Hey all,

As many of you likely already know we've been having a lot of incidents recently involving those attempting to access the site by lying about their ages. Up until now we've tried to take a forgiving approach to the problem by giving them the chance to own their mistakes and publicly apologize on the forum. I have spoken with some of those who did this, and I understand they wanted community and were encouraged by friends to lie to try to get in.

This issue however is quite serious for a number of reasons:

1. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires that we do not admit those under 13 onto the site. TG could be sued and/or shut down for violating it, destroying this home that we have tried so hard to give you (See: Here).

2. To prevent minors from masquerading as adults and accessing adult spaces, which could lead to innapropriate interactions or accusations and put our adult members at risk.

3. To prevent adults from masquerading as minors and putting the actual minors under our care in danger.

So these are safety issues, and it's our job to keep this place safe for all of us.

I have attempted to make it clear in the past that these attempts to bypass this aspect of our activation screening would eventually lead to others being banned over it "in the future".. Well, the future has come, and now we are banning someone over it.

If you have questions or concerns you may contact me or one of the other staff, or use the Write to Staff forum.

Regards,
-Cyg

With all of the new members here, many of which are new to forums in general, I and other staff often find ourselves digging for many links to answer member questions. So I'd like to make a big thread that has all the helpful links you'll need. And I'll try to organize them by category.

Please note that while this is an announcement that can be seen by members and guests alike, many of these links will only work for registered forum members.

Where to post if you need to ask staff about something:

Write to Staff

How the site works:

Community Rules of Conduct

The Staff Team

Why we have an age requirement

The age groups on our site

Safety for Minors

Privacy

All About Forum Points

About How Forum Code Works

The Points Shop


Becoming a Member:

How to Become Activated as a Member

How Long it Takes to Become Activated

Our Policy on Duplicate Accounts

Staff Teams:

Teams and How to Join Them


Life Issue Support For Members

Where to post if you need to vent or need support

How to join the support group

How to post in the support subforum

Our Discord Server:

How to join the Discord server

Rules of our Discord Server

Member Journals

The Journal Subforum

TG's Staff Journal

User Creativity

Where to Share Art

User Marketplace Conduct

How to sell physical goods with points

Physical Merch and Donations

The TG Budget

Donating to TG

Our Ko-Fi

Points Shop Physical Merch Designs

Let me know if there's anything you think I missed or would be helpful to add~

Howldy folks! Us staff have been hard at work lately, but we're ready to announce that we're offering new merch in our points shop! We plan to offer new team focused designs, as well as make new kinds of offerings like stickers! The points shop side of things isn't set up juuuust yet, as we have a few more things to tweak first.

We also just set up a new thread where you can view the designs available before investing your hard earned points. It also has links to our merch stores in case you want to just buy the items directly, and it has items which are not listed in the points shop too.

You can view the thread with the art and shop links here.

Now you can sport your team memberships in stylish new ways.

Enjoy~

Hey everyone,

We rarely make these announcements lately. I thought I'd make one just to show users who are not logged in that we are all still alive here and that something is going on. As the guy-who-pays-the-bills I guess it's my responsibility.


Lately there have been changes on Therian Guide. We always try to learn from past experiences and remain open to new views.

What we've learned is that we should focus more inwards and this is mainly what we have been doing. That is, Therian Guide's most important part is it's community. We've promoted staff who genuinely care about our community. We've added customization options to allow you guys to pick your colors. And we've been fine-tuning the rules to make sure therians are comfortable here.


The main challenge we've had to deal with is the massive influx of new members, primarily young people who access TG through their school chromebooks. Therian Guide is classed as an educational website in content filters, because that's what it actually is. We are a community dedicated to learning to live with therianthropy. However, this has also made us a bit of a target of these young people who don't really have any other online communities to choose from, because of content filtering.

If you have newly joined and have been waiting for months to get your account activated, I wanted to inform you that this is normal. Simply put, because our community is so important to us, we can only allow new members to join gradually and slowly, to give everyone a chance to get to know each other. Given the large amount of applications we get, this unfortunately means long wait times for you.

Don't worry though, you will not be forgotten. Staff use tools that make your application obvious even if you have not recently posted. Obviously of course, if you check back regularly that let's us know you are still interested.


There is more I could write here, but as we have been focusing inwards, most of the changes we have been making only really concern our community members and are not appropriate in this public post.

If you are interested, be sure to follow the Staff journal for new relevant information.

LP,
Dusty

Hello,

The TG staff have decided to add a new rule to our Community rules of conduct:

rules Wrote:23. Pups (users under 16 years old) are not allowed to discuss romantic relationships (whether with other members or in their IRL lives) anywhere on TG. Violating this rule will lead to warnings and eventually bans.

The addition of this rule represents a change in how the staff will deal with these issues going forward, so I posted this announcement to make extra sure that the pups are aware of this new rule, so that it doesn't seem unfair when we start enforcing it.

Just to be extra clear "anywhere on TG" includes private shouts, journals, the life issues and support forum, signatures, everything. As with all rules, teams might have exceptions, discuss that with the team leader.


Basically, there seems to be a recent trend going on with pups (usually age around 13) "dating" people and so forth. The discussions regarding it range from pups calling innocent associations with friends "polyamory", to maintaining stalking journals over unrequited love, to some pups "dating" off-site people with enormous age gaps and dramatic breakups leading to pups posting about self-harm.

I realise that romantic relationships are a part of life and that as young therians, you don't always know exactly where the border between human instinct and animal instinct is, and that talking about animal instincts is very much the subject for Therian Guide... However the amount of problems these discussions have created on the site, are making it difficult for people to even see discussions about actual therianthropy, through all the drama. Not to mention so much of the content created this way really skirts the other rules, which all exist for good reasons.


As such, if romantic relationships are the main thing you are after as a pup on this site, I would politely ask you to find a different community where such discussions are more appropriate. Therian Guide is an educational website on the topic of therianthropy.

I realise through our previous discussions in the staff journal, that there are some of you who really won't like this, but I've considered all the alternatives and at this point this is the best compromise I can think of.

LP,
Dusty