Rules

These rules apply to everything you do on sunken.ink. That means threads, replies, your username, your avatar, your bio, your About Me, your pronouns and gender fields, the flags on your profile, and anything else you can put in front of another member.

They also apply to conduct that starts here and continues elsewhere. If you use this site to organise harassment that happens on another platform, that is a rule break here, and we will act on it here.

Staff are covered by these rules too. Moderators and administrators are held to them at least as strictly as everyone else, and more strictly where the rule concerns the use of power.

Treat other members as people. You can disagree hard about the Sunken Scrolls, about which Splatfest mattered most, about whether Mr. Grizz was sympathetic. You cannot treat another member as less than a person while you do it.

The following are not allowed, in any board, at any time:

• Slurs aimed at any protected characteristic, including reclaimed slurs used about someone who has not reclaimed them.
• Insults, mockery or stereotypes based on a protected characteristic.
• Deliberately using the wrong pronouns for a member, or using a name they have told you they do not use.
• Sexual comments about a member who has not invited them, and any sexual comment at all about a member who is a minor.
• Telling someone to harm themselves, in any wording, including as a joke.

Protected characteristics on this site means: race, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, caste, religion or lack of religion, disability, chronic illness, neurodivergence, age, sex, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, intersex status, pregnancy, family status, and socioeconomic background.

Whether trans people are the gender they say they are, whether queer people should have rights, whether disabled people are worth accommodating, whether people of a given race, religion or nationality are fully human: these are not open questions on sunken.ink, and they will not be treated as two reasonable sides.

Framing an attack as a question does not make it a question. "I am just asking" is not a defence. Neither is posting a coded phrase, a number, a symbol or an image that carries the same meaning to the people who use it.

You can discuss law, history, religion, medicine and politics here when they come up. The line is the difference between criticising an idea, an institution or a government, which is allowed, and arguing that a group of people should have fewer rights or less dignity than anyone else, which is not.

A rule against hate exists to protect people who get targeted. It is not a neutral instrument to be pointed in any direction, and we will not pretend otherwise.

• A member describing racism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, antisemitism or islamophobia that they have experienced is not attacking anyone. Naming what happened to you is not the same category of act as doing it.
• Criticising a system of power, such as a government, a church, a company or an ideology, is not an attack on a protected group, even when members of that group hold power inside it.
• Anger from someone who is being targeted is not the same offence as the targeting. We will look at who started it and who is bearing the cost.

Reports filed to punish someone for naming their own oppression will be closed. Filing them repeatedly is itself a rule break, and so is coordinating with others to mass report a member.

Harassment is a pattern, not a single post. Following a member from thread to thread to needle them, bringing up something they said months ago every time they appear, or repeatedly posting about someone who has asked you to stop, is harassment even if no single post breaks another rule.

Also not allowed:

• Organising or joining a pile-on against a member, on this site or off it.
• Creating threads about a specific member in order to criticise them. Use a report instead.
• Continuing to contact a member after they have asked you to stop.
• Sockpuppeting, meaning using more than one account to make a position look more popular or to get around someone ignoring you.
• Organised downvoting. Agreeing with other people to splat someone's posts, asking anyone to go and splat a member, or working through someone's post history splatting as you go. Votes are what push an account into restrictions, so using them as a weapon against a person is treated as harassment and not as voting. Splat a post because you think the post is bad, as often as you like. Splatting the person is the rule break.
• Asking people to go and ink your own posts, or trading votes with someone for the same reason.

Every profile has a Block button. It collapses that member's posts to one line for you and nobody else, they are never told, and it changes nothing about what they can do anywhere on the site.

Blocking someone is not a rule break and you never have to explain it. Nobody is entitled to ask why you blocked them, and pressing someone about it is itself covered by the harassment rule above.

Going around a block with a second account is a rule break, and it is caught the same way any other duplicate account is.

Do not post private information about anyone, member or not. That includes legal names, addresses, workplaces, schools, phone numbers, email addresses, account names on other platforms that the person has not linked themselves, photographs of a person who has not agreed to it, and anything from a private conversation.

This applies even when the information is technically findable somewhere else. Collecting scattered details into one post is the harm.

Do not post someone's identity documents, medical information, or anything about their gender history, sexuality, immigration status, religion or health that they have not chosen to share here themselves. Outing a person is treated as a severe break, not a minor one.

