Rules and guidelines

[toprob]

You may have noticed a new link on the top menu here. (After New Zealand Flightsim Forums | NZFF Portal)
This is designed as a handy reference if you are unsure how you should behave when taking part in the forum, plus some tips on how to post.
These came as a result of the admin looking at ways to streamline the forum for low-bandwidth users, plus how to overcome some of the more messy posting habits. In the end, however, we decided that low-bandwidth users (dial-up and limited bandwidth broadband) already have a good set of tools to help them. In particular:

You can click the 'Lo-Fi Version' button on most pages. This reduces the forum layout to text only, although you will still get images. However you can turn off images (and/or signatures) using My Controls: Options: Board Settings. This would make the ultimate low-bandwidth forum.
You can also 'subscribe' to all the forums, or just the ones you are interested in, and select a delivery method which works for you. New posts can be emailed to you, so that you know what to keep an eye on, or a daily digest might be more useful.

There are also some guidelines for posting images to forums which are not mainly designed for images. Whereas the Screenshots and Real World Aviation forums can expect to have a lot of images, the others need some care. However in the end we decided that images -- whether screenshots or photos -- are an important part of flightsim, so we won't 'police' these guidelines.

The rules and guidelines are based on normal online forum etiquette, and don't represent a change to the way the forum will be moderated. The NZFF forum is a friendly and fun place to visit, which is part of its success, but some written rules and guidelines would be useful to prevent new users breaching etiquette through not knowing the normal rules of forum behaviour.

-Robin