After looking over this forum quite a bit in the last few days, it's come to my attention that some of you need to be educated about the rules of the forum. Please take note that these rules are in addition to the Forumwide Rules, which the site's administration considers you to have read and agreed to follow the rules when you register. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case as many new people to the site don't know where to find the rules or that there even are rules on Neoseeker.

To help you get more acclimated to the forum and to the site in general (for those of you that are new), I'll be going over some of the more easily broken rules so you'll be more aware of them and give you pointers on how to avoid accidentally breaking the rules.

1. Spamming: Spamming is one of the most commonly broken rules here on Neoseeker. The reason for this is that sometimes it's difficult to draw the line as to what in a thread should be considered spam, even for us moderators. A basic definition of spam is anything that's off topic or adds little to nothing to the current discussion. Many moderators even consider posts that aren't in English to be spam for various reasons. I don't really mind minor chatting from time to time in threads like the brother band request thread as long as it's talking about the topic of the thread to a certain extent, but some of it can very easily be taken to private messages (PMs).

A helpful way to avoid making a post that could be considered spam is to ask yourself if your post adds anything to the topic by either bringing up a new point for discussion or by helping someone out. If, after rereading your post before submitting it, you answer no to that question or if you're not sure, there's a chance that it might be considered spam. I like to give people the benefit of a doubt when it comes to this rule as, like I said before, it can be difficult to define at times, so it's doubtful that you'll get in trouble if it's unintentional.

2. Flaming: This is another commonly broken rule on the site, although thankfully we haven't had too much of that here.

The basic definition of flaming on an Internet forum is the act of insulting someone or trying to provoke them to the point that they fight back and cause a huge mess of things. The second part of that definition is actually closer to trolling than flaming, but the two generally go hand in hand. I'm aware that most of you can get angry or annoyed at someone and I respect that as it's human nature. However, if you feel like intentionally putting someone down or try to start a fight with them, I'll go ahead and suggest right now that you back away from the computer and go do something else for a while to calm down instead of flaming someone. Trust me, the person being flamed doesn't appreciate such comments about himself/herself and it only makes for more friction in the community, which is definitely not the way we want to go.

3. Advertising: You've all seen advertisements on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on the Internet, so I doubt that I really need to give an explanation here as to what it actually is. However, I will say that it's not appreciated on the site. If you want to let someone know about a site that you made or a friend's site to help boost activity, then place a link in your profile and/or signature. Posting advertisements in the forums will be a good way to guarantee that your post will be deleted without a second thought.

4. Bypassing a ban: If, for some reason, you get banned or placed on a posting restriction in this or any other forum on the site, the absolute last thing you want to do is try to get around the ban, which is what we call bypassing. You can bypass by posting as either a guest or by making a new account and posting. However, moderators can still identify every account you own, regardless of how you try to get around a ban. If you make a new account and post in a forum where you've been banned or restricted, you run the very great risk of the site's administration being notified, which will result in an instant permanent sitewide ban on the account you used to try and get around your ban. This means that you'll never be able to use that account to post on the forums again. It's much easier if you just wait until the ban/restriction expires; things will be much easier for you and for me as the section moderator.

5. Double Posting: Double posting is defined as making two consecutive posts before anyone else has a chance to reply to a thread. There are very rare circumstances where this rule does not apply, but these circumstances are usually for forum related threads like thread indexes or announcement threads where either the moderator of the forum/section or a trusted member works alongside a moderator in creating it. This is easily stopped by using the edit or quick edit link found at the lower right-hand corner of your post, which can be found alongside the quote, delete (del), and report links. Most of the time, I'll simply merge the two posts together, but if it becomes a constant problem, I'll probably have a word with you about it and ask you to stop.