• Sexual content involving minors, in any form, including drawings, fiction and discussion that presents it approvingly. This is reported to the authorities and the account is removed permanently with no appeal.
• Pornography and explicit sexual content. This is a Splatoon site and it is read by teenagers.
• Gore, real violence, and images of real death or injury.
• Content that encourages suicide, self harm, or eating disorders. Talking about your own experience is allowed and welcome. Instructions and encouragement are not.
• Threats of violence against anyone, including public figures, and including threats framed as jokes or wishes.
• Content promoting terrorism, mass violence, or organisations dedicated to either.
• Malware, phishing, scams, and links to any of them.
• Advertising, referral links, and posts made mainly to drive traffic somewhere else.

Spoilers for anything released less than thirty days ago need a warning. Put the game and the fact that it is a spoiler in the thread title, and keep the spoiler out of the first line of the post so it does not show in previews.

Do not post material that has not been released. That includes datamined files, unannounced content, review copies, and anything from a leaked build. It does not matter that it is already circulating elsewhere. Threads about it will be removed.

Once something has been officially released and announced, it is fair game, subject to the spoiler rule above.

sunken.ink is a fan project. Splatoon, its characters, its artwork and its music belong to Nintendo, and this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Nintendo.

Do not post:

• Links to ROMs, game files, emulator downloads paired with game files, or anything else that lets someone play a game they have not bought.
• Cheat tools, save editors, or modifications intended for online play against other people.
• Full uploads of Nintendo artwork, music or video that you are presenting as your own.

Screenshots, short clips, official art used to illustrate a point, and links to official Nintendo material are fine.

None of these get you banned on their own. They get threads cleaned up and repeat offenders asked to stop.

• Post in the board that fits. A theory goes in Lore and Theories, not Plaza Chatter.
• Search before you start a thread that has been run three times already.
• Quote the scroll, the log or the line of dialogue you are building on. The best threads here start from something a character actually said.
• Do not reply to a thread that has been quiet for a year unless you are adding something new.
• Do not post the same thing in several boards.
• Write so people can read it. Walls of text without paragraphs, and posts written entirely in capitals, will be asked to be reformatted.

• One account per person, unless staff have agreed otherwise in advance.
• Do not impersonate another member, a staff member, a Nintendo employee, or anyone else.
• Do not pick a username, avatar or profile field designed to evade the rules above, for example a username that is a slur with the letters changed.
• Do not share your account with anyone.
• If your account is suspended or banned, do not make another one. Ban evasion resets any suspension to a permanent ban.

One account per person is enforced, not just asked for. Your browser carries a token we set and a fingerprint it computes, both stored as hashes. If a second account signs up or signs in from the same browser, it is stained automatically: the account is marked as a duplicate of the first on its own profile, everything it writes waits for staff, and most of the forum closes to it.

And it is posted in public. Catfish, an automated account, opens a locked thread on the Catfish board naming the original account and listing every duplicate found. Your first account is not punished and loses nothing, but everyone can see what happened. If you think that is harsh, that is the intention, and not making a second account avoids it entirely. If it was wrong, say so in Stained Appeals and the thread is deleted.

A shared address alone never does this, ever. A household, a school and a phone network are all one address, and the other people on it have done nothing. Being on an address we have recorded means one thing only: a staff member gets a note to look at your account. Nothing about your account changes, you are not told, and nothing is restricted unless the browser matches too.

If you genuinely share a computer with someone in your household, so the browser really is the same, tell us at [email protected] and we will lift it.

Your pronouns, gender and flags are yours. Nobody is entitled to demand proof of them, question them, or bring them up as an argument against you. Doing so is a break of the respect rule above.

Golden Eggs are earned by being inked, by posting, by showing up and by earning badges, and spent at the exchange. They are points, not money, and the Terms of Service say what they are and are not.

Earn them by being worth reading. Do not farm them. Trading inks with someone ("ink mine and I will ink yours"), posting for the sake of the eggs, or inking your own posts from a second account all count as farming. Staff take the eggs and whatever they bought, and a second account is a duplicate account, which is dealt with under Accounts and identity above.

A custom title bought with eggs has to follow the rules for names and profiles. One that does not is removed, and the eggs stay spent.

Moderators can edit, move, lock and delete threads and posts, and can suspend or ban accounts. Administrators can do all of that and can also change roles and grant badges.

When we act on your post, we will normally tell you what rule it was and what we did. We do not always do this in public, because naming someone in a thread tends to start the pile-on we are trying to end.

The usual ladder is:

1. A quiet word, usually a private note.
2. A formal warning, recorded against your account.
3. A temporary suspension, typically between one day and thirty days.
4. A permanent ban.

We skip straight to the end of that ladder for hate speech, harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats, sexual content involving minors, and ban evasion. There is no first warning for those.

