No doubt many of you are familiar with the bulletin boards--SDK's feature probably second in popularity only to the chatrooms. It's great that people take to the BBs with enthusiasm, but often I'm seeing that they are not being used properly. So I'm writing this blog to give you an idea of how to use the them.

First and foremost, everyone should know why the boards exist. And the answer is simple:
The bulletin boards are for discussion. Chatting, on the contrary, is for the chatrooms.

Now for some guidelines on using the BBs:

Be courteous
No one wants to read a rude comment. You'll just be encouraging more of the same.

Be appropriate
This is common sense and really means no inappropriate references or innuendo (i.e. sex, drugs, extreme violence). Cursing/cussing is a separate issue; whether or not your words are intended to be malicious, it still makes you look ignorant, so just don't do it.

Be a good judge
And by that, I'm referring to spam. Both comment spam and thread spam. Think before you post or make a new thread. It's not a postapalooza! Will that new thread create substantial discussion or an entertaining game, or will it just attract trolls and pointless posts? This applies also to duplicate threads, which sometimes serve to alleviate the infamous "thread glitch", but more often are redundant and unnecessary. A general rule of thumb: search for and bump existing threads, rather than creating new ones.

Be vigilant
The majority of threads nowadays, unfortunately, aren't worthy of being topics. Others also can be irrelevant due to the time of posting. And if you can recognize these things, you should lock it yourself if you made the thread, or you should politely request that the thread creator lock his/her thread and/or possibly point them in the right direction. But going back to my previous guideline, spam is off-limits, so please refrain from posting a lock request unnecessarily or on a thread that has already been lock-requested.

Be respectful
This basically encompasses all my guidelines, and is a foundation for your overall behavior on the bulletin boards and this website. Respect fellow SDK members, and that of course includes our admins. They should be treated no differently.

That pretty much wraps it up for what I have to say. I hope that you learn a little from it, and that behavior on our boards improves to a degree. If you haven't already done so, read the stickied "Bulletin Board Rules and Info" thread which is handily located in each board.

Well, thanks for reading and have fun on the BBs!