Thrifty Tuscany Forum

[Fred]

Our goal is to have a website that is interesting, useful and easy to use. To help achieve this, we realized we needed a forum because some information was difficult to find when it was hidden in article comments.
So now we need a few basic guidelines, to help keep the whole thing ticking over:
1. Read the sticky posts (like this one). Their stickiness is for your benefit.

2. Please Tag things! Tags are just words. If there is a word, or words, that you think perfectly describes some aspect of the topic being discussed then add it as a tag. Tagging helps others who think the same way that you do.

3. Stay on Topic. If you have something to say and it doesn't quite fit with the discussion that inspired it, start a new topic!

4. Punctuation is fun! Ok, it's not fun but it makes reading easy. Please remember to use capital letters when starting a sentence, put a single space after a comma and two spaces after a full stop. It's old school, but so are many of the readers! On the web, writing in uppercase is considered shouting please DON'T DO IT! See what I mean?

5. Avoid "text speak"; this is a public forum where non-English speaking visitors have to translate the text.

6. Do not use... foul language or make racist, sexist, homophobic or any other abusive, offensive and/or discriminatory remarks, threats/personal attacks, references to illegal websites, software or activities.

7. Comments regarding third parties should be defensible. i.e. Do not libel or slander people. You can discuss your opinion, but defend it with facts. If you can link to another website where facts can be corroborated, then please do so.

8. Enjoy.
Moderation on this forum is a mixture of human and computer intervention. Spam comments are automatically weeded out by Akismet.
Your comments may be edited or deleted if the computer doesn't like them, if a moderator takes umbrage, or if they are out of line with these rules.
Finally, a small suggestion...
The old carpenter's maxim of "measure twice, cut once" is worth considering when writing on a public forum. Your words may be around for many generations, so leave your descendants something they'll appreciate. To help with this we allow you 60 minutes to edit your words after they've been submitted, so in this case you can "cut twice" - hopefully this will help the spelling, structure and cohesion of the discussions.