Topic: General Topics

Bonanzle Forum & General Interaction Guidelines

The Bonanzle forums (we use "forums" collectively here to also include booth chat and email) are a place users visit to get answers to questions, share common interests, or just unwind amongst friends. Bonanzle's forums receive many thousands of posts per day, and have a gained reputation amongst new users as some of the friendliest forums online. We are proud of this reputation, as it is a reflection of the benevolent community we've worked hard to bring aboard.

But let's be honest: this is the Internet, folks, and keeping forums harmonious when you mix together thousands of people with completely disparate views and life styles is anything but inevitable. Bonanzle has, over time, developed a collection of systems that work together to keep our forums a place free of drama, bullying, negative attitudes, and general dreariness. When forum topics or posts fall into one of the aforementioned categories, it may be recategorized, deleted, or locked (we'll refer to these collectively as "being flagged"). If the poster of the offending message has shown a negative pattern of behavior, they may have their forum priviledges revoked temporarily or permanently.

You don't want to miss out on the action around these parts, do ya? Well pull up a seat and take a listen, youngster. I think we could teach you something about what is going to get your posts or topics flagged...

Direct Paths to Being Flagged

Here's some definite no-no's:

• Attacking or bullying any user in any way for any reason. It's impossible to expect everyone to get along with everyone else, but regardless of your feeling toward another user, civility is a guarantee that every Bonanzle user is entitled to and will receive.
• Expressing negative viewpoints in a non-constructive manner. This applies to negative viewpoints about Bonanzle, or negative viewpoints about life in general. There is more than enough unrequited bad news to go around, just check your local newspaper. If what you feel is unrequited dreariness, the Bonanzle forums are not a good place to explore the depths of your feelings. Keeping subject matter upbeat is essential to making buyers feel positively when they arrive at Bonanzle. More positive feelings for buyers means more sales for sellers, and by golly, that's what picks up everybody's mood.
• Invoking drama. There are one thousand and one beginnings to a drama. This is great news for soap opera writers, but bad news for marketplace forums. Rule of thumb: if it is an emotional topic that people could even conceivably disagree about, it's quite possibly destined to become a drama.
• Other conduct unbecoming a good community member: expressing polictical or religious viewpoints, asking for donations, using foul language, engaging in threads of adult nature (drugs, drinking, etc.), threatening to talk to lawyers or file lawsuits, stalking, booth chat hijacking, starting topics about topics that have been reclassified, spam.

Warning Signs that You May be Flagged

It's not 100% guaranteed that you are in the wrong, but preliminary indications are not good...

• EXPRESSING YOUR FEELINGS IN ALL CAPS. It's hard to tell if you're feeling emotional/dramatic, or if you're just lazy. We won't hold the latter against you, but topics whose titles or posts are FILLED WITH CAPS are at a higher risk of being dramatic.
• You feel vindicated. You know that satisfying feeling you get when you've finally gotten something off your chest? That's the feeling when you have released a (usually negative) emotion upon a person or persons. Unless you are one of those rare talents that takes satisfaction in empathizing with the plight of another in the process of solving a mutual problem, your post is probably well on its way to a dreary Bonanzle oblivion.

About Your Ability to Blab Freely...

Bonanzle was founded upon the idea of empowering its users and living without rules. These are ideals that we take very seriously, and it is only in cases of extreme necessity that we make rules. Because forums are the backbone of Bonanzle, and they provide to prospective users their truest glimpse into the nature of our community, this isn't a situation where allowing drama or negativity to run rampant is worth the cost of having new users feel upset, or even leave.

To quote the illustrious BoingBoing.com,
"[We are] steadfast in support of your freedom of speech. We believe that you, O Reader, should be able to have (or refuse to have) anything you want on your own website, as long as it doesn't deprive others of their rights. Yay, freedom of speech!"

"By that same token, freedom of speech also means that the people who write and edit [Boing Boing have the right to have (or refuse to have) anything they want on their own website. If one of the things they don't want is a comment that you have posted, they aren't depriving you of your freedom of speech. You're free to put that comment up on your own webpage."

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