced/sold to third parties.

In addition to everything above, we still require you to let us know if you plan to sign in from abroad/a significant distance away from your usual home.




Thanks for the Fish

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Latte, semivivus, Crios & BirdPerson for their service to the site as members of the staff team. All of these people left on good terms, and we thank them so much for their selfless service to the site.

Latte in particular joined on the same day as the person writing this post (hi, it's Incli), and has been an invaluable resource to the site with service to the site via the Golden Popcorn system as well as acting as a translator at a moment's notice.




Idling

Since around the site's inception we have operated our IRC's help channel #ptp-help as kind of a "quick in and out" type of service with no idling allowed without being a special user. That changes today.

We have decided to open the floodgates to allow for idling in our IRC help channel, and for community members to offer their support for both simple and complex topics.

We've also changed things up a bit to have our current three recruiters accessible via the help channel in case of questions regarding recruitment and related topics.

Our hope with these changes is that it will help foster a bit more of a community spirit, and allow for quicker and more accurate help to be conveyed to users who need help.




Seriously?

We've had a rule for a number of years now that has reached it's end of shelf life effective today, namely the "No Politics Outside SD" rule. The rule has continued to be a thorn in our side in many different facets.

Cinema has been political for as long as it's existed and it frequently begs the question "what is political" which there really isn't one consistent, universally recognized answer for. Also consider that we have allowed political-related content for as long as we've been here, which frequently put us in the odd position of allowing political titles without allowing poltical discussion. This was not consistent and should have never been the policy to begin with. The rule has been a source of frequent friction between both staff vs users, users vs user and even in some cases staff vs staff over consistent, clear enforcement in a correct manner.

As such, we've decided to make some distinctions to change things up a bit:

Religious, political, and other volatile topics should be restricted to the Serious Discussion forum. Political and religious discussion can occur in torrent comments as long as the movie fits that topic and the discussion remains civilized.



This means that we are allowing political discussion in situations where it relates to the title at hand. There may be a bit of feeling out for us as staff with regards to "is this crossing the line" when discussing politics, but we will do our best to get our users adjusted to expectations via mutual dialogue and tough conversations. When in doubt, participate in good faith and ask if you have any questions.

Some examples of what is being allowed can range from discussing the role of feminism in Barbie to potential coverups within JFK, and so on and so forth. Use your best judgment and as always: contribute in good faith.

DISCLAIMER: The type of posts that wouldn't be allowed are anything bigoted, transphobic, homophobic, or generally hateful or rude. We can and will police hate speech just like we always have (this includes slurs).




New Subforums

We have two new subforums: Sports and Wiki.

The former is for discussing things such as basketball, motorsports... anything tangentially related to sports. Have at it, really.

The latter is to start coordination for the great wiki overhaul we've wanted to do for a while now, to modernize the wiki and encourage people to contribute. You may have seen it created a few days ago, as of this post it has been activated and you are encouraged to post in it. Let's make the wiki the best version it's ever been!



Let's Get Trivial

For those of you who utilize the multiplayer notepad that is IRC, we have a new fun thing that we have debuted as a user-run, staff-sanctioned new channel: #trivia. Thanks to the hard work of a few dedicated users (HT to MurphysLaw and kittenhat) who have put together a trivia bot. For fun times, smack talk, and trivia.

This is my dream destination tracker