British Expat Forum

These guidelines are intended to help you get the most out of being part of our community, and to let you know what we expect of you. We're a friendly bunch, so please have a look at the guidelines below and then join in.

To make things easier for you we've written a short version of the guidelines. Each guideline has a link to a longer explanation should you need it - just click on the links, or scroll down to read them.


Rule Number One: We do not tolerate spamming, the posting of advertisements of any kind, or flaming on these boards. Postings which contravene this basic rule will be edited or deleted without explanation and the offender is liable to be barred. In addition, you agree to pay £500 (five hundred pounds sterling) per insertion for any unauthorised advert. You have been warned.

Please do:

Register, log in, and join in

Post your message on the relevant board

Read the messages that are already there before posting

Start a new topic rather than taking an existing one off-topic

Give your topic a title that describes what it's about (not simply "Help!" or "A question")

Make your posting easy to read - proper punctuation and spelling, text formatting only where it makes your meaning clearer

Quote sensibly and sparingly

Limit any images you post to a maximum of 400 pixels wide or high, and 100KB filesize

Use PMs (if you're eligible) only if it's for something genuinely private

Keep your signature short - max three lines of plain text

Read the articles on the main site - these may also have useful information for you


Please do NOT:

Spam

Post links or web addresses (except to sites belonging to public bodies)

Ask for recommended suppliers of goods or services

Make personal attacks, or retaliate to them - take it up with a Site Admin or a Moderator instead

"Name and shame" traders - your complaint should go to trading standards offices or the courts, not here

Cross-post (repeat the same posting on several boards)

Post messages entirely in unusual formats - upper case (SHOUTING), colours, bold, italics etc. - or in txt msg style or l33t speak

Quote previous postings in their entirety

Post oversize images - use a link instead

Embed images hosted on other people's webspace without their permission

Use PMs (if you have the facility) to ask for personal assistance or for technical help

Include more than one URL in your signature (unless it's to a page on BE)

Link to get-rich-quick schemes in your signature

Use tiny URLs or other redirects when linking

Use an animation as your avatar


We'll add more guidelines as and when they arise.

Any comments? Please use the Feedback board. Please note, though, that we pay for the operation of this board and have drawn up these guidelines to protect our members' interests as we see them. We are under no obligation to change the guidelines, and we won't unless someone can come up with a damn good reason why it's in our interests to do so. ("They do things differently on other fora" does not count as a damn good reason.)

HTH

Dave

Rule No. 1: Spam

We despise Spam. This includes joining up for the sole purpose of advertising your website, product, or service. We don't tolerate Spam and Spammers get chucked off.

Our presumption is that any URL (web address) in a message is an attempt to score a free advert. We don't have the time to check out the bona fides of every URL posted.

So please don't post URLs in your messages until you've been round here long enough to make a worthwhile contribution to these boards. We're talking weeks or months here, not days or hours.

URLs in messages by new members will be deleted, whether they're working links or just typed in without a hyperlink. (Links to sites belonging to governments, inter-governmental, academic or other public bodies are OK, however. NB - "academic" does not include prospectus pages for fee-paying academic institutions; these constitute adverts.)

On a related point, messages asking for recommendations (for estate agents, websites, professional people, whatever) simply encourage spammers to try and score a free advert. So please don't post this kind of request. If you do, your request is likely to be deleted without explanation.

We also take a dim view of direct marketing approaches. Replying to a query with "PM me/Email me/Phone me for help" adds nothing to the stock of shared knowledge which these fora are intended to provide. Nor do we appreciate being used by cheapskates who won't stump up the small amount needed to advertise legitimately. The signatures/websites of these people are liable to be removed, and any further attempt to tout for business likely to lead to that person being banned.

Attempts to hoodwink the Site Admins and the bona fide users of these fora by signing up as a "sock puppet" (pretending to be a member of the general public) and posting a "recommendation" are illegal under the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive. Any such attempts may be reported to the relevant law enforcement authorities.

If you're genuinely interested in advertising with us, please read our advertising policy. We look forward to hearing from you.

Personal attacks/"flaming"/"naming and shaming"

We do not tolerate personal attacks. Postings which contravene this basic rule will be edited or deleted, and the offender is liable to be barred. You have been warned.

