This post is meant as an addition to the Terms & Conditions of the forum and explains the information presented there in a more intelligible manner.

1. Basic rules

• Please formulate your posts in whole sentences.
• Address other members of the forum in a way that you would like to be addressed yourself.
• The forum is for free, and the other members who are involved in it and helping you out are doing this in their spare time. Please respect that, even if your problem is very urgent.


2. How do I ask a question?

2.1 Look for the appropriate thread
Even if it doesn't seem so at first: every problem can be placed within a certain thread of the forum. Better take your time and read some messages in the subject areas that seem to fit to your problem or topic. You will quickly find out if it was the right choice.
Sometimes one problem fits into several threads, so one could think that one receives an answer much quicker if one adds a post to them all at once. But the opposite is true! Even if it is difficult: Please add your question to only one thread at the time!

If you have found the appropriate thread, pause for one more moment and look for posts that have the words "Important:" or "Announcement:" in their headings. Read them first before asking your question.

2.2 Choose a meaningful heading
The heading is not meant to tell the other members of the forum that you have a problem. This should be clear anyway. Instead, it should be an exact summing-up of your question or at least show what kind of problem it is about.

Please abstain from making your message more interesting by means of inappropriate headings such as "HELP", "Urgent" or "Important". This is considered as rude, and many members won't be willing to assist you.

2.3 Content of your post
Try to delineate your problem as accurately as possible. What kind of troubleshooting have you already tried, and with which results? Please mention the configuration of your computer (if necessary) and describe what you have changed in your computer before the problem occurred for the first time.

If you want to upload a picture, please do so in a GIF format, then there will be less trouble with the size of the data.

If you want to include pictures from another server in your article, please restrict them to a size of 100kB. If your picture is bigger than that, please link it.


3. Questions and answers

3.1 Why has my post disappeared?
Probably your article has been moved to another thread by the moderator. Please use the search engine of the forum to find it.

3.2 What does TO mean?
TO is the threadopener = the member who has started a topic.

3.3 What does OT mean?
OT means "off topic" and describes the fact that an answer does not relate to the original question.

3.4 How do I quote accurately?
In order to maintain the context of a thread that has several members discussing at the same time, you should quote the contributions that you are referring to. However, the quotation of complete posts is considered as rude.

3.5 Why do I always get links to google and am told by other members to use the search engine?
You usually get this hint from other board members if they have the impression that you have not contributed enough important points to the solution of a problem.

3.6 The answers to my questions contain a lot of expressions that are unknown to me.
A good help in such cases is Wikipedia. You will find a detailed explanation to almost every expression there.


4. Miscellaneous

4.1 Don't "push" a subject.
If you have opened a thread that doesn't arouse a lot of interest, please abstain from adding further messages to it. Such posts will be treated as spam by the moderator.

4.2 Let sleeping dogs lie!
Don't get involved in threads that haven't received any new contributions for months. Usually this is the case if no one has anything to say about it. Thus it would be unwise to add your own questions to this thread. Rather open a new thread and mention the old one if you wish to refer to it.