Rules, Guidelines and Helpful hints

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IanKennedy
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Rules, Guidelines and Helpful hints

Post by IanKennedy »

These are some rules, guidelines and advice on how to behave and act around here. These are broken into three sections:

Rules - Breaking these rules will warrant action from the moderators / admin team.
Guidelines - While not official rules following these suggestions will make the forum a pleasant place and will avoid annoying other members. Those who consistently and severely ignore these guidelines, despite multiple warnings, may be construed as violating the first rule "don't be a jerk".
Helpful hints - Tips and tricks for forum life.

These may be updated over time.

Rules
  • Posting here is a privilege, not a right. You are a guest here, and should behave accordingly. If you want to exercise your right to be a jerk, you will find that you will have to do it elsewhere.
  • No Spamming, and no trolling. We aren't interested in people who want to start flame wars, and we aren't interested in people who want us to buy their latest version of magic beans. Just to be clear that means no advertising, even for your own products.
  • No "my sci-fi universe would beat up your sci-fi universe" threads. No matter how well intentioned or reasonable it might start, ultimately no good comes of this.
  • All viewpoints are welcome here; however, people who preach any kind of hatred are not. You are welcome to say that you disagree with particular lifestyles, political philosophies, or whatever. But posting "All women/gays/asians/christians are evil and will burn in hell" is not allowed.
  • We all argue and insult from time to time. But threads that dissolve into flame wars will be closed, and those who keep such things running will be disciplined.
  • No posting large chunks of copyrighted material. Fair use rules apply. If posting work in the design forum or another forum that is not your original work you are required to give due credit to the original author. Members of this forum also hold individually and as a group intellectual property rights over the content within, this means that if you use any of the original creations and ideas seen in the board you are to give due credit to either the member or the board.
  • Remember that there is no age limit to members of this forum, and so children have free access here. As a result, no obscene or pornographic material may be posted. Whilst it is notoriously difficult to define exactly what is pornographic or obscene, as a general rule; no images that show uncovered genitals (or breasts in the case of women). No written material which explicitly describes sexual activity or extreme violence. Such will be censored, and if those posting it are deemed to be doing so for shock purposes they will be disciplined.

    Innuendo, while it has become an accepted part of the forum, needs its limits. A sly comment here and there or a clever barb is fine and even amusing, however this is a PG-13 board and thus the comments need to be kept reasonable. Basically this means nothing obscene or obviously sexual. Acceptable innuendo can be classed as a comment that we can understand but that an 8 year old would be oblivious to.
  • Threats of violence, death or computer hacking against other users is considered completely unacceptable and will be dealt with with the utmost of severity. Also, bragging or talking about illegal acts (as defined by UK law) done by members will not be tolerated.
  • No animated items in your signature. The use of animated items in signatures is both distracting and repetitive so from this point on the use of animated gifs, pngs, or animated images of any other form is no longer allowed in users signatures, this includes the use of animated 'Smilies'. Users with animated items in their signature will be asked by the mods to remove the item. Failure to do so will result in an Admin removing the item themselves and will result in a warning to that user.
  • Certain users have been appointed by the administrators as forum moderators - they're the ones with their names in green. Their role is to assist the admins in running the forum, such as by ensuring threads are in the right place and by enforcing the rules of the forum. If they ask you to do something, in particular, if they post an instruction in green writing, it is an indication that they are acting in their official role, and their instructions should be followed immediately. The use of such green text is limited to administrators and moderators for this purpose only.
Guidelines
  • We expect at least a reasonable level maturity from the members of this board. This means we expect members to be able to interact in a civilized adult manner; disagreements are to be settled with reasoned debate or with members bowing out of the debate. You are welcome to debate and more to the point, not debate, any issues you wish on the board so long as they fall within the greater rules. How ever if you do enter into a debate it is up to you to conduct yourself accordingly. While insults and flames are allowed, although not particularly liked, you should at least have some bases for them "You're stupid for thinking that" is ok, while "Your stupid" is not.
  • If you are in a debate with other members on the board, then it is expected that you will debate in an honest and rational way. Reply to your opponent's points, supply evidence for your claims, do not lie and do not answer some of your opponent's points while ignoring others. You should also not deliberately misquote, or selectively quote someone so as to make them to appear to agree with a point they don't. Most importantly, you must be prepared to lose. Going into a debate and rejecting any possibility of defeat is just going to lead to flames and hostility for all involved. If you are beaten in a debate: accept it and admit it.

