"Creating alts and exchanging keys with them to diversify the gardens at your disposal, while clever and resourceful, is not actually ok."
- Blanky
"If I have two characters that don't interact (don't send each other resources or currants, don't share housing), then it's quite easy to not have an advantage."
- Windborn, subsequently endorsed by Blanky
For the benefit of those who couldn't keep up with that thread discussing alts, this is the condensed version. The reasoning and specifics will be set out in a later, more lengthy post, but I'd say that the first line there alone should clarify a lot of doubts. It would probably also mean that most alts that exists out there right now are 'illegal', in some sense, which means that now would probably be a good time to start revoking house keys at the very least.
Those are the facts about how the rules stand today. Now, here are my thoughts, not on whether or not sharing keys and gardens with alts should be legal, but about how the Community Guidelines and changes to the rules to the game are communicated:
First, I think a lot of us had the impression that alts, even the garden sharing variety, were allowed. This can be seen in varies Global discussions, forum threads, etc. When we asked Araldia in Global about this, she referred us to the Community Guidelines, which states: