Rules & Guidelines [Archive]

Michelle

10th June 2007, 14:40

Due to the growth of the forum, the rules and guidelines have recently been revised. To keep things simple, the following are the basic rules, including the important issues. In the post below, you will find further detail and clarification.

Only one account is allowed per person. Usernames must not be URLs or email addresses. If you have a problem with your account, or wish to change your username, please contact a member of staff.

When posting, please be considerate of your fellow members:
All opinions are welcome, but do not make personal comments about anyone.
Do not post in capitals, 'text speak', or a larger font, and your language should be suitable for all ages.
Before posting a new thread, please consider a quick search, to see if one already exists.
Signatures should be kept to a minimum, as these can be seen on every post you make.
Similarly, be considerate with your use of avatar - anything offensive or inappropriate will be removed.

Please do not 'spam' the forum with links to other sites. Links in your signature and/or profile should only be to personal sites and should not have illegal or offensive content. Staff reserve the right to remove any links that they feel inappropriate.

Just to make this clear, links to commercial sites should not be added to your sig or your profile. These are only allowed for regular, active members, and only with consent from myself.

Do not link directly to images on other sites, including authors sites, book stores etc - this includes amazon!

The forum staff are here to ensure the smooth running of the site, and they may edit or delete posts as they feel necessary. Constant disagreement or arguing with a member of the team may result in a ban.

By posting, you agree to abide by the rules and guidelines. If you have any queries, please contact a member of staff.

Michelle

10th June 2007, 14:42

General Conduct:
Basically, please show respect for your fellow members. Whilst discussion and debate are welcomed, please focus on the subject, and do not make your comments personal. Personal insults and attacks will not be tolerated, and repeated offenders may be banned from the forums.

Please take care with the language that you use. This forum is viewable to all, and younger readers are encouraged to take part, especially in the Young Person's Zone. With this in mind, certain words have been filtered.. do not try to find ways to get around this.

Content of posts:
The content of your posts should be your own. If you wish to include quotes, reviews etc from other people, please acknowledge your source. This is particularly important in the Reviews section.

Posts that are spam, or designed to promote your own site will be removed.

Please do not write your whole post in CAPS, which is considered to be shouting, avoid the use of ‘text speak’ and do not increase the font size of your whole post. These can all make your post hard to read.

Could we please ask members to use correct punctuation when posting, including capital letters in titles. This simply makes things a little easier for others to read.

In the main discussion areas, please keep the following issues in mind...

Staying On Topic – Please try to stick to the topic being discussed. The threads on the forum become a great resource, and it can be frustrating if they drift into other topics. Please start a new thread if necessary, and don't drift into general conversation.

Power-posting – this is when members post 'empty' messages to the forum, in order to simply increase their number of posts more quickly. Examples of power-posting are replying to a message with only an emoticon (smiley) or 'I agree', but failing to contribute anything further to the discussion. Power-posting clutters up the 'new posts' function and wastes bandwidth and server space, so please make sure your post has something to contribute.

Multi-posting - which is where you submit 2 or more posts in succession. You can respond to various points in one post, and posts can be edited if necessary. If you wish to respond to various comments by quoting them, please use the multi-quote button:

Between the "Quote" and "Quick Reply" buttons at the bottom of each post is the one that looks like a quote mark (") and a plus sign (+). If you click that button on the posts you wish to quote, and then hit the "Reply" button, your post will quote the selected posts. However, please only quote the bit that's relevant and not the entire post (unless the quoted post is only a couple of lines long).

Searching - When posting a new thread, please look to see if there is already a thread on that topic already in existence. You can do this either by having a look through the older threads, or by using the search facility to search for key words (e.g. the name of a book or author). This helps to keep things together neatly, so that other members trying to find information or discussions can find them more easily, rather than having things spread out over several threads.

Staff members may merge, split or edit posts and threads as required.

Sections in The Lounge, and in particular, General Chat, have a more relaxed attitude. :)

Links to other sites:
Links can be in your profile and/or signature, and also within posts. Please keep the following in mind:

Obviously, you should not link to sites with offensive or illegal content. These will be removed by a member of staff, and you will most probably find yourself banned.

Commercial or e-commerce sites may be allowed for regular active members, but this will be with the prior agreement of a staff member.

Links promoting another site should only be posted if relevant to the thread. If you are at all unsure, please check with a staff member first. If it is apparent that you have joined purely to promote your own site, the link will be removed.

If you would like to post links to petitions etc, please check with a member of staff first. In general, we do not allow new members to join up just to promote their 'cause', but established members will have their request allowed.

Avatars/Signatures:
Avatars - We offer a choice of avatars, plus the ability to upload or link to your own. Please be considerate of others with your choice of avatar. Those with offensive or questionable content will be removed.

Signatures - Your signature can be added via the profile, and can be set to show after every post you make. With this last fact in mind, please be considerate with your choice, and keep to a minimum.
Restrictions:
No more than 4 lines of text or 2 graphics (The exception are tickers - these are fairly large, so no other graphic should be used)
No more than 3 links to other sites

Linking to Images:
Please do not to link directly to images on other sites, such as book covers on publishers or authors sites.

On the larger sites, there are often copyright notices, forbidding the use of content on other sites.

However, with ALL sites, they host those images on their server. If you link direct to them, every time someone here sees it, it's using that other site's bandwidth.. which could cost them money.

If you want to show an image, most members have limited space to actually upload an image to the forum's server. Other than that (and it's actually a preference) could you please use a service such as photobucket or tinypic.