MUST READ: Forum Rules

[Aaron Cake]

Because of the large influx of new users of this forum, I thought it prudent to post a set of general forum guidelines. These will help eliminate some of the problems we have been having recently, and make it a more enjoyable forum experience for all. Please feel free to post your responses and opinions, as these guidelines are a work in progress and will only evolve through your involvement.

Now, on with the show.

1. No personal attacks of any kind. This forum has always been a nice place to visit, and let's keep it that way. This means that there are to be no flame wars, topics started with the specific purpose to put someone else down, etc. Such posts will be closed immediately, or, if the situation warrants, deleted completely.

2. Please keep the "me too" postings to a minimum. . This does not mean that you can't post your agreement on a subject, but posts containing such simple statements are unnecessary, and clutter things up.

3. Profanity is not necessary. Unlike a lot of the other forums on the Net, this forum has always contained relatively clean language. There are very few circumstances where profanity is actually warranted, so it should not be a stretch to keep the language clean. Normally, the poster of objectionable content will get a warning and be asked to edit the post.

4. Please use the Search feature. I cannot stress this enough. Please use the Search feature before you make a post asking a question. This is especially true if you are a new user. You will find that common questions have been answered several times already. Not only will you get a speedier response, but the other members will not become frustrated answering your question yet again.

5. The "Off-Topic" forum is just that, off topic. This forum is designed for things that don't fit into any other categories. For example, posting jokes, pictures of your new pet alligator, the night you spent with Britney Spears, etc. Being off topic, this forum has a few looser rules than the others, but people are still expected to behave in a respectable manner.

6. No porn. Period. I don't think this needs an explanation. If you want porn, there are a lot of other forums that contain copious amounts. The Honda Tuner forum at http://www.clubsi.com is the first one that comes to mind.

7. Moderators will become more active. Very simply, this forum is expanding with a great number of new users. Because of this, it looks like the moderators may need to step up a little and become involved. This means that topics will be moved accordingly, useless postings to the wrong forum will be closed, etc. Note: I do not want this to turn into a moderator free for all. It is up to the moderators to act responsibly and use discretion.

8. Pictures of others should not be posted without their permission. This includes friends, ex-partners, etc. Doing so could put the forum into an undesirable legal situation.

9. This forum is not for MP3 trading. There are a number of good services available for MP3 trading, and this forum is not one of them. With the recent attention MP3 files are getting from the media and RIAA, there is no need to bring negative attention to this forum.

10. "Post-whoring" is unacceptable. Posting for the sake of posting (except in the Off Topic forum) is not necessary, and serves only to make it harder to find information. Remember that people are respected for their knowledge, not post counts.

11. For-Sale issues should be handled in private. At least until a solution is reached. Bickering on the forum serves to help no one. While it is perfectly acceptable to let the other members know of a potentially unreliable seller, such an action should NOT be done unless one of the moderators or admins agrees first.

That's basically it. You will see that most of these guidelines fall into the common sense category. If you have any concerns or suggestions, feel free to let the moderators know.

[RaZor]

Aaron: Just a wise suggestion, but you might want to post this where everyone will have easy access to such as with the menu options (my profile, register, search, faq, forum home....right with these). That way you wont have to keep referring back to this post, which will be not be at the top of posts in a few weeks.

[JupiterX]

Set it to sticky if your copy of UltimateBB has that feature. Problem solved.

[magnetik]

I love the set of rules (the last one u posted a few months back was really good to)

Now just to get everyone to follow all these rules..... (i hate to name names.... we all know the main offender!) thats another impossible challenge in itself...

[CALIBOY]

Lstrunk wasn't afraid to name names

[Alives]

um...this isnt hardware related...follow your rules man!! general discussion

j/k i know you're god.

[Aaron Cake]

This version does not have the sticky feature (unfortunately), but I will see about including the rules link in the top right where the rest of the stuff is.

[GK]

Free post!!!!! J/K

Post-whoring was a very large problem on my site as well. I found it to be very annoying as well. I setup rules and now its not a big issue anymore.

BTW, have you considered migrating to vBulletin? I've been running UBB since 2000, but last month switched over to vBulletin.

Its way easier on the server and the amount of features will literally overwhelm you. Its taken me almost a month to weed through all the cool stuff you can do with it!

I was able to use the import utility and I kept all my members, posts, PM's, and forums.

[Maveric]

GK... I don't think vBulletin is a viable option since I belive this server runs NT & IIS and vBulletin only runs on Apache & MySQL. I doubt Moon wants to change hosts and migrate from ASP to PHP (as I am curently doing). I wish people wound make more quality BBS's that use ASP, but it seems PHP is taking over. People love free stuff, maybe Micro$oft will learn that.

[Callahan]

Why not just run PHP & mysql on the windows server? Works great with IIS, which means vB works fine too (and I have run it, but prefer ikonboard myself)..

[ 01-31-2002: Message edited by: Callahan ]