Frequently Asked Questions
Discussions
1. What does ''bump'' mean?
2. What is a ''troll''?
3. What is your policy on giving real names?
4. Why did my post get removed?
5. Why won't you let me post a Private Message?
6. Why are some posts NOT removed that are obviously inappropriate?
General Questions
7. Do you sell or rent my information to other companies?
8. What identifying information do you collect on your visitors?
9. Why don't you require people to give their real names when creating an account?
10. When I try to log in it goes through all right, but the top still says "Welcome, Guest." Why won't it log me in?
Private Messages
11. Someone sent a Private Message to me that was rude or threatening. What can you do about it?
12. Someone sent a Private Message to me that was a SCAM or SPAM. What can you do about it?
1. What does ''bump'' mean?
People will often type "bump" when they want to bump a thread back to the top for more attention. It is generally considered to be in bad taste to bump a thread more than once, though. Instead, you should only bump a thread when you have more information to add to the topic.
2. What is a ''troll''?
The term "troll" is often used to refer to someone that makes a series of posts for no reason but to start an argument. It is often difficult to determine whether a post is a troll, but we generally will remove a post if that's what it appears to be.
3. What is your policy on giving real names?
Names and other identifying information of other users is generally prohibited, with a few exceptions. The forum is moderated by a real person, and while some names are blocked by default, others will usually be removed as quickly as possible.
You may use another user's name if they have publicly posted their own name in the past. Posting your real name is strongly discouraged, though.
4. Why did my post get removed?
There could be a few reasons. The most common are libel, vulgarity, and personal attacks, although we also either move or remove posts that belong in a different section of the site, like a classified ad, or that are completely off topic from the rest of the thread.
Libel
A post is removed for libel if it accuses a specific person of illegal or immoral activity. This does not apply to an anonymous username, but only to real people.
Personal Attacks
Similar to libel, a personal attack usually applies when someone is saying negative things to or about a specific person. This MAY apply to an anonymous username if the moderator feels like the person attacking knows the person being attacked in real life, but this is often an educated guess.
Vulgarity
This site is frequented by people of all ages, so we try to keep everything at a PG-13 level. Because of this, certain topics of an adult nature may be removed.
5. Why won't you let me post a Private Message?
The wide majority of the time, people only post a Private Message when they want to argue with someone. The Private Message Center was specifically designed to keep those type of arguments private, so please don't post them.
6. Why are some posts NOT removed that are obviously inappropriate?
We strongly rely on our site visitors to report any thread or post that they think is inappropriate. To do so, just log in to your regular account, then either click on the "flag" icon at the upper right corner of the thread, or follow the "Report Inappropriate Usage" link at the bottom of the thread.
Once something has been reported, one of our moderators will review it as quickly as possible. This is usually within a few hours, but may take as long as 24 hours.
If you have not reported something that's inappropriate, please do not assume that it has been seen!
7. Do you sell or rent my information to other companies?
No, we never have and never will! We do use basic demographic information to sell ad space on the site, but that's the extent to which your information will be used.
8. What identifying information do you collect on your visitors?
We do collect basic demographic information, such as what operating system and browser you use, just so that we can keep up with any web design trends. We also collect IP addresses, so that we can determine how many unique visitors we have and how many pages those visitors view.
However, it should be noted that none of this information can be used to identify you. Most IP addresses are used by more than one person (often by hundreds, or even thousands of people), so it really has no use other than to gather a ballpark number of visitors.
9. Why don't you require people to give their real names when creating an account?
To be quite honest, this would be much, much worse than anonymity! When someone gives their real name, we have no way of knowing if they are really the person that they say they are, and with several hundred new users signing up each week (regionally), it would be impossible to verify even a small percentage of them.
10. When I try to log in it goes through all right, but the top still says "Welcome, Guest." Why won't it log me in?
This is a common problem for users of Internet Explorer 7.0. This is a very buggy browser!
What happens is that it does log you in, but it stores the header of the page into the browsers cache. So instead of showing you the correct header, it shows the one from before you logged in.
The easiest way to resolve this is to update your browser to the newest version, here.
If this doesn't solve your problem, please contact us.
11. Someone sent a Private Message to me that was rude or threatening. What can you do about it?
A Private Message (or PM for short) is just like an email, and the same rules apply. PMs are not moderated, and there are no current disciplinary actions being considered for a PM.
If you do not wish to receive a PM from a specific person, we do offer an Ignore feature. Simply add the username to your Ignore list.
Communicating a threat is illegal, though, so if someone threatens you by PM, you should contact your local Sheriff's Dept.
12. Someone sent a Private Message to me that was a SCAM or SPAM. What can you do about it?
Please report scammers and spammers as quickly as possible! We will block them immediately, and your expediency will help us to block them before they can send many more PMs.
To report a scammer or spammer, contact us here