Welcome. This page briefly explains how this site works, and lists most of its features. If you're new to this site, you might want to read this page in full before you continue. If you lose this page following one of its links, click «Welcome Page» in the frame to the left. If you lose that frame as well, click «home» in the navigation bar that you might see at the top. Thank you for your time and have a nice stay.

Unregistered visitors, known as guests, may read what's going on in the chat frame, navigate public forums, read messages posted there by registered members, and download files from the community disk. Registration grants the rights to chat, post messages, upload files, send or receive private messages, vote in polls, and generally participate to the community. Registration is completely free and does not require you to reveal any personal informations, but it requires you to allow cookies to be stored on your computer. That said, all you need to register an account is choose a nickname (up to 20 characters long) and provide a password of your choice (between 6 and 20 characters long). You only need to register once, as multiple accounts are generally not allowed.

Immediately after having registered, you may log in using the proper form you see to the left. By logging in you initiate a session, a cookie is stored on the computer you're using, and afterwards everything that is browsed or sent throught that computer will be acknowledged as part of your session. If you do nothing, after 15 minutes your session will expire and you will be automatically logged out. To log out without waiting for the session to expire, you may use the «logout» link presented in the session control panel (it appears there once you have successfully registered and logged in), which is especially important when you're using a public computer: if you leave the cookie intact on the computer, whoever uses that machine will be allowed to use your account here. Logging out, instead, invalidates the cookie marking your session, making that impossible unless someone else knew your password.

By accessing this community you implicitly agree to be bound by the following set of rules: at any time you may decide to leave the community, by accessing your profile form and checking the three boxes to «resign», should you no longer agree with our rules. Actively participating to the community, as well as selecting links to show the chat frame, read messages, download files from the c-disk, is entirely under your own responsibility, and also implies that you agree to the community rules, which are strongly enforced by our moderators and administrators, who are entitled to take action, in the form of changing and/or deleting any of your eventual messages, threads, files, profile informations, that are found to break the rules, as soon as those infringements are spotted.

1. Do not attack other members.
2. Avoid intentionally and repeately disturbing discussions («trolling»).
3. Do not submit material that might be not suitable for a public place. This includes material characterized by: race and/or gender discrimination, explicit pornography, excessive and/or untargeted violence, bigotry.
4. Do not submit copyrighted material whose copyright owners did not authorize you to distribute in public.
5. Do not practice any forms of explicit, redundant advertising for commercial goods and services.
6. Do not lie. Do not wilfully deceive the other members of the community by spreading information you know is false. Remember, there is a difference between deception and joking. Of course, we don't want to compromise your privacy, so there is a limit to this rule.
7. Do not try to stress the system (and its users) with meaningless spam, or with the repetitive creation of threads, messages, chat phrases («flooding»), c-disk files, having little or no reason to be submitted. Yet, you may feel free to look for glitches and problems in Postline's code, and test the system under special conditions to see how it reacts, but only if you strive not to disturb other users, and for the sole and only purpose of eventually reporting your discoveries so that they could be solved.
8. Do not register multiple accounts. You are entitled to register only one account. You are allowed to register again only after your original account has been pruned for inactivity, or deleted by system malfunctions. By successfully completing the registration process, you implicitly agree that all community staff members will be granted the right to collect and monitor any informations about you and your computer, with the sole purpose of identifying multiple accounts, whenever possible. On their side, staff members agree on keeping such informations stricly confidential.
9. The official community language is English. Slang, dialects and distortions of English are completely tolerated, and although preferably limited by common sense, rough language is also tolerated, unless it is used to insult one or more members, therefore breaking rule number 1. It is your own responsibility to comply with your actual legislation concerning objectionable language that you may encounter in this database. And generally, significantly long conversations and postings held in languages different from English and its variants are not allowed (although this might not be considered a serious violation, we'd like to actually understand what people write on our board).
10. The source code of this bulletin board and content management system, by the name of «Postline», and in the form of a set of PHP scripts and additional graphics parts, is Copyright ©2001-2006 by Alessandro Ghignola, and is distributed under GNU General Public License. Actually, the entire source code can be downloaded for free by following one of the following links (choose preferred format): ZIP package, TAR package. The source code is therefore subject to the rules set forth by the said license, and as such, it may be re-distributed only under the license's conditions.

Repeately acting against any of the above rules may cause your actual account to be temporarily or permanently disabled, and eventually your IP address range to be also blacklisted.

To reveal the chat frame and its input line, use the «show chat» link of the site navigation bar (the bar at the very top of the browser's window). After doing that, at the bottom of the browser's window the chat frame will show, and below that frame, a grey line will accept keyboard input: that line is the command and chat prompt. While logged in, everything typed there that is not acknowledged as a command will be sent to the chat frame. That frame cannot be vertically scrolled, but anything that disappears from its upper edge doesn't really get lost: it is simply transferred to the directory holding the chat logs. Prepending certain things to what you type, will highlight the message in several ways. Prepending an exclamation point will turn the message to all uppercase (yelling), prepending a hash will print it with a soft color (whispering), prepending an asterisk will highlight it as the correction of a former typo, and writing something like "/me says hello" will turn the message into an action. Finally, throught the command and chat prompt several commands may be used to perform particular operations, although most of those operations are reserved to members having moderation or administration access rights. For further details on all available commands see questions and answers.

