Updated forum guidelines – please note

[FS Administrator]

Hi everyone,

Following an ongoing review of forum activity and lots of community feedback, we’ve recently tightened up the guidelines in a few areas.

We know that the vast majority of our members always do the right thing and we thank you very much being involved. We also know that clear guidelines are the only way to help everyone get great value from the forum.

Our full guidelines are here, and the main updates are outlined below:

Signatures. In response to increasingly flamboyant signatures, often longer than posts themselves, we have new new signatures guidelines:

Please keep signatures short (4 lines maximum), simple and professional – a link to your business website and a tagline are fine in your signature, but not multiple links to your website(s). We have 'no-follow' attributes on all external links. This guideline will apply from now on, and we would appreciate it if you could update your signature if it is outside these guidelines.

No follows. This has long been the case, but just a reminder that we have a ‘no-follow’ attribute on all external links which means they won’t benefit search engine rankings. This is in response to the huge number of spammers attracted to popular forums.

Adding value. We’ve added the following point to the guidelines:

Please ensure that posts add value to discussions and/or continue ongoing conversations. Seemingly empty posts such as ‘I agree’ or ‘Good point’ etc that we deem are purely posted for promotional purposes will be deleted and repeated posts treated as spam. This is not at all aimed at genuine conversations or common courtesies. One of the things we love about the Flying Solo community is the friendliness and generosity of those who participate, and we do not intend this new guideline to interfere with that. If you think we've been over-zealous in our moderation, please feel free to let us know.

Self-promotion. We’ve expanded our guidelines on self promotion and they now read:

Don’t start threads or posts for the purposes of advertising or promoting: Any commercial or promotional links to your websites should be directly relevant to an ongoing discussion in all instances. This includes re-posts of articles and blogs that appear elsewhere and that are clearly posted here purely to drive traffic.

We welcome your continued input and support as the forum grows. Please continue to use the ‘report this post’ link above each post or private message us if you see anything needing attention.

See you in there!
Peter, on behalf of the Flying Solo crew