Introduction - our Mission Statement

If you want a quick overview please see our About Page

When participating here what you post should aim to add something of value and in a respectful way with a view to move the conversation forward. If you keep that in mind you won’t go far wrong, and you’ll be doing your bit to help keep this place as fun and friendly as it can be

This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion

Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation.

These are not hard and fast rules. They are guidelines to aid the human judgment of our community and keep this a kind, friendly place for civilized public discourse.

Improve the Discussion

Help us make this a great place for discussion by always adding something positive to the discussion, however small. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later.

One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests.

The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said.

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond by disagreeing. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:

• Name-calling

• Ad hominem attacks

• Responding to a post’s tone instead of its actual content

• Knee-jerk contradiction

Instead, provide thoughtful insights that improve the conversation.

Your Participation Counts

The conversations we have here set the tone for every new arrival. Help us influence the future of this community by choosing to engage in discussions that make this forum an interesting place to be — and avoiding those that do not.

Discourse provides tools that enable the community to collectively identify the best (and worst) contributions: bookmarks, likes, flags, replies, edits, watching, muting and so forth. Use these tools to improve your own experience, and everyone else’s, too.

Let’s leave our community better than we found it.

If You See a Problem, Flag It

Moderators have special authority; they are responsible for this forum. But so are you. With your help, moderators can be community facilitators, not just janitors or police.

When you see bad behavior, don’t reply. Replying encourages bad behavior by acknowledging it, consumes your energy, and wastes everyone’s time. Just flag it. If enough flags accrue, action will be taken, either automatically or by moderator intervention.

In order to maintain our community, moderators reserve the right to remove any content and any user account for any reason at any time. Moderators do not preview new posts; the moderators and site operators take no responsibility for any content posted by the community.

Always Be Civil

Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness:

• Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.

• Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.

• Respect each other. Don’t harass or grief anyone, impersonate people, or expose their private information.

• Respect our forum. Don’t post spam or otherwise vandalize the forum.

These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the appearance of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of a major news site.

This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends.

Keep It Tidy

Make the effort to put things in the right place, so that we can spend more time discussing and less cleaning up. So:

• Don’t start a topic in the wrong category; please read the category definitions.

• Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics.

• Don’t post no-content replies.

• Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream.

• Don’t sign your posts — every post has your profile information attached to it.

Rather than posting “+1” or “Agreed”, use the Like button. Rather than taking an existing topic in a radically different direction, use Reply as a Linked Topic.

Using Site Features

Please only use the features provided, such as your profiles, in good faith. Please do not use them to circumvent our usual guidelines or to make statements (political or otherwise) of any kind. Features like our profiles are there for you to tell us about yourselves and while most fields are optional please ensure required fields are filled out appropriately (some of them are in place to help us combat spam/bad actors). Please also do not upload profile pictures that are inappropriate or may cause confusion.

Post Only Your Own Stuff

You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law.

Intellectual Property and Code Use

Unlike other sites we do not ask or force you to transfer ownership of your intellectual property by requiring that you to agree to some sort of ‘Creative Commons’ type licence. Instead our terms reflect the implicit behaviour you exhibit when you sign up and take part here: that you are contributing to the forum openly and freely and that we may make your content available for others so that they may use it within the context of the thread in which you contributed it. So for example if you were to post an answer or a code snippet in a thread where someone is asking a question or asking how to do something you would be doing so in the knowledge (implicitly stating by contributing to that thread) that they or anyone viewing that thread in future can use your answer or code as per the context of the thread in which you posted your contribution. By extension this also means that if you were to post about your experience of something you would more than likely simply be sharing your experience with the forum and that does not imply others may copy, modify or reproduce what you’ve said elsewhere or in their own applications or projects (other than what might be permissible as ’acceptable use’ under local/country specific laws).

Creative Commons type licences essentially mean anyone can do anything with your content and while that might be ok on a strict Q&A type site, it wouldn’t be suitable for a community oriented platform like this one where people also share personal experiences or take part in general discussions. We feel usage rights granted via implied behaviour is more appropriate - i.e by allowing you to decide which types of threads you want to contribute to based on the context of each one individually. This offers the greatest flexibility and freedom, as well as protection since collectively copyright of threads reside with the forum, meaning we can help protect you and prevent unauthorised use of what you contribute to this resource. Examples of unauthorised use include people or third parties taking content from threads you have posted and passing them off as their own, making a copy of the forum, creating a chatbot/LLM service or Q&A type site from the questions/answers you have contributed, etc. Please see our Terms of Service (in particular, the section on derivative works) for full details.

Your Accounts

While it’s always sad to see someone go, we know that sometimes this may be required. You can therefore ask for your account to be closed at any time. When closing accounts we use the forum’s built in tool for this purpose which is to ‘anonymise’ them. This removes all personal information from profiles, including email addresses and profile pictures, and replaces the username with a non-identifiable substitute which usually consists of between 2 to 4 letters and 2 to 4 digits.

If you have posted any threads or posts that are of a personal nature or identify you personally, such as your real name, website address, social media handle, photographs of yourself or details about your place of work or where you live, you may ask for these to be deleted any time before the account is anonymised (i.e while we’re still able to verify the deletion request is genuine and from the original account owner).

Powered by You

This site is operated by your friendly local staff and you, the community. If you have any further questions about how things should work here, open a new topic in the site feedback category. If there’s a critical or urgent issue that can’t be handled by a meta topic or flag, contact us via the staff page.

Terms of Service

Yes, legalese is boring, but we must protect ourselves – and by extension, you and your data – against unfriendly folks. We have a Terms of Service describing your (and our) behavior and rights related to content, privacy, and laws. To use this service, you must agree to abide by our TOS.