Topic: General Forum Rules
General Forum Rules
Please read and follow these rules before posting in these forums. The overall quality of the forums depends on the quality of the posts within them, and it's your responsibility to make sure that what you're contributing is worthwhile.
Anyway, the rules.
General Information
Before starting a thread, ask yourself two questions.
Firstly, is your thread suitable for the forum you intend to post it in? For instance, threads about what brand of monitor speakers you should buy would logically go in the Music Production forum, threads about a song you've written would go into the Music Reviews forum, and 'hay guys checck out my cool web sight' threads in the General Discussion forum.
Secondly, is your thread interesting, humourous, or otherwise worth posting? If not, why are you posting it?
Before replying to a thread, consider whether or not you have anything to add to the discussion. "Me too!" or "Fuck you!" posts are irritating and pointless, and detract from the worth of a thread.
Post Content
Endeavour to spell things correctly, and don't use AOL-speak (u instead of you, wat instead of what, etc.) People who are consistently unable to do this will be warned, and then banned.
If you're going to post a potentially offensive thread, put the word 'NSFW' in the subject somewhere so people know to avoid it if they're at work.
Don't post work-unsafe content in someone else's non-NSFW thread; instead, just link to it (with a note that describes the content as being not safe for work.)
Be careful not to derail a thread. If you wish to discuss a wild tangent of the current topic, don't disrupt the flow of the thread, just start one of your own.
If you don't like the content of a thread, DON'T READ IT. It's literally that simple. Writing a post about oh how stupid the thread subject is and oh how silly the poster must be amounts to derailing.
"hi doods im new here" threads are a waste of valuable server space. If you're new, LURK until you're capable of contributing to the forums in an intelligent or humourous manner.
Don't post malicious links (ie, sites that pop up an infinite number of windows or which crash your browser etc.)
Don't leech images from other peoples' sites. If you don't host it personally, or if you don't pay for the bandwidth you're about to use, DON'T POST IT. I know from personal experience how astoundingly irritating it is to have your bandwidth sucked away by assholes who leech your content on another site without bothering to host it locally.
Images width than 800 pixels will tend to break the tables, and are pretty annoying for most readers. Resize your screenshots before posting them.
Don't sign your posts. We can read your username just fine.
Summary
Try your hardest not to be a fuckwit. Seriously. You're an intelligent person; it's not difficult.
To those of you who have managed to follow these rules successfully, thank you for making these forums a nice place to be.