FreeBSD Forums Rules

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DutchDaemon

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This section contains general FreeBSD Forums rules which should be followed by all members in order to keep the quality of these forums on a high level.

Though many of the FreeBSD development members read this forum, we cannot always guarantee that we will get to your questions in a timely fashion (or at all) if you post them only to one of the forums available here. FreeBSD mailing lists and comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.* groups are currently the mainstream place to ask your questions with a lot of subscribed users. Please note, that by addressing your questions to the appropriate forum you will reach both us and a concentrated FreeBSD audience, invariably assuring a better (or at least faster) response.

Please keep focus on the actual topic. Most of our forum members receive many hundreds of FreeBSD related messages every day, and by obeying the rules of proper use we are striving to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of the forums high. To do less would see the forums ultimately fail as an effective communications medium for the project.

Before posting to any forum, please learn about how to best use the forums, such as how to help avoid frequently-repeated discussions, by reading their contents. Searching the forum is a quick way to see if someone has had your issue and if it has been answered. Forums can be searched within the Search page of this forum.

Most of the forums are technical: they are for technical discussion. You should read the description for each forum carefully before joining or posting to one as there are firm guidelines for their use and content.

All FreeBSD forums have certain basic rules which must be adhered to by anyone using them. Failure to comply with these guidelines will result in two (2) written warnings from the FreeBSD Forum moderators (forum-moderators@FreeBSD.org), after which, on a third offense, the poster will be removed from all FreeBSD forums and filtered from further posting to them. We regret that such rules and measures are necessary at all, but today's Internet is a pretty harsh environment, it would seem, and many fail to appreciate just how fragile some of its mechanisms are.

If you have any technical problems, please contact forum-admins@FreeBSD.org and provide all the relevant information that might help us in resolving your problem. Be aware that this is not a place for requests related to moderation and these will be ignored here.

Rules of the road:
  1. The FreeBSD Forums are not an advertising billboard or a "Search Engine Optimization" (SEO) tool. If we find that you use your profile pages, home page link, visitor messages (your own, or those of other members), signatures, private messages, board messages, avatars, or forum posts to promote websites other than your own personal (i.e. non-corporate and non-commercial) homepage or weblog, your account may be banned on sight. There will be no linkdumping, no linkbuilding, and no backlinking on the FreeBSD Forums. There is a zero-tolerance policy in effect. Don't test it. Moreover, your account details will be reported to various blocklists. Note: linking to commercial FreeBSD-related content is allowed, but exclusively in the logical context of a topic.
  2. Be respectful of all users at all times and respect the forum staff. This means please use etiquette and politeness. Treat people with kindness and gentleness. Be considerate to the person asking the question. We were all a green user at one point. Yes, some users are harder to help than others, but please be respectful to all users.
  3. The FreeBSD forums aim to build and maintain a friendly and co-operative user community. As such, you agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, political, religious, threatening, sexually-orientated or otherwise divisive or combative material, or anything that may violate any applicable laws. Such posts (in this context, 'posts' refers to any part of the forums that is visible to other members, including signatures, private messages, and profiles) will be removed without any warning and attempts to introduce material of this nature can lead to an infraction or you being temporarily or permanently banned from these forums.
  4. Personal attacks and profanity (in the context of an argument) are not allowed, and that includes users and developers like. Gross breaches of netiquette, like excerpting or reposting private mail when permission to do so was not and would not be forthcoming, are frowned upon but not specifically enforced. However, there are also very few cases where such content would fit within the charter of a forum and it would therefore probably rate a warning (or ban) on that basis alone.
  5. Ongoing irrelevant chatter or flaming only detracts from the value of the forums for everyone on it and will not be tolerated. For free-form discussion on no particular topic, the Off-Topic forum is freely available and should be used instead.
  6. If you have found a post that you feel is inappropriate or that violates the forum rules, please use the report post function (button). Do not attempt to moderate discussions or correct other users yourself. Also please do not post "spam reported" messages into the affected threads as these do not add any information value neither they will speed the removal of affected posts and they only add another "spammy" tone.
  7. We will not allow technical/support questions about any operating system other than FreeBSD anywhere on this forum. That includes the Off-Topic forum. Always ask technical/support questions about other operating systems on the forums or mailing lists associated with those operating systems.
  8. When in doubt about what forum to post a question to, post it to the General forum. The topic of any posting should adhere to the basics of the forum it is posted to, e.g. if the forum is about technical issues then your posting should contain technical discussion.
  9. We currently do not have enough resources to moderate international discussions, thus we support only English topics. Please do not use any other language, as this will result in the topic deletion/lockdown. This rule will probably change in the future, however until then please respect it.
  10. No posting should be made to more than one forum. Ever. For most forums, there is already a great deal of member overlap and except for the most esoteric mixes, there really is no reason to post to more than one forum at a time.
  11. Users are allowed to have only one active account. If you feel you have justification for requiring a new account, please contact an administrator to discuss your situation. Users who have multiple accounts without approval of an administrator may be subjected to infractions or bans without notice.
  12. If you consider some post to be useful and you would like to express your appreciation, please do not post "Thank you"-like messages. Instead use the 'Thanks' button.
 
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