Writing this up at the suggestion of the mods for more visibility. This appears to be related to some past topics like Why are the forum guidelines so hard to find?, particularly this comment.
By way of introduction, I noticed someone else’s thread I commented on happened to get closed for a (reasonable) rule violation, but then I couldn’t actually find a specific rule it broke (and it wasn’t my thread so I didn’t get a PM from the mods myself). I PM’d the mod responsible to request for clarification for my own edification and that led to a short thread about some inconsistencies between the “Guidelines” page and the “FAQ” page.
Specifically, there are a couple of rules that are in the FAQ, but not mentioned in the Guidelines. Some also appear not to be publicly written (i.e. unwritten rules - more on that later).
As a newcomer to this forum, my thought process was that the Guidelines would contain all the rules, and then the FAQ would have more detailed examples, explanations, and process nuances (like flagging, the FMC / forum administration structure, warnings, etc). While this is mostly accurate, this is not entirely the case currently though, and the inconsistencies don’t seem to be intentional?
Perhaps that inconsistency is partly because the FMC and Moderators are fairly independent, and so some of these haven’t been updated yet, but others may have been missed earlier. I’m not sure / don’t really know.
A few rules I noticed:
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Q39 - the AI generated content policy - only in the FAQ, no mention in the Guidelines
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Q40 - the links to Twitter/X policy - only in the FAQ, no mention in the Guidelines
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Q8 (and part of “Guide to the Guidelines” 3.2) - the personal practice policy - in the FAQ, is not explicitly mentioned in the Guidelines, only some reference to “The Watercooler” category
- This policy in particular differs from some forums, including Buddhist ones I’ve used, so may deserve some more explicitness since it may be more confusing to new users used to other forums
- How strictly this is followed in “The Watercooler” category is a bit confusing to me. I think it would be helpful to more clearly list some boundaries (I’m aware there’s lots of gray area and these things change over time, but some more clarity could help)
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Possibly spam related - the personal blog/link-only/self-promotion policy - I’m not sure what to call this exactly, but primarily link-only posts to personal blogs / self-promotion are strongly discouraged (reasonably so), but this isn’t mentioned in either the FAQ or the Guidelines.
- Some forum(-like) sites list this under their spam policies, but this forum doesn’t explicitly mention it there either.
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Possibly other unwritten rules I’m not aware of - that’s the problem with unwritten rules of course
- Perhaps these are written in internal moderation documentation already and just haven’t been written about publicly yet
Personally, these rules seem reasonable to me and I have no problem with them, I was just hoping that some inconsistencies could be rectified or otherwise clarified. Especially for new users like me (and I don’t use forums too much these days, so I imagine others might be more confused). Metta 
In case they are helpful, some references for comparison include: Stack Overflow’s generative AI content policy/ies, Stack Exchange’s “spam” flag description and link usage guidance