Group Etiquette
Ground Rules
There are a few ground rules for participation in our community. Please respect these rules, and each other.
Be nice.
No personal attacks. Do not feel compelled to defend your honor in public. There are smaller children reading what you have to say.
Stay on topic in Forums.
Please pay attention to the topic of your messages, and check that it still relates to its parent. Off-topic discussion not taken to private email will be removed.
Be nice to newcomers.
Newcomers may be annoying. But lots of valued contributors started out this way, and treating newcomers kindly makes them more likely to turn into the valuable community members we all know and love.
So while you don't have to humor them or suffer them gladly, and it's fine to point out when they make mistakes, point newcomers in the right direction in addition to turning them away from the wrong ones, and be kind to them in the process of helping them out.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
If you have an argument on a certain subject then stay away from that subject. Don't go back just to start the argument up again.
Reopen a discussion ONLY if there is new information about that topic.
Ignore spammers.
Spam is a blight upon the face of the net. Nobody likes it. However, it is hard to avoid. Despite our best efforts, you will occasionally see spam on our site. If you see it before we do then report it to admin. Complaining about it just upsets everyone and we don't want that.
Identify your subject matter.
Not everyone has time reading all forum postings. To ensure that your message reaches the right people in a timely manner, identify your subject matter clearly in the subject line. Subjects like a question
and problem
are not very helpful.
No unsubscribe messages.
Unfortunately, this bears repeating.
No test messages.
Please do not send test messages to the forum. You can, however, create test pages on the Wiki, but please don't forget to delete them after you finish learning.