Read Me --> Good Stuff to Know About This Forum

[DSieve]

Moderation Notes

The ultimate goal of the moderating team is to foster a friendly, open atmosphere where members of the forum can ask questions, debate and discuss issues as adults. This includes people who we may not like or who we may disagree with!

I would like for everyone to consider the forums as a home and forum members as invited guests to a dinner party. Moderators are co-hosts that will be gracious to our guests while at the same time cleaning up after them if they make a mess. Troublemakers who are spoiling the party might be asked to leave if they can't control themselves. Please, try to not be an asshole.


Posting Images and Links

The post and image restrictions described below are not active at the moment... they will be after the forum achieves a critical mass/nucleus of community

New members are not allowed to post images or links until they have met a certain threshold of community participation. Unfortunately, there are hooligans, trolls, spammers and polluting the internet and making more busy work for site admins. This modest restriction helps discourage them from polluting this forum.


Best Forum Threads

I've added a page to the site listing the best forum threads from the Political Debate, Political Polls and Economic Roundtable forum categories sorted by their thread rating.

This forum lets you vote a rating for every thread. When viewing a thread, right above the first post on the page, there is a drop down menu called "Rate Thread". All DSieve members (this means you) can rate forum threads. You can only vote one time per thread and you can change your vote/rating for any thread at any time.

I will be going through the forums and rating threads that I think deserve more attention than run of the mill posts. I encourage you all to do the same.

I'd suggest only rating threads 3 stars or better as you see fit (or 1 star if it is ). Not every thread needs to be rated either. Just the ones that you find particularly useful, helpful or amusing (or ).

The best forum threads page should sort threads with equal ratings according to the ones with more votes, so a thread with 5 stars and 3 votes appears before one with 5 stars and 1 vote.

Hopefully, this will help those new to the site to find the best, most interesting and helpful discussions easily. Let me know what you think.


Custom BB Codes - [yt], [lf], [sup]

I've added custom BB codes to this forum for embedding YouTube videos, highlighting text (quotes for example) that are logical fallacies and superscripting text (for reference notations for example). The highlighting can obviously be used for highlighting text for any purpose. For more information on using these codes, see the BB Code Help page.


Different Colored Usernames

You may have noticed that some usernames are displayed in different colors on the forums (it's easy to see if you look at the memberlist).

I've color coded various user groups for now:

Admins = Bold, green
Super Moderators = Bold, red
Moderators = Bold, Blue
Supporters* = Bold, Yellow
Contributors = Yellow
Registered Members = Gray

All registered members are automatically promoted to Contributors when they have posted 50 messages (the system checks for this hourly, so don't fret if your username color doesn't change immediately upon your 50th post). Contributors are allowed to use signatures and possibly a few other forum features that I'm not remembering off the top of my head.

I hope these changes make the forums a little bit more colorful and helpful for everyone. Please post any comments or suggestions you may have on this. I'm always interested in improving the forum in line with what the members would like.


Paid Subscriptions

I added an option for members to help support DSieve by donating $10 per year. There is now a "paid subscriptions" option in your user control panel under Miscellaneous in the left side menu.

Donors belong to the Supporters user group (see above) and get to create their own custom title (the phrase that appears underneath the username on all posts), get twice as much storage for private messages, can use images in signatures and get a DSieve logo icon underneath their username on all posts.

Please note that donations do not exempt members from adhering to the forum rules. Donations are non-refundable.

What Did I Miss?

I'm sure there are other topics I forgot to mention. Feel free to ask questions. Make yourself at home here and enjoy the forums!

[DSieve]

Profile News

I added a new (optional) field to the member profile where you can specify a topic/keyword(s) and the forum will pull a Yahoo! news feed on it for you. You can then see the latest news stories on your topic of interest from the DSieve home page. Try it out - edit your profile to add your topic.