Rules and Guidelines

In order to keep PWOPL running smoothly and to make it a fun, safe, and friendly community for everyone, there are a number of rules and guidelines to keep in mind.

General Rules
All general PWO rules, which are located here, apply on all boards, including the League. Breaking these rules will result in earning an infraction, or warning, on your account, and eight infractions will result in a ban from PWO as a whole. Infraction counts do not show up on the League board, so if you are ever curious about whether or not there are any on your account, please log into the Normal board and look next to the Mailbox link in the top-right corner of the page. All questions about infractions and general rules should be directed to a PWO admin.

League Rules
Rules that are specifically created for the League are treated separately from the site-wide system, and breaking them will not result in an infraction. However, it's possible to be banned from the League board specifically under certain circumstances and still retain access to the other three boards.

Game Expectations
a. abusing the battle system to unfairly gain levels
 * 1)   First and foremost, PWOPL is a roleplaying game and is meant for fun. If someone or something is causing you stress within the game, let Professor Oak or an admin know so that we can take care of it. Also, please remember that your real-life needs and commitments will always be infinitely more important than a Pokémon game on the internet, so never hesitate to take a break if PWOPL is interfering with something like school, work, or your health.
 * 2) Please keep track of all your information, including trainer information, Pokémon, and items, in your profile. Think of this as being your start menu.
 * 3)   Cheating in any form will not be tolerated. If you are caught cheating, you will be permanently banned from the League board. The following are examples of cheating:

b. adding Pokémon that you did not obtain in-game to your profile

c. adding items or event rewards that you did not actually earn to your profile

If you believe that a member is cheating, please omail Professor Oak with a thorough explanation of your accusation, supplemented by clear evidence such as screenshots of potentially suspicious activity.

Image Posting Guidelines


 * 1) All images uploaded to the PWOPL board should be relevant to the game in some way. Generally, image posts should only depict trainers and Pokémon that are part of the League, though some events allow exceptions to this from time to time. Images of canon Pokémon characters should only appear when used to represent NPCs, as part of plots, or for special events. When posting something such as an announcement or battle/trade/giveaway post, non-related images that follow the overall PWO rules may be used.
 * 2) Images not created by the user who posts them must include credit to the original creator. If you pick an image from a search engine but you cannot locate a source to link to, pick another image that has a known source. Please keep in mind that websites such as weheartit.com and zerochan.net are not actual sources, and linking to the front page of a website like Pixiv or deviantART does not count as proper sourcing either. If you have trouble finding sources, saucenao.com and its image search extension, available for Chrome and Firefox, is very helpful.
 * 3) The exception to the above rule is when a screenshot from a game or the anime is used; the credits for these sources are covered in the site footer. Images from the various manga and trading cards must still be sourced by stating the artist who drew them (no links are required in these cases).

Text Posting Guidelines

 * 1) While we encourage our members to draw out their characters’ adventures in the League, we understand that some members may not be confident in their abilities to illustrate what they want to portray, or may simply prefer writing in roleplay settings. Therefore, we allow members to post their writings in the artist’s comment box of an image post.
 * 2) In order to maintain a safe environment for all users, written posts that contain potentially frightening, disturbing, or triggering content must have a clearly visible content warning at the very beginning of the artist’s comment. Do not put such warnings in the title line, as some users may not look there and could miss the warning entirely.
 * 3) To keep the board from stretching too much vertically and making scrolling down the page difficult (especially on mobile devices), written posts must be enclosed in either [ small ] or [ sub ] BBCode tags to shrink the text size.
 * 4) When using symbols like hyphens or tildes to create a break between either sections of writing or the writing and your regular artist’s comment, please do not use more than five symbols. When you use what appears to be a full line’s width of symbols on your screen, it often stretches the page horizontally on smaller screens and mobile devices, which makes it more difficult to view the post.
 * 5) Images uploaded with written posts must follow the image posting guidelines in the above section.