Forum Rules and Guidelines

We just want a nice friendly forum here for the free exchange of information and learning about all things VoIP related.

To this end, please note that we will delete any postings which are rude, defamatory or prejudiced against age, sex, race, location or cultural background.

1. SPAM - is aggressively tackled. Open discussions about VoIP Service Providers and hardware/software retailers is allowed. We draw the line at blatant self-promotion and commercial plugging. Please note this includes promotional URL's in signatures.

2. Links - this is a site about VoIP and associated topics and links to other sites should be the same. Again, blatant self-promotion is off the mark, links to good quality VoIP related sites is absolutely fine by us (including links to other forums - don't be afraid). Afilliate links are treating in the same way as self-promo. Please post the raw URL.

3. Blank posts - or those simply quoting another post and nothing else will of course be deleted. Please don't do this - it just wastes moderator time. I can tell you that posting does work - there's no need to test it

4. Phone numbers - If you want to post them, that's up to you. It doesn't matter to us if you want the whole world to know your phone number. If you start getting strange calls in the middle of the night, don't come and blame us

5. Topicality - Please keep threads on-topic. If you wish to say something which is not within the topic of a thread, create a new one. This again saves moderator time in the cleaning up exercise that inevitably follows.

6. Multiple Posts - Please do NOT repeat the same info with multiple postings in different areas of the forum. In most cases ALL instances will be removed so you will not achieve any benefit at all.

7. Market Research - We do not exist for the benefit of companies to do market research or run polls. We classify that as spam - if you need market data, it can be purchased from many of the existing collating agencies out there.

8. Calls To Action - Posts entitled "Don't buy from XYZ" are likely to be deleted for legal/anti-competitive reasons (for all we know you could just be a competitor of XYZ) but it's also important to remember that VoIP User is not a soapbox. Being negative about any company is fine within a well worded thread that invites discussion rather than a call to action.

Moderators

We're lucky that we don't have too much work to do here as generally 99% of people are respectful of the above. If your post got edited or deleted, there's probably a very good reason for it.

Here are some tips for starting a thread

1. Choose an appropriate forum. If you are a new user, browse through the forums to find the one that most closely matches the topic of your interest. Read the forum description.

2. Search before you post. Many questions have been answered before.

3. Use a descriptive title. "Problem with Sipura XYZ Phone" is much more likely to get looked at by someone that can help you resolve it than "Please help me".

4. If you need to post a very long URL, please use anchor text to keep it short. Anchor text is used like this (remove the *'s to make it work):-

[*url=http://www.voipuser.org/]Descriptive Text[/url*]

That ends up looking like this:-

Descriptive Text

5. As a general request, please, no animated gif or HUGE avatars (they mess with the page layouts big time).

6. Don't be afraid to post, even if to you it seems like a stupid question. There are users here of all levels and bound to be someone who can help.

Style Tags

Fancy creating a funky looking post? Here's a brief overview of phpBB's style tags (for each example, remove the "*"):-

[*b]Bold Text[*/b]

[*i]Italic Text[*/i]

[*color=red]Red Text[*/color]

[*color=blue]Blue Text[*/color]

Tip : you can also use a web hex code like color=#FFCC00

Quote:

[*quote]A quote box[*/quote]

[*u]Underlined Text[*/u]

You can insert an image on another server like this:-

[*img=http://www.voipuser.org/somedir/someimage.jpg][*/img]

You need the full path, including the "http://" part.

Dean