General Forum Guidelines
The Mud-Club forums are aimed at maintaining a family-friendly and light hearted area for our members to seek out information, chat and share light hearted banter.
To achieve this, a certain amount of moderation of discussions is sometimes required. The moderators and administrators of the site try to keep this intervention at a minimum, but in order to maintain the ethos of the site it is necessary.
Whilst we encourage a free and frank discussion in all the topics on the forum, a few basic guidelines are in place to maintain the friendly atmosphere which exists in the club.
Swearing
As a family club, we know that people of all ages use our website and as a result no bad language will be tolerated on the forum. The forum has an automated bad-words filter which will replace any swearwords it finds. Deliberate attempts to get round this filter may result in your entire post being removed. Action will be taken against repeat offenders.
Offensive Content
There are plenty of places you can post adult humour and risque content on the internet... Mud-Club is not one of them ! Any post which is considered offensive or abusive may be removed or edited at the moderators' discretion. Where this happens, the moderator will normally contact you to explain the situation. If a member continually ignores the actions of a moderator, steps may be taken to prevent them from posting messages.
Personal Abuse
Mud-club is not the place to start personal attacks on other users, just because you don't agree with their style of posting or their point of view.
If you have a specific complaint about a post which breaks the rules, click on the 'Report to Moderator' link at the bottom of the post, and a moderator will deal with it.
If you happen to have taken a disliking to a particular user who happens to see things differently to yourself, the best thing you can do is simply ignore them. The moderating team will not tolerate any form of personal attack or bullying through the club site.
Commercial Activities
Mud-Club does not exist to provide free advertising for anyone who feels like it, and as such limitations exist on the posting of commercial information.
Genuine recommendations from members for companies, products or services are allowed. Threads started deliberately for the purpose of creating 'false' recommendations will be removed. Decisions about commercial content are made at the discretion of the moderating team and are final.
Any commercial information should be posted in the 'Releases' section of the forum. This is the only part of the site where commercial information is allowed. Members who appear to be conducting commercial activities will be asked to stop, or may have their membership revoked.
Sales of copyright-protected material and illegal copies of any sort are prohibited.
Posting
When posting, please be careful to post your message in the relevant area of the forum. Posts may be moved by the moderators if they consider it appropriate, so if a post has 'vanished', please check other sections of the forums.
When attaching files or images to posts, please ensure that they are of a suitable size. We recommend that image files are resized to be less than 600 pixels wide, and less than 500 pixels high. The overall file size of attachments is limited to avoid problems for members using dial-up connections.
Location
In each member profile, there is a space for your location. Filling this in will help other members recognise that you may be a 'neighbour' and this can help them decide if they should contact you. If you post asking for assistance, or in the sales / wants sections, your location can be very useful.
A few notes about the moderating team.
The moderators and administrators of this website are volunteers. They give up their free time to provide a community where like-minded people can share information and discuss ideas. Without their hard work, the website would not exist... Please remember this !
When moderation does occur please respect that the reasoning for this is most likely to be within the goals of keeping the forums, and the club "fun, friendly and free" and that the moderation team are unpaid and human.
Moderators may edit posts, lock threads, or if the issue is sufficiently contentious they may even remove threads from public view to protect the interests of the club, or to protect the club itself. They undertake their task because they believe in the club and not because they want abuse.
Should any member feel that matters have gotten out of hand at any time we would politely request that they contact one of the forum administrators who will attempt to resolve the matter.
If this action is to call an end to the discussion and lock the thread, this will be done because the Administrators believe that the matter is unlikely to be resolved with further discussion. It is not a signal that the Administrators believe in one opinion or the other. "Follow up" threads which seek to deliberately re-ignite an argument will be locked or removed. In these cases all involved parties should recognise that their respective points have been raised and that the matter should be dropped.
If you have any questions, queries or concerns about the above guidelines then please feel free to contact one of the forum administrators who will attempt to address your concerns.
