Guidelines
* 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.
* You are expected to show respect and consideration for your fellow members. Discussion is welcomed, but personal comments and insults will be not be tolerated.
* 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. Links to commercial sites may be allowed for regular, active members, but this will only be with prior permission from myself. Affiliate links are not allowed, including affiliate links to amazon.
Do not post about other sites unless it's relevant to the thread. If you wish to tell us about a site, be it your own, or something you've come across, please contact us first, with details of the site, and any involvement you have. If it appears that you have posted just to promote your own site, that post will be removed.
In the same way, please do not join just to ask for help with your homework / dissertation / survey etc. These are also only allowed for regular, active members.
Staff reserve the right to remove any links that they feel inappropriate or promotional.
* Please be considerate of others with your choice of avatar/profile picture. Those with offensive or questionable content will be removed.
* Your signature will show after every post you make. With this last fact in mind, please be considerate with your choice, and keep to a minimum. Graphics are not allowed in sigs.
The forum staff are here to ensure the smooth running of the site, and they may edit, move, merge or delete posts as they feel necessary. Constant disagreement or arguing with a member of the team will not be tolerated, and may result in a ban.
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 we have younger members playing an active role in the forum. 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.
When posting about a book:
When starting a new thread about a book, please put both the book title and author name into the thread title, as this aids future searching.
When posting a synopsis of the book (I.e. the blurb from the back of the book or from a website) you do not need to use spoiler tags as these do not give away major plot points but instead act as a hook to entice people to read the book. Also, if posting a synopsis, please indicate where it's from.
When starting a new thread for a specific book or series, it's helpful if you can provide more information, as well as your own thoughts or review. Considering the amount of books out there, simply asking if anyone has read it/them probably won't get much response.
We obviously welcome your book reviews, but when you post them, please simply use the book title and author name in the thread title, and do not specify 'Review of'. This is for many reasons, including uniformity and encouragement of discussion.
Searching for previous topics:
When posting a new thread, please look to see if there is already a thread on that topic. 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.
Punctuation:
We ask all members to try to use capital letters for book titles, authors, the personal pronoun (I) etc, both in the thread titles and in their posts. This helps to keep the forum tidy and easy to read. We also ask for basic punctuation to be used, as again this makes posts easier to read. In addition, 'text speak' is not allowed.
Font changes:
Please do not use capitals letter for your entire post, as this is seen as shouting, and is difficult to read.
Also, please do not make entire posts in either bold, italics, colour or larger fonts. It's absolutely fine to use any of these to highlight part of a post, but not all of it, as it makes things far more difficult to read.
Off Topic Posting:
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.
Staff members may edit threads, and move posts if necessary. General chat may be removed from book discussions.
Ensure you contribute to the thread:
Please be aware of posting a reply with just a smilie, or a comment such as 'I agree'. These clutter up the 'new posts' function for other members, and waste server space. Please make sure that you're contributing to the discussion when you reply.
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).
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.