Here are a few notes, in no particular order, which expand on or explain or just reword Jeph's rules, or simply remind you of good practice:
1- Respect the rules; in particular, don't try arguing that "the rest of the Internet" allows things - Jeph pays the bills here, and what he says goes. And meanwhile an admin's or moderator's word is final.
2- Respect each other. Jeph's rule says "please be civil"; this can be expanded to avoiding discriminatory speech or remarks that are based on stereotypes. Taking our cue initially from Jeph's comic, we have become more sensitive in the areas of gender and sexual speech and terminology than most places on the Internet - please take note of this (and see the following post for more explanation).
3- Lurk a bit (or maybe you did that before registering) - see how things are done before jumping in, check whether someone has just said what's in your mind before speaking. Don't post too much until you can see how you're fitting in.
4- If you want to add to your thoughts you can edit your post; this is preferred to making a new post immediately below it.
5- If you are replying to the last post, don't bother to quote it - we can work it out, it's like a conversation! If someone else gets in while you were writing, you can easily edit in a quote. And if you do quote, don't quote the whole of everything - just enough for context; people will appreciate your posts more if they are easy to read. And don't quote pictures. Please.
6- Write English. There are many non-native English users here, so we don't expect grammatical perfection and consistency of spelling. But please, no 1337-speak, ALL CAPS, or excessive use of smileys
, marquees,
fancy fonts and
colours and such; and please try to spell people's (and characters') names right - it's only polite. Oh, and Internet memes or image macros? Passé. There is nothing exciting or new about any of them, and they just make people sigh when they see them.
7- Please, no religion or politics. They just lead to people getting all het up in entrenched positions with consequent unpleasantness, so we don't allow it in general. However, there is one sub-forum (DISCUSS!) in which serious discussion of things like that is permitted - but it is correspondingly more heavily moderated, and you should read the sticky there before joining in.
8- Also, no pictures focusing on guns or violence, and no porn; if that's your thing, there are other forums you can use.
And a couple of technical hints:
1- Make pictures a sensible size; the forum software displays them with a maximum width of 800 pixels in any case, to avoid distorting the forum layout, but if the original is big it still slows down the loading of the page. Equally, text should be legible; the forum software will force font sizes outside the range of 5pt to 36pt to the nearest of those values.
2- URLs in the [url=<URL>] tag do not have "quotes" round them, unlike on some other forums; putting quotes breaks them. It's sensible, and easy, to check your links after posting them, to be sure they're OK.
3- For mobile browsing you have a choice if you find browsing the normal view too difficult: you can use WAP2 (there's a link at the bottom of each page); or you can use the Tapatalk forum browsing app (cheap or free, from any app store near you) - search in the app for "questionable" and you'll find the forum there.
Finally, remember that we're all here to enjoy ourselves. Be nice to other people, and they will normally be nice in return. If any unpleasantness should arise (and we can't pretend it doesn't happen) either ignore it or take it to PMs if it's personal, or leave it for an admin or moderator to deal with if it's public. We will be firm when necessary.