    Everyone loses sometimes; we will not think less of you for losing. We will think less of you for being dishonest about it.
  • Avatars are not there just to look cool or show off, they are there so that members can easily tell who is posting with just a glance. For instance a quick look at an avatar and everyone knows "Marvin the Martian = Teaos". Changing an avatar frequently makes this difficult, and can be disconcerting for people who don't realise that what they are thinking of as several different people is actually one who keeps changing avatars. So while you can change your avatar, know that you will be frustrating many members by doing so - it's best to limit changes to once-in-a-while things. If you want to mess around with your public profile your sig is just fine for that and you're more than welcome to mess with it as often as you like.
  • In the interests of allowing people to easily understand a user's posts, it is requested that you use proper punctuation and grammar in your posts. By this we mean using full-stops at the end of a sentence, commas to break long sentences up into clauses, and capital letters and paragraphs to enhance readability (no one likes trying to read a wall of text that has no paragraphs or punctuation). We do not expect perfection in everyone's posts, but basic punctuation and grammar is requested.
  • Emoticons are there to punctuate certain point in a post. As we all know certain things do not come across well in type and thus require an emoticon to make the point. However smiley spam is frowned upon - this is the excessive and unnecessary use of emoticons in a post. To that end you are limited to no more than 12 emoticons in a single post.
  • If you wish to contribute to a topic that has been dead for a while please make sure you have something of value to add to the topic and are not just posting for the sake of it. Posting in an old topic is referred to as Necroing and can be annoying if done often and without reason. Generally it is preferred that you start a new topic and summarise the existing points in the first topic. Please include a link to the previous discussions in your introduction.
  • When posting please try to keep your thoughts in a single post, don't, for example, post several times in a row just because you though of something else to add. If you wish to add to your point simply edit your last post, especially if nobody has replied to the thread yet. You can do this by simply hitting the 'edit' button in the top right corner of your post.

    One exception of this rule is if you are responding to multiple people in a topic. If that is the case then you may quite freely reply to each in turn in separate posts. You are not expected to group all your replies into one post, in fact doing so can make it difficult for the people you are responding to. Equally, if there has been a large amount of time passed since your last post, or people have already posted more messages, feel free to post new replies to the topic.
Helpful hints

Here are a number of tips and tricks that will help you in your posting:

Quoting

To quote you can copy and paste a section of writing from the forum or elsewhere and paste it into a quote box, to insert a quote into your text you can press the quote button at the top of the posting screen and insert your quote in the brackets. I find it easy to have the text you want to quote already copied and once I hit the quote button just press Ctrl+V, this instantly inserts the copied text into the quote box rather than having to right click between the brackets.

Example:

Code: Select all

[quote]Blah Blah Blah[/quote]
Blah Blah Blah
If you wish to make it clear you are quoting a specific person or reference you can make the quote box state who the quote is from:

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[quote="Rochey & Seafort"]Teaos was right, I was wrong[/quote]
Rochey & Seafort wrote:Teaos was right, I was wrong
You can also achive this effect by scolling to the bottom of the posting screen to where it shows posts already made in the thread, you then highlight the portion of writting you wish to quote and press the "quote" button found in the top right hand corner of that post. This will add the quote to your post and say who its from.

Images in text

These are easy to achive, the simplist way is to upload any picture you want to a website like Photobucket. Once there most of these sites offer a premade {IMG} address. Then you just copy and paste the img url into your post:

Example:

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[IMG]http://www.ditl.org/Images/Gengrafix/typ12phasfire.jpg[/IMG]
Image

If you manage to find a site that allows hotlinking (which is linking pictures directly off their site (most sites dont allow this as it eats up bandwidth)) and want to use one of their images you can click the IMG button at the top of the posting screen and insert the address into it.

Linking

This is pretty simple to do, you can either just type out the link address:

http://www.ditl.org

But this looks ugly and messy, it is much better to make it into a URL link. You do this by adding the address into a URL bracket, the URL button is found at the top of the page near the IMG button.

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[url=www.ditl.org]DITL website[/url]
DITL website

Now you can be really fancy and make an image into a link.

This can be done by doing the above URL linking thing but instead of adding a word for the link like above you add a IMG link, example:

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[url=www.ditl.org][IMG]http://www.ditl.org/Images/Gengrafix/typ12phasfire.jpg[/IMG][/url]
Image

Now, clicking this image will take you to the DITL website.

Polls

The Polls feature allows you to create polls for other members to vote on. It's simplicity itself to use. When posting a standard message, you will see a pair of tabs below the preview/submit buttons, highlighted in this image :

Image

Clicking on the "Poll creation" tab will bring up a page for you to enter the poll question and a list of options for people to vote for.

Image

The "Options per user" box allows you to let voters choose more than one of the options, and you can choose how long to run the poll for and whether to allow people to alter their vote after they cast it. Once you've filled it all in, simply hit "submit" as you would for any other post and the poll will be there.

Embedding Video

To embed a video in a message, bring up the "post a message" form in the normal way. Then click on the "Video" button above the box where you type the message. It will put this into your message :

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[Video][/Video]
Between the tags, paste the source URL of your video, like this :

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[Video]http://www.ditl.org/Images/Gengrafix/Phaser-Cannon.mp4[/Video]
The result will be an embedded video in your post.
Please note that you cannot simply post a standard URL to a youtube video in the tags. Instead, you have to change the "watch=" part of the URL to an "embed". So instead of looking like this :

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[Video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ej24W8gcmXQ[/Video]
It looks like this :

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[Video]https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ej24W8gcmXQ[/Video]
Now you will get an embedded youtube video, thus :
email, ergo spam
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IanKennedy
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Posts: 6155
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Re: Rules, Guidelines and Helpful hints

Post by IanKennedy »

Please note that there is now a new rule in the first message in this forum. It goes as follows:
Rules wrote:* No animated items in your signature. The use of animated items in signatures is both distracting and repetitive so from this point on the use of animated gifs, pngs, or animated images of any other form is no longer allowed in users signatures, this includes the use of animated 'Smilies'. Users with animated items in their signature will be asked by the mods to remove the item. Failure to do so will result in an Admin removing the item themselves and will result in a warning to that user.
Please can everyone take note and remove the animation from your signatures.
email, ergo spam
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