It is not our right to punish one for thinking what they do, no matter how much we disagree.

So what the hell are we?

We're a universal forum (BBS) hosted in the Netherlands that is dedicated to freedom of speech and freedom of information. The site is called Sanctuary because it was designed to be a sort of oasis away from all the heavy-handed moderation, corporate influencing, reputation systems, and spurious social media outrages. It was inspired directly by Jeff Hunter's TOTSE of old, but it does not seek to emulate that. We are not TOTSE 2.0 but we go by the exact same ideals.

It's easy to think that this kind of site isn't needed anymore, but if you've been posting on the modern internet long enough, you will begin to see the cracks. And they are many. We offer five huge things that many many other sites do not.

1.
The most obvious and notable thing that we offer is, of course, what we enforce and how we do it. Our rules are light and are specifically designed to encourage people to post as they wish while still maintaining order on the site. We do NOT want to emulate /b/ but we do not want to emulate NeoGAF either. Thus, we straddle the fine line between too much freedom and not enough. Most, if not all sites don't even try to attempt this. They either give too much or too little.

2.
There are no rep systems. Although rep systems are great for quick automated content generation, they're terrible for pretty much anything else. On the more micro level, they lead to friends upvoting each other just because they're friends, funny posts tending to get upvoted instead of the more smart and thoughtful posts, people downvoting others simply because they might have a grudge against that poster regardless of the quality of the post, posts getting upvoted because it tells people what they want to hear instead of what they should be hearing, posts deserving of upvotes not getting them simply because they're last on a huge stack of posts and some users TL;DRing all posts past mostly the first handful, and posts getting downvoted because it tells people what they don't wanna hear, even if it may be true.

3.
We do not have any corporate interests whatsoever or government interference. Our rules adhere to international law. There's also no danger of frivolous US-based lawsuits against us or the other users on the site because someone's feelings got hurt due to our overseas hosting. And such lawsuits have actually happened to other sites many times before. We also do not run any ads on our site, do not require or even ask for donations, and there are no plans at all to change this. We are completely independent and wish to stay that way.

4.
We offer a huge sense of community and "togetherness". It's harder to care or even notice someone when they're just a generic usertag in a long sea of generic usertags with some text attached. On a forum like ours though, there's more personality and ease of personal connections. Furthermore, with the rep system gone, you and others now decide for yourselves if that person is worth listening to or not. You actually read people's posts instead of looking at how many arbitrary points they have or worrying about your own. The atmosphere is generally looser. Less detached and more personal and friendly. There's no mad rush for followers, upvotes, shares, or anything. You make a topic and people discuss it with you.

5.
Finally, we have extensive posting and user customization features, with more being added as needed. We have many ways to post and deliver content with powerful moderation tools and even an open and public banlist. We can also easily scale and host other forums that need it. We are stable, flexible, and powerful in our software. A board built to be a true universal forum.

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This is the Sanctuary. We are here for freedom, we are here for each other, and we are here to stay.

Quick Links:

Site Rules
Sanctuary's Origins
Official YouTube Channel