Play nice and friendly. Follow these rules and you'll fit in nicely here. Ignore these rules and you may have a very short visit to the Lurker Lounge forums, followed by a swift boot out the door. Note that these rules may change at any time and it is the responsibility of the poster to abide by those changes.
Last updated: 15 July 2002

Keep on topic.
A common sense rule; simply put your posts in the right place. Off-topic posts having nothing to do with covered games on the Lurker Lounge belong in the Lounge forum. General posts related to a game belong in that game's general discussion forum. If you screw up and accidentally post something in the wrong forum, no big deal; the admins will move it over. Continually posting to the wrong forum(s) over and over again will likely leave you wondering why you can't post at all anymore.

No cheating allowed.
If you cheat in multiplayer games, you are not welcome to read or post at the Lurker Lounge. We ask you to respect the administrators' and posters' feelings on this matter and go to another site with less stringent rules against cheaters. However, if you choose not to respect our wishes, don't be surprised when you are met with extreme hostility from gamers who like to play games the way they are meant to be played. If you are ever caught admitting to cheating, you will be banned on sight.

Prevent duplicate postings.
In other words, before you go and post about a topic, make sure that the topic hasn't already been discussed within the last few days' worth of postings. The Lounge forum also has a search engine if you're asking a rather rare or esoteric question. That's what the archives are for in the technical or strategy forums - to allow for searches for old material. After you've looked around and could not find anything related to your question/topic, fire away!

Avoid hotbutton issues.
Basically put, there are some issues and topics that are useless to debate on an Internet forum. You'll never be able to change people's minds on hotbutton political issues such as abortion or gun control. Yet, various people always try to do just that on every forum out there. Here's the deal: many posters try to make a name for themselves by starting a thread on just such an issue just so they can have a special thrill over watching a hundred posts spring up from their inciting topic. They'll then feed the conversation along by constantly nibbling at other posters' arguments. Once the topic has dried up, they'll move on to the next one, and keep doing it for weeks, causing gargantuan threads over and over. This is known as trolling, and the moderators WILL put a stop to you if they catch you in the act.

Keep your pictures small.
For the sake of the dial-up modem users out there, please limit the maximum size of your pictures used in signatures and avatars to 30 kilobytes. Understandably, if you're posting a game screenshot it could be large; however, when you put large pictures in your signature you are continually slowing down everyone who loads threads with your posts in them.

Respond to the proper post.
This forum uses fully threaded discussions, unlike those of other popular forum software such as ubb. So, when you reply to a post, be sure to reply to the correct one - otherwise you'll be confusing a lot of readers.

Take flame wars to email.
Flame wars are not welcome here. Address the topic, not the person. What that means is when you're debating a topic, debate the topic. Adding personal insults into your posts nullifies your argument and may result in your post getting wiped by a moderator. There's an old Internet adage which simply states that the first person to resort to personal attacks in an online argument is the loser. Don't be one. When flaming gets out of control, you will be asked to take your tiff to email. There's no reason to air your fight in public, and we don't want to see it.

The forum is not the chatroom.
It happens from time to time - two to three posters are up late at night and just post away on a forum thread, with new posts every minute as they go back and forth. If you find yourself doing this, try the Chat room instead please.

Keep it clean.
It's PG-13 here. Computer games, even those rated "mature" by the ESRB, will have young kids playing them. There's no need to have swear words in your posts - they aren't condusive to intelligent debate or strategy discussion anyhow. We run a clean site and we hope that the posters will respect that.

The administrators are not responsible for bad content posted by users.
Well, duh. But we'd like to officially state that here. If your post is edited by an administrator or moderator, the entire post will have to be removed. This is so that posters don't have to worry about admins editing in specific lines of someone's post and effectively "changing" what they were saying.

Once your post is censored, do not post it again.
When an administrator or moderator edits (removes) your post, they will leave a short reason of why it was edited. Editing that post to put your original post back or to argue with the moderator will result in a ban from the Lurker Lounge Forum.

Follow common, known Internet posting etiquette.
Frankly, we could write a thousand rules about basic common sense internet etiquette, such as "don't type in all caps." Instead of that, we'll just say that you should use your brain and follow the basic rules of Internet posting. If you're not very familiar with basic etiquette or are new to the Internet, we recommend that you simply read the forum for a while before making your first post. That's always a good rule of thumb before you dive into any online community, yet it's rarely followed. The Lounge posters have our own small subculture like all good fansites, and it won't take long to pick up on the nuances. Enjoy your stay here!