If you think that someone is making a personal attack (against you or anyone else) please do not respond in kind - that simply leads to a "flame war". If you've got a complaint, please take it up with the board moderator or one of the Site Admins.

Banter between friends is fine, but you need to know a person well before you can risk having a go at them. And always bear in mind that things can appear much harsher in writing than they do when said face-to-face, with the benefits of tone of voice, facial expression and body language.

On a slightly different point, please don't post "name and shame" type posts warning people to steer clear of specific suppliers of goods and services. We have no way of verifying your story, and we don't wish to run the risk of a libel suit against this site. If you've got a complaint against a trader, then please pursue it through the appropriate official or legal channels.

Registering

You cannot post unless you're registered and logged in. This is simply to prevent anonymous trolls or other mischiefmakers from causing havoc. The only details you need to provide when signing up are a username and password (so that you can log in) and an email address (so that you can receive admin messages from the board, eg password reminders).

Posting on the relevant board

A big, busy set of fora like BE's holds masses of information. To make sure that people can find what they're looking for, we need to keep all that information in some kind of order.

So please take the time to find out what belongs on which board - in most cases it should be pretty self-evident. (And if it isn't, please tell us.)

Postings on the wrong board risk getting shifted or deleted. So do cross-postings (repetitions of the same posting on multiple boards).

Starting a new topic

Golden rule: there should be only one topic on any given subject, and only one subject discussed in any given topic.

Before starting a new topic, please read the postings that are already there. Your question may have already been answered. (The search facility is very helpful for this.)

Similarly, please read the phpBB FAQs and our own FAQs before asking the "what is"/"how do I" questions which are answered there.

If you've got something genuinely new to post about, then please start a new topic about it. Please don't hijack an existing discussion and take it off-topic - including if it's one you've started yourself! - as this only buries information and irritates other users.

Please take a little time to think about the subject title you're giving your new topic, and make sure it indicates what the content's about, particularly if you're asking for help or information. A title like "Help!" only tells other people that that someone needs help, not what kind of help they need. (Some hardened forum users disregard topics titled "Help!" on principle, so be warned!)

Something like "What papers do I need to open a bank account?" or even "Opening a bank account?" conveys much more information. It also increases your chances of getting the reply you need quickly.

Quoting

Please quote sensibly and sparingly. It's a nuisance to other readers to have to scroll through the same text more than once to get to new content.

So please don't quote a previous posting in its entirety unless you really are responding to the whole thing. It should NEVER be necessary to quote from the immediately previous posting at all, unless it was a particularly long one.
(The easiest way to reply to a posting without quoting is to hit the "Post reply" button at the bottom of the topic, not the "Quote" button in the posting.)

If you're responding to one particular point within a posting which makes several points, just quote the point you're responding to. (If you're responding to several, feel free to quote them individually; it'll help others follow the thread of the discussion.) But please ensure that any editing of the original posting doesn't distort its meaning.

Ease of reading

Above all, please don't post messages, including subject headings, entirely in upper case - this is SHOUTING and it's rude.

The same goes for postings all in bold, colours and large fonts. Posting entirely in bold purple writing isn't likely to impress anyone - it just marks the writer as an ignorant Yahoo who thinks that what they've got to say is more important than anyone else's contribution.

On the other hand, posting lines and lines entirely in lower case without a break means that the reader has to struggle to try to figure out where each thought begins and ends.

Please avoid using text message (txt msg)-type abbreviated spellings. They obscure your meaning for others, and there's no need for them since the length of your posting isn't subject to any limit. The same goes for l33t Speak; it's annoying for others to have cryptic messages scattered over the boards.

Sensible use of punctuation helps make your meaning clear for other readers. We're not the grammar police and don't intend to start chucking people off for using a semicolon instead of a colon. But please do use the occasional full stop (followed by a capital letter) and comma to split your thoughts into meaningful chunks.

Text formatting can be very useful where it adds something to the meaning of your posting - but please use it sparingly. Less is more!

