So it's going to be a long post because Id like to explain why every rule worked for my tribe and how we got to that solution. It's situational, the biggest part of being a successful tribe and keeping everyone happy is trust. We have a council of four members, we don't make decisions unless three out of the four agree. This type of "council" happened accidentally and by no means should be something that is forced on your members. T
I experimented with a lot of different rules my first two weeks on the game. When it was released I created a tribe with my two good friends on one of the early servers. We were constantly raided and we got tired of it. That's about the time they released the first batch of new servers. So we hopped on, created a tribe and started to recruit people... That's when things started getting hectic. We didnt really have a solid bond with most of these guys, i didnt really know them. Then they started inviting randoms into the tribe. It got to the point where tribe members were taking tribe dinos and getting them killed. Our newly tamed dinos were getting lost/killed within the day. We had people just want to ride around on them and try to kill a rex on a level 16 scorpion.. I put a stop to tribe owned dinos and locked ownership. From that point on it was "you tamed it you own it." We had members that were against that idea but this is a tribe, we help each other out.. If i helped my friend tame his argent, he would help me tame my argent. This went on for about two weeks. My members got used to the idea that "You Tame it you own it" so I opened up the dino ownership so anyone could ride anything. But I set it up in governance that its personal tame. This will let you can see the person who tamed its name above the dino. So when Tribe member A wanted to use Scorpion he would ask Tribe member B if it was okay. If Tribe member A got it killed then he would lose trust and would have to tame another scorpion. This got us all on the same page Dino wise. Fixed.
Then we started having problems with people taking stuff off of logged out bodies, and personal chests. So I made it a rule, leave the stuff that's on peoples bodies. I knew that in order to have a successful tribe we would have to establish trust. That you can log off and still have your items in your inventory. At this time I made personal locks. Everyone had one to three personal boxes. My members could keep any items they gathered. You mined up 600 metal? It's yours and you can divy it up how you see fit. So more people started gathering metal instead of taking metal. After a week of this rule being implemented I didn't hear a single person complain about losing stuff. Fixed.
Base building design was a group effort from day one. We had two members that would put the items down, but everyone could participate in the design. We wanted to hear everyone's opinion on how we should build our walls, how to make the second floor, how to make the taming pen, etc... We all trusted one another on building design. But only one person do defenses. This way it was all being planned by one person (He played on the PC). We gathered the materials for him and he got it all figured out. Fixed.
At about two and a half weeks on this server a tribe mate (new recruit) started talking shit to another tribe. That tribe was bigger than us and one night they came over and leveled our base.. Great. New rule, no talking in Public chat. AT ALL. We picked up all of our stuff and moved out west near the snow biom. This person was still talking shit. So i kicked him and made a new rule. We are locking our tribe. The only people we will be inviting into our tribe from now on are friends known personally. It was easier to get new trustworthy members now. We didnt have to rely on people being unpredictable since we had tribe members vouching for their friend. No more randoms messing everything up. Fixed.
Like I said I experimented a lot, tried different things but these were the main contributing factors in my tribe.
TL;DR