Forum Rules

[deanwebb]

Forum Rules

1) No racial, sexual, religious or any other kind of intolerance or discrimination will be tolerated.

2) No flame postings.

3) Keep threads on topic.

4) No posting links to commercial websites. This one is up to the administrator and moderators discretion. Obviously, posting to cisco.com or other on-topic, helpful sites is allowed.

5) No private message SPAM.

6) No double posting. Pick a forum and post to it. If your thread is in the incorrect forum, the admin or moderators will move it for you.

7) Do not post discussions or links regarding any illegal activity including pirated software.

8) The administrator reserves the right to terminate a user's privileges at any time with no explanation.

These are not necessarily "rules", but just good forum etiquette.

1) Before asking a question, consider using the search tool to see if it has been asked and perhaps answered already. If there was no answer to the first time, feel free to bump it.

2) Do not expect us to do work for you. If you want somebody to write up a config for your box, this probably isn't the place to ask.

3) Do not expect us to give you the answers to your homework. The point of homework is to get practice at certain topics, asking somebody else to do it for you doesn't help a bit. We will be much more willing to help if you would ask us for guidance/corrections to your homework and keep it to fairly specific questions.

4) Promote open discussion of topics. Forums should be places where free exchange of knowledge and experience occurs on a regular basis. If you have a question, no matter how easy or difficult, please feel free to ask it! We love to talk about this sort of thing and sincerely hope that we can help you in the process.

5) Don't use annoying or uninformative titles. "OMG PLEAZ HELP MY INTARWEBZ IS BROKEN" or "Pleeeeaeaaaase help noob question" for example. Titles like those do nothing but annoy, they hold little or no information pertaining to the post itself. As such, try to keep words like "please" and "help" out of your titles. Simply stating your problem in the title is quite sufficient. Furthermore, I do my best to remove annoyances from titles when I run into them, but it makes my job easier when people don't use them to begin with. All-caps definitely doesn't help either.

6) Urgency is entirely your problem. We understand that many issues in the IT industry can be considered "urgent" by many, however, a forum is not the place for that. If you're seeking urgent help, cut a SEV1 ticket with your vendor. While a subject indicating that the topic is urgent may sound like it'll evoke a response, really all it does is annoy people and make them inclined not to help. Remember that we're not getting paid to be here, we help because we want to.

7) Don't post the same thread in more than one forum. All this does is piss off the mods (and most other users). The users on this forum tend to look at all the forums equally (within reason), so it's not like you're reaching out to more users by posting twice. Double-posts will be locked or deleted.

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Many thanks to Steve and Ibarrere from the original network-forum.com for composing these rules. They were good there, they are good here.

[deanwebb]

Had a few concerns raised about URLs in signatures, so I've turned those off. Blogs are linkable in posts and we can set things here to import blog entries from members' blogs. URLs that are of a "linkback" nature to businesses or vendors are not acceptable. "Linkbacks" are links that are posted either without context, out of context with the current thread, or in a thread created specifically to host the link, and it is of an advertising or "social media awareness" nature.

[deanwebb]

Removed an avatar today that was NSFW. Folks, don't use avatars that are NSFW. If you don't know what's NSFW, you have 2 tries to figure it out before you're banned.

Also, just thought I'd mention even though it's not an issue right now, but it's good to be reminded about: quite a few members here have security clearances. Please don't post anything that would jeopardize those clearances, such as discussions of how to commit crimes, find illegal materials, things like that. We're doing good so far, so consider reading this post as your annual training on the subject.