Forum rules - Read before posting

StephanTual

In 8 months of operations, this forum has received 694,263 page views and has 2,699 users registered (as of 8 sept 2014).

I think the fact that I only ever had to shadowban one single troll speaks volumes as to the quality and maturity of our community. I take great pride in the large set of on-topic, concise, clear posts that are genuinely helpful to newcomers.

It is my full intention to keep it that way - I want newbies to be able to jump in a thread and gather the information they need quickly, without having to scan 10 pages of comments. So, I manually curate every post that is displayed here.

Recently, there has been a number of accounts on this forum that are taking liberties with our community - and while I didn't want to create rules, it has made it very difficult for me to justify some post being removed while other stayed.

So, here are the rules. They are probably obvious etiquette to 99.999% of the community, but now I can curate knowing we have a standard to refer to:

• No commercial offering or links to commercial offerings (only jobs request and offers go to the 'jobs and skills' category)
  
• No signatures (the feature is disabled for a reason)
  
• No adhominem (personal insults)
  
• No derailing threads
  
• No flooding forums many threads when one would have sufficed
  
• No flooding threads with subsequent messages if you're OP
  
• No abuse of the advanced editor function (use formatting for clarity, not to draw giant letters across the screen)
  
• Off topic goes to the watercooler, rules above still apply there (it's a watercooler, not a bin)
  
• No posting of outside material unless the source is authoritative. Self promotion is discouraged.
  

And finally: be kind to each other. We're in a small community, and what we write here is how people from outside the space will perceive us.

Thank you