Forum Rules/Hints for new users - needs a bit of updating for new format

Since we have the General Chat situation coming up every now and then, I thought it might be useful if we had a stickied thread where new users, or people who weren't sure about things could come to look so that they knew what was going on, or find out how to do things.

I've started it off, but being quite used to using various forums I'm sure there's technical things people will think need adding that I haven't thought of. So if anyone has suggestions, or things they want to know how to do just add them below and we'll see how we get on.

Rules for the Hull Forum

I think we only really have the 3 we all agreed on when we first came over from the BBC 606 site.

1) We don't talk about politics unless it's related to the club/football - ie the Allams vs the Council over the stadium.

2) We don't talk about religion.

3) We don't act like arses with each other or be otherwise offensive.

NB: These are just the rules for this section of the site. You're free to post in any section of the site, but bear in mind other sections may have different rules and when you are there you will be expected to follow them.

Hints/Information

1) Swearing

Swearing is allowed.

If you wish to hide the swearing, either because you come on here with your kids, or because you come on at work and they have a swear filter that prevents access to offending sites* there is an optional profanity filter on the site. At the very top right of the site you'll see your username. Hover the cursor over that and select Preferences from the menu that appears. Towards the bottom of that the screen that comes up you'll find a check box to allow Profanity Content.

People that are going to swear should be aware of that, there's no need to reverse any letters in ****, or spell **** with a k. All it will do is mean that the swear filter doesn't work for those that want it to, and could result in a partial or total inability for them to access the site if their work place has a stronger filter than the site does.*

*Work based filters can include schools, or even parental ones at home. The one they used to have on the computers when I was at school used to block the page and flag up the domain name to the admin staff. If a site repeatedly got blocked by the filter the admin would just disable access to it completely.

2) Off topic threads

It's a football board, but it would be dull if that's all we ever spoke about. Off topic threads are allowed. Any off topic threads should have the Off Topic prefix attached to it, which you can recognise on sight as the green box saying Off Topic on the threads list.

3) Posting pictures/Videos

Instructions to follow

4) Not Safe For Work

As with swearing, posts are within reason allowed to contain content that might not be suitable for all circumstances providing they are marked that way. If you have a picture you need to mark up as not safe for work you do it like this:

Instructions to follow

The one exception to this rule is miff's Babe of the Day thread. On that thread you don't need to use the nsfw tags. Anybody opening that thread should know what to expect, and therefore if they're at work should know not to open it. The pictures though do need to be "child friendly", as a rule of thumb don't post anything that couldn't be published on page 3.

5) User status/Points

At the left hand side of posts you'll see various information about posters.

More information to follow

6) Moderators

The moderators on all the forums on this site are volunteers. We're just normal posters like everyone else, and we're allowed to have opinions and disagreements with people like everyone else. We just happen to have been given the ability by the administrators to edit and remove posts when it is necessary to make sure the content remains acceptable to the users.

On this forum, as with the rules, all the moderators have been chosen by the users following open threads on who they should be.