7Seas Social Chat is a group-IM based chatroom which lets fishers connect with each other, find contests, learn about new custom catches or other 7Seas-related creations -- or just hang out and enjoy talking socially. It's a terrific resource for fishers looking for an enjoyable fishing experience, and fishing area owners looking to draw a crowd!

To join Social Chat, just wear and click on the Join Social Chat object that comes with your fishing rod. Please allow up to 24 hours for invitations to be processed. If you need assistance, contact 7Seas Sass, our customer service representative. (Only registered fishers over with accounts over two weeks old may participate. Our regular 7Seas Fishing group, which has no group IMs or discussion, is free to join anytime just by searching for it and joining it.)

In order to keep the chatroom discussions friendly and civil, we have some rules that all chatters need to follow. Remember, access to Social Chat is a privilege, not a right -- you may be banned from chat if you are too disruptive.

If you see a violation of these rules, please log the incident and send it to 7Seas Sass, so that the staff can consider if administrative action should be taken. We want your stay in our chatroom to be a pleasant one.

• Keep It Classy. Social chat is generally meant to be like our General Access fishing areas. We're trying to promote a friendly, open chatroom that's suitable for all fishers. Note however that this is not a hard and fast rule; an accidental, occasional obscene language slip-up will not get you banned outright. We are not a jackbooted squad of Language Police, looking for the tiniest little offense to jump all over.
   
  The main purpose of this rule is to prevent people from going on a willful blue streak of cursing and sexually explicit dialogue. Basically, no mouthing off deliberately and disruptively, just to be mouthing off, just for the lulz, or just to annoy someone. We request you use some common sense and common courtesy here. We are "mature" in the sense that we expect our chatters to act like mature adults and respect the wishes of others not to be subjected to that.
   
• Don't Start Or Join Fights. People have disagreements -- that's just a fact of life. Discussions and debates and disagreements can happen in chat, and that's fine as well. But when those debates turn into fights, with profanity, personal insults, abusive language, malicious rumor mongering, and/or spammy back and forth yelling... that's incredibly disruptive and fun for nobody.
   
  It's critical to note that we don't care who started the fight, we don't care who's right and who's wrong. The 7Seas staff will not listen to your pleas that it's all the other guy's fault. Take it to personal IMs or all involved might face disciplinary action. That means if someone trolls you for a response, poking and prodding and insulting, do not respond in turn -- report them and you'll be the better human being for it. And less likely to be banned, too.
   
• Local Fishing Areas Set Their Own Local Rules. People who buy/rent land in SL to run their own flavor of fishing area have a right to decide who can drop by and what they can do once they're there. You might disagree with their approach, but nevertheless 7Seas doesn't dictate what someone can or can't do with their fishing areas. See the previous rule -- disagree politely or quietly if you must. Do not start fights. There are MANY fishing areas out there, and if someone doesn't want your business, that's their problem to live with and not yours.
   
  We suggest visiting General Access fishing areas, which are open to all comers and quite friendly. (General Access means they must not limit attendance based on avatar, or have or allow sexually explicit content. The General/PG/Mature flag on the sim itself is irrelevant in this case, too.)
   
• Keep It (Reasonably) Fishy. This is social chat, so going off topic is okay. It's a social chatroom, after all! However, if your off topic discussion is so spammy that people are complaining they can't see contest announcements, you may want to take it to private IMs instead out of common courtesy.
  
  As for promoting business interests, in that situation, it's best to keep it fishing related. That can mean selling yachts and harbors, renting a CPG, or such. A completely unrelated business has no place advertising itself in our chatroom. If you're unsure if your product and/or service is fishy-relevant, run it by 7Seas Sass for advice before you promote.
     
• Please Use Non-Annoying Contest Announcements. This is less of a rule and more of a guideline. For example, inserting fake blank lines, tons of ASCII art, making it more than six lines tall in the chat window, or announcing too often in a short period of time -- all these are more likely to aggravate than entice the fishers you want to come to your contest.
   
  We won't set specific rules at this time about acceptable formatting, since we don't want to limit creativity... but if fishers tell you that that you're too spammy or annoying, you should seriously consider changing your advertisement. We may have to step in if you willfully and repeatedly use an advertisement that is disruptive to chat and drawing the ire of our fishers.
   
• Be a Responsible Citizen, Not a Self-Important Busybody. We encourage people to report violations of our chat rules by sending logs to 7Seas Sass, but in the end, WE decide based on those logs what is and is not actually a violation and what to do about it. Our chatters have no administrative authority, so don't threaten others due to a perceived rule violation. You can politely request someone knock it off if they're violating the rules In Your Opinion... but once you start getting abusive about it, you're violating policy yourself! Either report quietly and respectfully, or don't report at all. Fighting in chat is, well, fighting in chat, and that's not allowed.
   
  That said, if we see a trend of people harassing each other through repeated reporting, we're far less likely to take those reports seriously. Don't use reporting to extend a vendetta.
   
• Who Gets the Trouble Report? At a fishing area, if someone is behaving so badly that it violates Second Life's own Terms of Service or Community Standards -- griefing for example -- then you should report it through official SL channels, not to us. We have no enforcement authority over someone else's fishing area. To file an official abuse report to LL, Click Help and Report Abuse, with a screenshot.
   
  For issues in Social Chat, report to 7Seas Sass -- and if it violates SL's rules, file an official abuse report as well.
   
• The Rules Can Change. We reserve right to change these rules at any time to keep our chatroom easy to manage and keep our chatters as generally happy as possible. The rules are kept generalized and open to interpretation specifically so we can interpret them and can adapt them to the everchanging needs of a community. The general rule is "Don't be a jerk," with many examples thereof, and we'll flesh that out as need be over time.

In the end, Social Chat is a wonderful resource, with friendly people. 95% of the time, with 95% of our fishers, we don't need to step in and take any action. We're just trying to keep that 5%, which will always be with us as a part of human nature, from interfering with the other 95%. Thanks for understanding and thanks for helping us keep chat friendly!