Welcome to Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share (MPSIMS). As the description reads on the main page, this is the forum for discussions ranging from frivolous chatter to deep thoughts; from harmless diversions to life-changing announcements.
Now that The Game Room has opened and the game threads moved out of this forum, we’re taking this opportunity to consolidate and update the existing rules.
Listed below are the rules, one rule per post. We hope this format will make for easier reference. Some rules may be repeats of the overall board rules, but we’re including them simply because questions or concerns about, or violations of those rules pop up with some frequency.
While we appreciate that conversations can turn heated when it comes to controversial subjects, insults do little more than distract from the conversation and drag down the overall tone. If you’d like to vent your anger, please take it to The Pit, our forum for flaming other posters. Group insults, while permitted in most cases, will not be tolerated if they are aimed at other posters participating in the discussion.
Please do not post contact information such as (but not limited to) e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses so as to facilitate a contact campaign. This is not a comment on the merits of the campaigns themselves; the SDMB just doesn’t want to be the base for such efforts.
Even this forum—with its spectacular name—has its limits for truly pointless threads. We will be closing threads which cross that line, or exist merely for post-padding reasons. This includes any post count parties.
We understand that determining what is or isn’t pointless is a subjective process, but we reserve the right to make the final decision. We will, however, be as consistent as possible, with the caveat that as human beings with families, jobs and other distractions, we’ll probably foul up once or twice.
A lot of our Dopers tend to browse from work, public libraries or other places where risqué photos, questionable video or content with loud noises are not appropriate. While our philosophy concerning material read on or linked to from the SDMB is generally Caveat Lector (Reader Beware), and while we caution all of our readers to scrutinize the links before clicking on them, we understand that mistakes happen, links are accidentally clicked, or the description of the linked material is not accurate. So, if you want to link to content not safe for work, please be sure to follow the “two-click” rule as outlined in the Registration Agreement:
Alternately, you can post a NSFW link as long as you make it unclickable. (This entails unchecking “Automatically parse links in text” before submitting your post, or breaking up the link by inserting extra spaces between the characters.)
ETA: Another acceptable method for rendering a link SFW is to place it in a spoiler box. Because the person needs to click once to open the spoiler box and then again for the link, it meets the two-click rule.
Please make sure your thread titles are descriptive. Ambiguous titles such as “Guess What?” will be edited by a moderator to help give the readers an inkling of what the thread is about.
Since C K Dexter Haven has already stated the board’s position on copyrights over here, we’ll just steal from him. Suffice it to say that the SDMB takes copyright seriously, and tries to treat other sites, artists, writers, etc… with the same consideration we hope to receive from them.
The Chicago Reader, Inc., and its agents, including the administrators and moderators of the Straight Dope Message Board, are in no way responsible for anything associated with any real life meeting of our members. While we permit SDMB users to post announcements and other discussion of meetings and events on the Straight Dope Message Board, we don’t organize, sponsor, endorse, approve, or have any formal association with such events or any activities that may occur at them. We don’t vouch for any individual or group organizing an event. Attend at your own risk. SDMB moderators and administrators who attend events do so as private individuals and not as representatives or agents of the Chicago Reader, Inc. We encourage all attendees at these events to obey the laws of the jurisdiction in which they are held.
(No, you’re not seeing double. We’re including this disclaimer here as well as its original sticky because we feel it’s pretty important.)