This is a Civilised Place for Public Discussion

These guidelines are intended to keep this a clean, well-lighted place for civilised public discourse. The ‘rules’ are simple and few:

1. Don’t break the law or incite others to do so. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit. Don’t post spam.

2. Commercial enterprises may not be advertised or conducted through this board.

3. Play nicely, don’t stick beans up each other’s noses and absolutely no running with knives. In other words, no name-calling and no ad hominem attacks. Don’t harass anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information. Don’t discuss the policies of other private Archers boards, or personalities or specific posts from them, or carry disagreements from one place to another.

4. Language: none is prohibited, police yourselves. Context is all. Bear in mind that you will be peer reviewed, so think at least thrice before dropping a bomb-word.

If in doubt, think whether you would want your post, with your name on it, featured on the front page of a national newspaper. If you wouldn’t, then you probably don’t want to post it…

5. You have a responsibility not to offend deliberately; you have no right not to be offended.

Your Participation Counts

Engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoid those that do not.

Discourse – the framework of this forum - provides tools that enable users collectively to identify the best (and worst) contributions: favourites, bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators are responsible for this forum and so are you.

When you see bad behaviour, don’t reply. It encourages the bad behaviour by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

Thus, if you are judged to be deliberately obnoxious by your peers, your post will be disappeared in short order. Persistent unpleasantness will result in temporary or permanent suspension of posting rights.

If you are judged by the moderators to be making frivolous or malicious ‘complaints’, in your use of flags or otherwise, then there will be the same consequences as for being obnoxious in your own posting.

In the interest of transparency, a brief explanation of any such action taken by the moderators will be posted in a dedicated thread, which we hope will see very little traffic.

In order to maintain a ‘clean, well-lighted place’, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts in any way; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by users.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

• Don’t start a topic in the wrong category.
• Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.
• Don’t post no-content replies.
• Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, the option exists to use Reply as a Linked Topic.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

Powered by You

This site is operated by the Hosts, the moderators, and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the “What’s Gone Wrong” category and let’s discuss! If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact any moderator via private message (see the staff page).

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behaviour and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.