AMF Participation Guidelines

[Forum Admin]

Hi everyone.

We have written these participation guidelines to help you use the forum more easily, both for you and your fellow members, please take the time to read them and bear them in mind when you are using the forum.

Thanks AMF Admin

Australian Motorsport Forums participation guidelines.

Ground Rules
There are a few ground rules for participation in AMF forums. Please respect these rules, and each other.

Be civil.
No personal attacks. Do not feel compelled to defend your honor in public. A spirited mature debate is encouraged, but infamatory and personal attacks won't be tolerated. If you find you are being flamed, then report it to a moderator.

Stay on topic.
Most of these threads particularly in F1 are high-traffic and read by busy people, so please pay attention to the topic of your messages, and check that it still relates to the Topic Title of the thread to which you are posting. Off-topic discussion not taken to Off Topic or PM/Email, or any place where it is not considered off-topic, by someone who knows they should be taking it elsewhere, is eligible for removal from the sub forum.

Adding Polls
Polls are good, but use them sparingly, the over use of polls detracts from their usefullness and tends to reduce topic discussion. Its also considered good manners not to introduce a poll to an already established thread, particularly if you are not the auther of that thread.

Be kind to new members.
New members may be annoying. They ask the wrong questions, including ones that seem obvious (or whose answers seem easy to find). But lots of valued contributors started out this way, and treating new members kindly makes them more likely to turn into the valuable community members we all know and love (and cut some slack when they mess up).

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 new members in the right direction in addition to turning them away from the wrong ones, and be kind to them in the process of correcting their transgressions.

Let sleeping dogs lie.
It's tempting to revisit controversial decisions you disagree with, but it's rarely productive to do so, since it almost always results in the same heated, lengthy, and time/energy draining discussions leading to the same conclusion that was reached in the last round.

Therefore, for issues already raised, discussed, and decided upon, reopen the discussion only if you have significant new information that would reasonably prompt reconsideration of the original decision.

Crossposting and Duplicate Threads.
It is almost never appropriate to send the same message to two different threads or topics. Please don't do it, to do so will be considered spam and will result in removal of one or both of the relevant posts. It is also not useful or enjoyable for forum members to have to follow duplicate threads discussing the same subject, this detracts from the debate and makes it hard to follow.

Duplicate threads will be either merged where possible, or the less relevant thread simply deleted.

Spam
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 the AMF forums. If you feel the need to flame the spammer, don't. It only gives unwanted attention to them. Instead report the spamer/spam post to a moderator and it will promptly be removed.

No large attachments and embeded pictures.
Do not post high res pictures in full size on the board, try reducing them in size, remember not everyone has a highspeed internet connection, some of us are using 56K so large downloads can be painfully slow.

Trim your Quotes
Do not quote the entire content of the message to which you are replying. Include only as much as is necessary for context of your reply. Remember that if someone wants to read the original message, they can; it is easily accessible. A good rule of thumb is, don't include more quoted text than new text.

Some people like to put their reply after the quoted text, some like it the other way around, and still some prefer interspersed style. To keep forum discussion friendly, please do interspersion with trimming.

Identify your subject matter.
Not everyone has time reading all forum postings. To ensure that your message reach the right people at timely manner, identify your subject matter clearly in the Topic Title when creating new threads.