Being stained sits beside that ladder rather than on it. An account is stained three ways: its reputation falls to the bottom tier, it is caught being a second account for the same person, or an administrator decides it. While an account is stained:

• Everything it writes waits for a staff member before anyone else can see it.
• It can only post on Feedback and Bugs and Stained Appeals, and in threads it started itself.
• Its profile shows nothing but its name and the mark, and it cannot open anyone else's profile either. The social half of the site closes in both directions.
• Where the cause was a second account, the other account's name is shown on the stained profile for anyone to read.
• The addresses it was used from are recorded. As said above, that alone never restricts anyone else.

Catfish. Getting caught running a second account is the one thing here that gets posted in public. An automated account called Catfish opens a thread on the Catfish board titled with the original account's name, listing every duplicate found and when each was made. The thread is locked the moment it is made, so it is a record and not somewhere to pile on, and the harassment rules above apply to talking about it anywhere else.

The original account is not restricted by this and does not lose anything. It keeps its posts, its badges and its reputation. What it loses is the ability to pretend it did not happen.

If staff decide the detection was wrong, the mark is cleared and the Catfish thread comes down with it, because an accusation that has been withdrawn should not outlive the withdrawal. Say so in Stained Appeals.

Marks. There is a set of badges nobody wants: Stained, Catfish, Liar, Misinformer, Leaker, Pile-On, Vote Farmer, Doxxer, Bigot, Art Thief, Spoiler, Brigader, Serial Reporter, Stalker, Pirate and Impostor. They are not rewards. They are put on an account by an administrator for the thing they are named after, and they behave differently from every other badge:

• A mark is worn on every post you make and on your profile, ahead of anything you chose to wear, and you cannot take it off in your settings.
• A mark does not expire and is not lifted with a stain. Only an administrator can remove one, and they do so when they decide it was wrong, not because time has passed.
• Stained is the mark of a stain and the one exception to the above: it comes off when an administrator lifts the stain, and not before. Catfish is put on by the software at the same moment an account is stained for being a second account, and lifting that stain does not remove it. If the detection is found to be wrong, it comes off with the Catfish thread.
• Every mark is recorded with who put it on and when, and you can appeal it under Appeals below.

A mark is meant to be permanent and public. That is a heavy thing to do to someone, so it is done by a person, for a specific rule broken, and you are told which.

Nothing is deleted. Your posts stay where they are, and you keep reading the whole site.

Getting unstained

This is meant to be a door, not a wall. There is one way out and it is the same for everyone:

1. Post in Stained Appeals. Say what happened and, if the stain was earned, say so. Staff are not looking for grovelling. They are looking for whether you understand what went wrong.
2. Your post waits for approval like everything else, so give it a day.
3. An administrator reads it and answers in the thread.

If they lift it, and the stain came from votes, your reputation is reset to zero at the same time. You do not have to climb back from the bottom, because with two boards open and every post queued that would be impossible by design, and a punishment you cannot finish serving is just a ban with extra steps. You start again at neutral.

If they do not lift it, they will say why, and you can ask again after thirty days. If the stain was a mistake by the software, say so plainly and it will be lifted with no conditions at all.

Only an administrator can lift a stain. Every stain and every lift is recorded with who did it and when.

Every post has a Report link under it. Pick what is wrong, add a note if there is anything staff should know, and send it. It goes straight to the moderation queue. Do not reply in the thread to argue with it; that usually makes the thread harder to clean up.

You can also write to [email protected] with a link to the post, which is the right route if the problem is not a single post.

Reports are confidential. We do not tell the person you reported who reported them.

If the report is about a staff member, send it to the same address and say so. If it is about an administrator, say that too, and it will be handled by someone other than the person it concerns.

You can appeal any warning, suspension, ban, stain or mark, including a restriction applied automatically by the software.

• A stain or a mark goes in the Stained Appeals board. The route is set out in full under "How moderation works" above. A mark is not lifted by time, so an appeal is the only way one comes off.
• Anything else goes to [email protected] within thirty days. Say what happened, what you think we got wrong, and what you want us to do.

Either way you will get an answer, and if we made a mistake we will say so and undo it.

An appeal is read by someone who was not involved in the original decision. Where a decision was made by the software rather than a person, any administrator can review it. Where the site is small enough that only one administrator exists, we will say so in the answer rather than pretend otherwise, and you can take it further through the complaint route in the Privacy Policy if it concerns your data.

Appealing is not a rule break. Filing twenty appeals about the same decision is.

We will change these rules when we need to. When we do, we will post a thread saying what changed and why, and update the date on this page.

Changes are not applied retroactively. You will not be punished for a post that was allowed when you made it.

Last updated 19 September 2026.