Images

Please don't post large images in messages. There are two main reasons for this:

- Slow loading. Many of our readers are in developing countries and don't have broadband. Large images are a nightmare to download on dial-up connections;

- Page distortion. Our web stats show that about half of our readers still use 800x600 screen resolution. Large images make the page spill over and force people to scroll from left to right.

As a general guideline, anything more than 400 pixels tall or wide, or bigger than 100KB, is starting to push the limits. (Please see Dave's posting at the top of the Chinwags board for more info.)

If you want to show people a large image, please consider including links to images in your postings, rather than embedding the image - particularly if they're larger than the guideline size of 100KB or 400 pixel maximum width or height.
(There are quite a few sites around that offer free image hosting - we recommend PhotoBox.)

Please don't embed images hosted on other people's webspace unless you have their permission - they have to pay for the use of the bandwidth, so you're effectively stealing from them. (A link to the other person's website is OK, though.)

Private messages (PMs)

The PM facility is a privilege we grant to people who are established users, ie who've been frequent contributors to the fora for a reasonable length of time. (This also safeguards our members from people who sign up just to spam other members using the PM facility. For the same reason, we don't disclose the criteria on which the granting of the PM facility is based.)

PMs are fine in their place, which is for private and personal messages that you don't want others to see and that others would have no legitimate interest in anyway. But they're an add-on to the fora, not their primary purpose.

Please avoid using PMs unless it really is something private and personal that doesn't belong on a public board. ("Welcome" messages are NOT private and personal. And new members don't have access to the PM service anyway.)

Above all, please don't PM Site Admins, moderators or anyone else to ask a general question, eg about property or how to go about planning your move. For one thing, Site Admins/Mods may not know the answer anyway. More importantly, the idea of these boards is to share information that's likely to be of use to other users. So questions of this kind belong on the boards.

Also, please don't PM Site Admins/Mods with a "what is..."/"how do I..." question. Check the FAQ first, and if it isn't answered there then post there and ask your question. With luck someone will be able to help.

Signatures ("sigs")

Sigs are a nice way to personalise your presence on the board. But if allowed to run wild, they become distracting and an annoyance.

So please keep your signature short in length: no more than three lines of plain text (ie unformatted - no bold or coloured text). The three lines include any blank lines - otherwise signatures become longer than some postings.

We're happy to allow one personal URL. (You're more than welcome to include a second link if - and only if - it's to a site operated by British Expat Ltd.)

Please don't link to any get-rich-quick schemes or any other offensive or undesirable rubbish. We'll just delete it and disable your ability to include a signature in your postings.

Avatars

Like sigs, avatars are a great way of personalising your profile and your posts. But animations are a distraction and can rapidly become an annoyance - so no animated avatars, please.

The main site

If you're a newcomer and came direct to the forum, you may not be aware that we also have a whole online magazine full of articles, facilities, information and games, with well over a thousand web pages.

Our articles on living in, or visiting, individual countries are a major part of the site - you may find that we've already got some useful info on the country you're interested in. We also have a growing range of tools for the traveller which you may find helpful.

To find out more about what's on offer, just click on our mascot in the corner and you'll be taken to our home page.

Linking

We've already discussed what links are acceptable above. This is about how to post an acceptable link in an acceptable way.

The fundamental rule is: people should be able to tell exactly where a link is taking them, either by the link's anchor text (the visible text that you click on) or by hovering on the link.

If you're posting a permitted link, please don't use a tinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, t.co or other similar redirection service. They may be desirable on Facebook or Twitter where space is at a premium, but not on a forum. People shouldn't have to feel that clicking is taking them on a magical mystery tour. And hard-pressed site admins and mods don't want to have to visit a site to verify that it's actually within the guidelines.

If you're concerned that your link is overly long, then we encourage you to use an embedded link (a couple of words of text that you make clickable). We explain how to do that here:
BE Forum FAQ: How to shorten long links to other webpages

As you see, a few words of explanatory text are much easier to understand, more convenient, and more reassuring for your potential reader, than something like http://britishexpat.com/expatforum/general/viewtopic.php?t=4115 (which goes to exactly the same destination as the embedded link above).

But again, please don't use redirects of any kind - and please make the text you use readily understandable.