Starting today, when you submit a prompt, it will NOT be posted to the sub unless approved after being reviewed by a mod first to make sure it follows posting rules.

For submissions that do not get accepted, a reason for such will be provided, otherwise you may message the mods to ask for one. You may also ask for further clarification on a post not being accepted even if you are provided a reason.

There are a couple reasons why we have decided to make this change:

• To hopefully save more time for the mods to focus more on checking post replies. Pretty self-explantory.
• To inform users about any decision to not accept a post without it ever going live and possibly accuring many replies. We've received some complaints from you guys about your prompts being removed after already receiving a lot of engagement, and your frustrations are understandable. We obviously want everyone to follow the posting rules here, but more ideally, to understand them before their submission ever goes out for others to see.
• It is more in line with how things were done on the real-life Scenes From A Hat game on 'Whose Line Is It Anyway.' Drew Carey and Aisha Tyler would often have to sift through the 'bad' prompts in the hat first before pulling out and reading the good ones.

One final important thing on this change: Even if a post gets approved beforehand, it DOES NOT mean it can't be removed later if another mod still feels it doesn't follow posting rules.

Certain prompts can be worded in such a way where they might toe the line between what is acceptable or not based on the rules. Since prompt quality isn't exactly something that can be fully concretely measured, sometimes whether prompts are deemed acceptable or not is based more on a judgment call. Even us mods have not always agreed on decisions over prompts.

Fortunately, this sort of situation doesn't happen frequently. To make things as fair as possible, we will try to only remove prompts if they have too many rule-breaking replies AND it itself is deemed to be breaking the rules.

Locking otherwise 'good' prompts for having too many rule-breaking replies WILL still continue.

I wanted to address a comment that we've gotten a couple times recently in response to the 'no blurted answers rule' that I suspect might also be shared by some others here if they were asked about it.

Rebuttal: "But on 'Whose Line Is It Anyway,' they sometimes blurt answers out in response to prompts!"

While it is technically true that there were occasional instances on the show where performers would respond to a prompt by just stating an answer as their only form of dialogue, there is ONE major difference between responding to a prompt in real life versus in an online format like this one - the ability for the performers to utilize nonverbal cues like voice inflection and body language such as gestures and facial expressions​ to further convey and add more comedic effect to their scenes. All those things can't be fully replicated within an online format.

The closest way we try to make up for that limitation is by allowing people to write out stage directions in their replies, like actions or sound effects for anything that can't be acted out solely through dialogue.

And even though it is not wrong to say that just blurting an answer was not necessarily forbidden on the show, acting out prompts through dialogue and/or actions was still the MOST common way of responding to prompts, by a mile. In the sub, we can expect to see at least several blurted answers to prompts almost every day.

There's also usually a second part to the rebuttal:

"If the point of the game is to be funny, why should it matter HOW people respond?"

Saying that the main point of the game is to be funny is somewhat oversimplifying the objective here. Being funny is obviously important, but it still has to be done within reply rules. This sub isn't 'FunnyAskReddit' or a place where you simply respond with whatever funny or pertinent answer pops into your head first.

Perhaps some of the complaint is due to the thought that for a reply to be considered a 'scene', it must have at least several lines of Hollywood comedy-quality dialogue or else it will be removed. We're not asking anyone to write a movie script for us nor knock our socks off with the most perfect, brilliant, one-liners. Just one short sentence of dialogue is enough in almost all cases.

Will this mean that replying to certain prompts could take a little more thought and consideration? Sure, but at least to me, part of the fun of this sub is that people can be a little more creative with their replies than just stating an answer. One of our mods, Aeri73 had a pretty good summation the other day on the different types of acceptable versus not acceptable replies.

Look, we understand for a lot of you this sub is a place where you can wind down, ​be entertained, or maybe speak a little more freely than you might otherwise be permitted to in your personal lives. But at some point, we still have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Or else we wouldn't be doing our jobs as mods. We of course want to be fair to everyone here, but still stay true to the spirit of the game as much as possible.

You don't have to agree with our rules, but make sure to keep complaints civil and respectful. And you're always free to leave this community at any time or create your own community with your own rules :)