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Hulldom, I stand corrected on the relationship between RMB and government in TNP - thanks for that. Your explanation neatly sums up the situation for me because you refer to TNP's RMB community as "they/them" whereas anyone in Forest would refer to our RMB community as "we/us." In that context I'm very much in favour of friendship with you, but not if the cost of that is having them all over our RMB.

I do appreciate your suggestion of a code of conduct but I share Far away enough's skepticism about how workable that is given the mechanics of your region and the evident maturity levels of the posters causing the problem. Nor would I want you to end up constantly playing whack-a-mole over an issue that's a problem for us but might not be a problem in the same way for any other region you have an embassy with. That said, it's notable that we never have this problem with the Rejected Realms who by definition have the hardest to govern of all communities, so who knows what might be possible?

So what would off-site relations look like? That would have to be negotiated. We're not very good at off-site in Forest. We already have an embassy thread on your forum (but it's much neglected, for which I bear some responsibility as a former foreign minister) and you have one on ours (though out whole forum is gathering dust AFAIK). TNP players are already welcome on our Discord, which we moderate much more gently than the RMB. Nothing that's been posted on the RMB would have attracted censure on Discord with the exception of Kirby0508's personal attack on Herya. Accepting that off-site is not our strong point we might look to you for suggestions on how to do this better.

We could possibly have some kind of declaration of friendship or memorandum of understanding. At a minimum this should cover inclusion in events normally open to embassy regions. We're an atypical treaty partner because we don't do military gameplay. There's a very limited exception to that around liberating allies and we could build that into an undertaking to recognise the "government in exile" in the unlikely event of a coup in TNP, but mutual defence in the normal sense of the term wouldn't be an option. Still, I'm confident that representatives of both regions could work something out. I understand lack of an in-game embassy might be an issue here. If it was a deal-breaker then personally I'd rather have nothing than the current arrangement, but others may disagree.

I'd like to take this opportunity to ask Mount Seymour for an assurance that whatever happens as a result of the current poll entries from TNP will be welcome in the photography contest.

I should also clarify that I don't view TNP as sh1t. We're completely different regions with completely different cultures. I particularly admire the work that's gone into making TNP the powerhouse of the WA (to an extent so comprehensive that critics often think that dominance is unfairly coded into the game), and your RMB plays its part in that. It would be absolutely impossible to manage a feeder or frontier in the way we manage our little recruitment-free backwater. Both regions are good regions, but when such a high percentage of the message board that is Forest's central feature becomes suppressed nonsense posted from TNP then I make no apology for describing the situation as "putting up with this sh1t."

Difinbelk wrote:

Seconded. I know nothing of how RMB/embassy posting restrictions work (if there are any), but is there no way to keep the embassy and just restrict/disallow foreign posting?

Yes, we could change the settings so that nobody from other regions could post on our RMB, or so that only regional officers could do so, but that would affect all regions equally, there'd be no way of singling out the region that the majority of the spam comes from.

I'd be against cutting everyone else off because of TNP. I'd also ask, since literally the only thing an embassy does in terms of game mechanics is allow RMB posting, what the point of an embassy would be if that feature was disabled.