site crashes for some returning users

this is caused by faulty rules retrieval handling

awhile back our usage of the Discourse api broke, which messed up how we were retrieving “rules” data for various pages (for example: create empire)

this broke account creation. see:

to fix this i ditched the Discourse api (temporarily) and just linked to the rules post directly, instead of retrieving/displaying its text. however, i apparently missed a few places and is currently causing me issues while i’m working on

i need to: