The base ruleset here is common sense + ethical code + no politics + no religious talk. This is not any website with a closed forum where you have your playground. We are here at an open source community website attached to a commercial product.

It took me about 1.5h this afternoon to clean up the mess from RC leakage including flamewars and people getting personal on each other afterwards. This is fun I can tell!

Banning people is only one klick away but I take the time and offer a chance to apologize. If people would calm down before they post it would save much time from all of us. There is no point in getting personal over here.

Noise, useless and other posts doing no good to this community will get moved or deleted like at any other community website too. Again, point your fingers at me if you want to blame someone, I take it. The SNR is getting worse everyday, either you do something about or moderators will find it on their own randomly. Make use of the "Report This" function! I got about 20 reports today which isnt much I guess but complaints all over the place.

Impossible things will be handled immediately, miracles take a little bit longer.

For the moderation structure: TMO needs mods based on sections as noone can keep track all over the place, if I find something not for my section I use the uberSearch function and merge all posts I find to the section they belong to. This is slow but it works. For not giving random people power over TMO globaly it is a good way (thats how it is currently handled) to hand out subsections duty and have a look how they behave. I used to report posts for merging a lot. Improvement there would be a change of the delay set to something like 20 instead of 60 seconds or remove it for moderators at all.

Setting up a rules page is up to the council I guess or at least it should be verified by it. Policy Agreement checkbox for signup page and an announcement showing in all sections is the best way to get everybody on the same page.