This message contains important information about a fairly exceptionally complex and esoteric set of special rules on Wikipedia. It does not imply any misconduct regarding your own contributions to date, which we feel the need to point out explicitly, because everything else about this template screams exactly that.

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorized discretionary sanctions related to a fairly arbitrary set of topics. The Committee's decision is probably not remotely intelligible to new users, the type of which would need a notification such as this, so we've opted to omit the link all together moving forward.

Discretionary sanctions is a system of conduct regulation designed to corral disruption on controversial topics to its very own special venue, with special rules regarding how we enforce our special rules, which must be followed in exquisite lawyerly detail, despite any rumor to the contrary. This means uninvolved administrators can unilaterally impose comparatively arbitrary sanctions for conduct that would often not be sanctionable in an open community discussion. These should normally be immediately appealed at the Administrators' Noticeboard, in a discussion that will waste a maximum amount of community time, and almost certainly result in no consensus.

This message is a compulsory notification as part of the above mentioned special rules that must be unflinchingly adhered to. Please do not bother to familiarize yourself with the discretionary sanctions system, because if we're being completely honest, half the time some of our most experienced editors, including sitting and former committee members, don't themselves perfectly agree on what they mean and how they should be enforced.