User Account & General Rules

We take pride in running a polite and respectful Lounge, basking in the upper echelon of the gene pool.

USER ACCOUNT RULES

User Accounts are only available to those over 16 years of age.

Account names, display names, signatures, biographical information and any pictures/gravatars used will reflect the site’s polite and respectful expectations. Swearing, innuendo and disrespect are examples of unacceptable use, as are copyright violations. Please, for your own protection, NO EMAIL ADDRESSES in user account or display names or signatures, and refrain from posting biographical information. If your user name is still an email address (it’s leftover from a migration of databases years ago), email me at sb@askwoody.com and I can edit your username.

Dormant accounts are culled from time to time. If your account hasn’t logged in and you haven’t viewed any Lounge page in a while, the account may be deleted.

Registering as a user is for the purpose of contributing to the AskWoody community and its discussions. Advertising normally only occurs in the free newsletter is only with the prior explicit written approval of management (a fee may be charged for such ads), or will be taken as spam and treated as such.

Any user account not meeting the standards of the site is subject to having access and account suspended or blocked. Have a problem? Email CustomerSupport@AskWoody.com.

GENERAL RULES

Please make sure you only post relevant, contributing content. Posting anything that doesn’t contribute, or that has already been posted, is not appreciated by those reading through reams of repetition, nonsense, or irrelevance, so will be removed.

Should you wish to thank someone for their post, click the helpful Thanks button below the reply, which is open to logged-in users.

• Stay on topic
• No politics or religion
• Swearing, cursing or blasphemy are unacceptable
• Trolling, baiting, personal attacks or other disrespectful posts will not be tolerated
• Only content submitted in English will be published
• Software of dubious original or from inappropriate distributors, key-gens, or similar, are unacceptable – Yes, that includes hacked copies of Windows 7 and password crackers
• Any posting is subject to editing or trashing, at the moderators discretion (incl. where a thread has turned toxic, some good posts could be trashed in the clean-up process)

We ask that you register on the site. It ensures that you will have the best experience. If you post on the site for the first time or haven’t posted in a while, your post may be deplayed in posting. After that – unless a spam filter catches your post – your posts should be posted immediately. That’s why we recommend that you register. If however, you’d like to remain anonymous, you will note that the site asks you for a name and an email address. While you’ll get the best experience by using a real email address, you can make up one. All the input box needs is an email address format of something@domain.com. Realize that all such posts from unregistered users are reviewed (moderated) by unpaid, overworked and underappreciated volunteers, and it may take a long time for an anonymous post to appear. Anonymous posts of marginal interest and repeated anonymous posts will be deleted, without warning, never to be seen again.

Registered users can create new Topics, and I encourage you to start a new Topic when you can’t find an answer with a site search. If you want to get help, make the title descriptive (“Windows won’t talk to my HoloLens”) not generic, and absolutely not ALL CAPS (“NEWBIE QUESTION”). If you don’t get an answer in, oh, three days, start a new Topic with a more compelling title. Post in the appropriate topic or forum – one forum only. If you’ve already posted a similar question on a different site, please link to it so we can avoid reinventing the wheel.

To enable assisting queries to be prioritized over moderating, please ensure you only post content that contributes to the discussion; anonymous content should also contribute, and frivolous posts don’t.

Before posting a link or question, search the site first. Chances are high it may already have been posted. Duplicate posting is not allowed; ask all related questions in one thread. If a question is not answered after 3 days, please start a new topic in the appropriate forum to ask the question, linking it to the original. Folks are busy, and reading or replying to the same thing detracts our readership and our hard-working volunteer MVPs and moderators.

Posts must respect copyrights. If you want to quote somebody, use a snippet with a link to the original source. I get burned by that at least once a day — you’ll see no sympathy here.

Remain polite and respectful to all AskWoody contributors, registered or anonymous, MVPs and moderators.

AskWoody is not here for persons or businesses to promote themselves. Advertising enquiries should be directed to CustomerSupport@AskWoody.com.

If you see disrespectful, irrelevant or spam replies or topics, logged-in users are asked to report these, using the Report button above the post, giving a brief reason to assist our moderators.

Dissenting opinions welcome – encouraged! – as long as they’re coherent.

Anyone found to not be meeting the standards of the site is subject to having access and account suspended or blocked, at my discretion.

Examples of non-contributing posts that will not be published include:
+1; emoji; LOL; same here; I agree; interesting comment, me too (all recent examples);
also: posts that are off-topic; irrelevant kvetching; asking questions already asked or answered; those who just appear to want to be the first to answer a new topic; using txtspk instead of words, etc.

If you see a gap in our Rules that we ought to address, please contact us to advise.