Everyone, please remember that this board corresponds to a real-life activity. It is not an Internet entertainment site existing in a vaccuum. If you are disrespectful to someone, you will likely have to see them in real life. Think before you post and we'll all be better off.
RULE A NUMBER ONE THAT APPLIES TO EVERYBODY: Do not discuss specific questions and answers from tournaments that will be running at other sites at later dates.
College section: No illegal content or stupid anonymous troll accounts. Anything else goes though you of course put your own reputation on the line. Administrators reserve the right to post the IP address of any stupid posts.
High school and off topic sections:
1) Language must be appropriate for a high school academic setting. This applies not only to words that are uncouth in themselves, but to the overall tone of any address to specific people.
2) The use of something approximating proper English is required. This means appropriate capitalization, "you" instead of "u", and other things that you might expect of people engaged in an activity associated with intellectual knowledge.
3) Threads should be kept on topic. If you want to discuss a tangential issue, feel free to start a new thread. If you want to discuss a moderation decision, use e-mail.
4) Posting other people's phone numbers, e-mail addresses that the user has not chosen to put in his or her profile or posts, etc, is not allowed.
5) Discussions need to follow basic rules of logic and rhetoric. In particular, the "you would like Tournament X more if you won it" and "you are only disagreeing with me because you have a bias against the region I'm from" cards are not in the deck of available arguments here.
6) Deriding people for enjoying quizbowl or intellectual activities is not permitted.
7) Basic civility is required.
8) The rule on calling people out on behavior at high school tournaments is: don't do it before talking to your coach, don't do it before talking to the TD, don't do it before attempting to resolve the situation elsewhere, don't do it from a new, unfamiliar, or anonymous account, don't do it if you do not have a long record of worthwile posts about more germane topics, and don't do it unless you are earnestly trying to start a discussion about how to deal with similar behavior in the future. In summary, calling people out for dramatic purposes is not permitted.
Long website addresses
Do not post long URLs that make the thread impossible to read. Either use a site like tinyurl.com or, better yet, use the url tags to hide your address behind text. Patrick King provides a tutorial on how to do this:
Moderators will change any URLs not following these rules to put them in compliance.Also, if you need a long URL, use the special url tag so that the URL itself is not displayed, but rather a shorter piece of text that can describe it. (You need to deselect the 'Disable BBCode in this post' before you do that)
The syntax is as such:Don't place a space between url and the equal sign or the equal sign and your address.Code: Select all
[url=___________]text[/url]
And make sure you remember the close tag so that your link doesn't trail on forever!
Example:translates to:Code: Select all
[url=http://www.hsquizbowl.org/phpBB2/]World of HS Quizbowl Bulletin Board[/url]
World of HS Quizbowl Bulletin Board
Notice that when someone clicks your link, they actually know what it means.
E-mail addresses and spam
There are NO active email addresses at the hsquizbowl.org domain. Any e-mail you receive from "[email protected]", "[email protected]", or any other such address is FAKE and should be deleted on sight.
For spam protection, any accounts associated with Russian or French IPs or e-mail addresses will be deleted on sight. If you are a legitimate quizbowl participant who plans on posting from Russia or France, let me know ahead of time.
Signatures
Will work again when the next version of phpBB comes out. Signatures reenabled 2/7/2007
Editing
Will remain disabled for the time being. Contact a board staffer if you need to fix something important. Editing reenabled 1/9/2007
Tournament announcements
Use this standard format for the title of a thread announcing a tournament of any level:
ANNOUNCEMENT: Quiz Bowl Tournament (00/00/00) at Name of Host (City, State)
Use the SAME thread to post updates and results from your event instead of starting a new thread. If your tournament is moved or cancelled, you should definitely post to that effect. Board staff will change the thread title from ANNOUNCEMENT to RESULTS, DATE CHANGE, or CANCELLED as appropriate.
Tournament attendees should follow the directions posted in the announcement regarding how to register. What this means is: if the announcement says to email a particular person in order to sign up for a tournament, then do so, don't just post in the thread and expect them to accomodate you.
Board staff
The board staffers and their handles here are:
Chief Administrator:
Fred Morlan/leftsaidfred
Administrators:
Evan Silberman/BuzzerZen
Mike Sorice/ImmaculateDeception
Matt Weiner/Matt Weiner
Moderators:
Emil Thomas Chuck/E.T. Chuck
Pat Freeburn/Dolemite
Trygve Meade/millionwaves
Tricia Southard/sabine01