Heres the cracked rules, fun bunch eh?
The PWoT Forum Ban Policy and other useful information:
We ban people for...
* Posting porn or other offensive pictures without putting a warning in the title of the post that it's porn or an offensive picture. If you do post a NSFW (not safe for work) picture, make sure it's in link form instead of the actual picture. Posting the actual NSFW picture gets you banned on the spot.
* "Bumping" threads by posting an empty post just to make the thread rise back to the top of the page.
* "Spamming" or posting too many meaningless posts in too short of a time. Don't post every little thing that pops into your head. If every member did that, the forums would be buried under it all. Don't ever post just to say "heh" or "lol!" or "that's funny." This isn't one of those forums.
* Being an asshole. If you get into a "flame war" with somebody you keep it to ONE THREAD. If you start following somebody from thread to thread to continue your catfight, I'll ban you.
Other things:
Keep signature graphics to a reasonable size. No huge animations, keep everything under 100K in size.
The "We Saved Hitler's Brain" area is for serious debate and it has its own set of rules. It is HEAVILY moderated.
Read around a bit before you post.
This is an odd place and some of the regulars have been around since the Summer of 2000 (this forum pre-dates Cracked.com, the sites merged in the fall of 2007). So there are lots of in-jokes and that sort of thing so if you try to jump right in and start new threads, it will make everyone sad. Try responding to someone else's thread first, rather than starting your own.
Do NOT, under any circumstances, make a "hello" post or thread.
On a slow day 10 people may join the forums, on a busy day it may be 100. It's not a special occasion when somebody joins. So when you start a "hi everybody I'm new here!" thread it's like you think you're the Queen of Sheba or something.
Try to type in actual sentences with punctuation.
Or at least enough that it can be read. Don't use AOL or l33t speak or smilies. Keep the lols and pwneds and >_< out. This is one of those boards where we type everything out.
Do a search before starting a thread to make sure an existing one doesn't already cover the topic.
If you're starting a thread to tell us all about your new kitty and post adorable pictures, you're probably safe to go ahead and start a thread about that without searching first. It's highly unlikely that someone else started a thread about your little Mr. Flufflesworth before you were able to yourself. But if you're posting about a cool video or website you found, a tv show, movie, band, video game, or anything of that nature, you should use the forum's search function first to see if someone has already started a thread about it. Redundant threads will usually be noticed and end up locked by one of the moderators. Also, you will look dumb.
Even if you're posting about an old movie, we would actually prefer you resurrect an old thread than make a new one. As long as you have something to add, there's nothing wrong with bringing back old threads.
On the subject of "karma"...
You've probably noticed over to the left of your posts you have a Karma score. Once you've been around a bit you'll have the ability to "applaud" or "smite" a post, according to whether or not you liked it. An applaud adds a point to their karma, a smite takes one away.
Do not post about your karma in an effort to manipulate it. That's not the point.
On the subject of spoilers:
If you're posting the ending or some other "spoiler" information in a thread, you need to take care to warn people. It's common courtesy. Now, it's not good enough to just write,
SPOILERS
and then skip only one line to begin writing out your spoilers. People are still going to see it because it's right there. So you want to write SPOILER and then skip down at least ten lines so there's some blank space.
Or, even better, you can make your spoilers invisible by adding
Code:
before the text, and
Code:
after it. There's more on that below.
Thanks. Welcome aboard. Below Nav has written up some advanced tips about how to format posts and stuff like that.
