You write the forum rules

[Ken Leung]

Ok, every year we spend endless hours posting reminders, guidelines, and suggestions about how people should post in the Chief Delphi Forum. Every year we spend endless hours pointing out errors, making criticisms, arguing with each other, and rebutting those arguments whenever we see inappropriate behaviors. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. Regardless of their effectiveness, these posts seem to come back every year.

I figure, why don’t all of us participate in this ritual together? Instead of only having a few veteran members lecturing all the time, let’s come up with a set of rules as a community!

So, here is the deal. I am asking you to come up with a set of rules and guidelines regarding appropriate behavior in this forum. These could be as small as tips on thread titles, or as big as what is considered gracious professionalism in your message. You could ban all use of sarcasm, or go as far as saying it is ok to flame each other as long as there’s no profanity. Hopefully at the end of this exercise, we will have a set of rules we can all agree on… Well, that might be too good to come true, so let’s just hope that we will all learn something from this exercise.

Few things to keep in mind:

1. Team 47 leaders are the ones who make the rules in this forum. So this thread is only intended as an exercise only. Any rules we come up with will be suggestions only.

2. There is a set of forum rules already, so there is no need to rewrite any rules included here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/rules.php?

3. Keep in mind that every year there are new members coming into this forum with no experience what so ever. While we should try to teach them the right thing to do, there MUST be room for mistakes and errors.

4. Understand that people are different, and may not agree with you. This exercise is intended as a brainstorming session instead of a fault-finding debate. You may suggest changes to other’s rules, but you can only disagree with them by coming up with your own set of rules.


Also, if this thread gets out of hand, we will close it. Lets hope we never have to see that happening.

Ready, set, go!