The community disk (also known as c-disk or just cd) is part of the server's disk space that's been made available for arbitrary files uploading from the members. Any registered members, once logged in, may save any number of files into the c-disk, which makes them available for download to any visitors, including guests. Before uploading a file to the c-disk, but even before posting anything in the forums, you might have a look at additional community rules: normally they may be posted in sticky threads or «welcome» forums, and normally, it will be basically a matter of NOT posting or uploading any objectionable material, and agreeing that anything you post/upload as a member has nothing to do, in terms of objective responsibility, with the people that made the community available and the other members. For better clearance, by uploading one or more files to the community disk (c-disk) you implicitly accept the following fundamental rules, and agree that:

1. Any file(s) that you upload to the c-disk is (are) under your sole responsibility. You must not consider the c-disk to be reliable enough for storing important informations which loss could cause damage to you and/or to third parties, and in general informations that exist in no further copies, or in lack of any safe backup copies.
2. In no circumstance whatsoever this community itself, its members apart from you, its hosts, its managers, its moderators and its administrators, will be held responsible for any inconveniences and/or damages your uploaded files may cause to you and/or to third parties, either directly, or consequentially, or indirectly, and even if advised of the possibility of such inconveniences and/or damages.
3. The community's manager, administrators and moderators reserve the right to delete any file(s) uploaded to the c-disk that they don't see fit, either because they explicitly break one or more of the community rules, or for any other unspecified reasons at their own discretion, as soon as such file(s) are identified.

One suggestion: although there is no condition that blocks you from uploading more than a given amount of files, you might try to avoid exceeding your quota. To see how much of it you have used at a given time, go to your profile and select the button to list all your c-disk files. On top of that list, it tells you wether you exceeded your quota or not. However, the indication is only informative and, given good reasons for you to exceed the quota, you may not worry too much. The quota is calculated relatively to the total amount of space reserved to the c-disk, multiplied by the number of file types for which a folder is provided in the c-disk's root directory, and then divided by the amount of members who registered an account. In theory, this should be rather reliable as an estimation: it's true that this way, if all members reached 100% of their quotas, the c-disk space would be exceeded by an amount of times equal to the number of file type folders, minus 1. But at the same time, it might also be frequently true that most members won't even use 100% of their quota, let alone exceed it. To conclude, if you need to exceed your quota, feel free to, but try to do it responsibly, or moderators will most probably begin deleting some of your files to make room for other people. Oh, and one final precisation: the c-disk simulates the way a real disk works, so it calculates its allocated space in units called «clusters»: when you upload a file, its allocated space will be calculated by rounding the file size to the next multiple of the cluster size. This, indirectly, gives a maximum amount of files (taking one cluster each) that could be ever stored to the c-disk, because no file can take less than a cluster. Here follow some useful stats:

• C-disk cluster size: 32 Kb.
• Capacity in clusters: 81,920
• Overall capacity: 2,621,440 Kb.
• Quota per member: 20,434 Kb.

While current member's quotas will be progressively shrinking (as new accounts are created), there can be several solutions: members, moderators and administrators may decide to be more tolerant about those who exceed their quotas; the community manager may decide to allocate more server space for the c-disk; members may be pleased to go and seek any unnecessary files to make room for newcomers; moderators may begin to patrol the c-disk for useless, large files, and, last but not least, administrators may decide to remove inactive accounts that couldn't be automatically pruned, but whose owners aren't logging in since long time.

The c-disk is also used to store small pictures conveying emotions in messages. If an image file that fits emoticons' limits is uploaded along with a KEYWORD that starts by a colon or semicolon, then every time the given keyword is found in a message's text, the corresponding image will be inserted at that point of the message. The keyword may be upto 20 characters long, but it must start with a colon or with a semicolon. Now, there are common smileys that don't begin with one of those signs, like for instance a short version of the cool 8) smiley. Those keywords are not allowed, because they're quite probably appearing in normal text. Popular equivalents that should be used in those cases are keywords such as ":cool:", formed by a colon, a textual keyword, and another colon. Finally, bear in mind that there are many limits to smileys, such as how many of them can be uploaded and listed together, their images' width and height, and their image file's size in bytes: the actual limits allow 120 smileys complessively, 32 by 32 pixels as the maximum size of their icon in pixels, and a file size upto 20 Kb.

So, there's moderators and administrators, but they're not the only ones who can do something to moderate the board: even "major members" can contribute to reduce the presence of people who may not be playing fair. It all depends on the ignore lists. Every member is given, in the database, a personal ignore list: it's the list of those members you don't want to read posts from. The forums will filter out those member's posts when you access them: all you will see at that point will be a short notice («ignored: nickname»), in place of any of their messages. There's only a limitation: it is not possible to ignore moderators and administrators. That said, to add a member to your ignore list, access that member's profile, and select the button at its bottom that reads «ignore his/her messages». This operation can be undone because after that the same button is replaced by another one reading «stop ignoring his/her messages». However, please note that it isn't possible to filter out all of the traces of a post from the database: you will not be reading messages from members you are ignoring, but you will still see their threads' entries in forums, and their traces in the list of recent discussions (the «new» button in the status line). For stronger moderation, at that point you'd need help: for this matter, Postline is told to consider the indications of a significant number of major members; actually, that number is 10 members. What happens is that, when at least 10 major members, by their own will, choose to ignore the same person, then Postline automatically bans that person, and prevents him/her from logging in or registering again. This kind of ban can be removed only via an administrator's intervent. Finally, you reach «major age», and become a major member, after you've been registered for at least 100 days and posted at least 100 messages in the boards. Before that moment, you can ignore people, but you don't count. And once you'll become a major member, note that your initial ignore list will be cleared: from that point onwards, you have decisional power on the question of the majority ban, so you will need to rebuild your ignore list.

P.S. the majority ban feature could be disabled by administrators, should they suspect it's being abused, so please try to be careful ignoring random people around. The actual state of the majority ban feature is: ENABLED.