Actually the rules are official, but the sticky thread and list in Meta is unofficial. It seems really weird saying this. Maybe the Bitcointalk governing body didn't give it's approval for the list to be official . The title of the thread says "Unofficial list of (official) Bitcointalk.org rules".

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Everyone has noticed that the overall activity is dropping and this couldn't have been missed by the forum admins either. In a situation where people are leaving Bitcointalk, being less active, and losing general interest in the forum culture, the admins have two choices: they can continue to ban people for plagiarizing a few posts (even if it happened many years ago), or they don't do it as much as they did in the past and only ban the worst of the plagiarizers giving many others a free pass. They went for the 2nd option.