Comfort Levels

I very much want this forum to be a place where each one of you feels comfortable. By that, I mean that each of us should treat one another with respect and civility, and I'd like everyone to feel free to post if they have something to say. Of course, do your best to make your posts on-topic but if you can't figure out where to post something, give it your best shot, or post it in the Off Topic sub-forum that I have set up for that. If I think that it would be a better fit in another area of the forum, I'll simply move it. No one is going to be chastised for an honest mistake. No worries.

 

For the benefit of our new members, I'll bump this one up too.

I am the administrator of this forum but you will rarely see me in the forum under my Admin account, as I log into that only when there are administrative things that I need to take care of. Otherwise, I participate in this forum under this account, which is a regular member account.

You might notice that this forum is not monetized in any way. At some point in the future, I might monetize it in some unobtrusive way since there are costs involved in running a forum; but, thus far, I have no plans to do so. I run this forum because I enjoy it, and I didn't so much enjoy some of the other senior forums that I have been a member of.

When I say this, I don't mean to imply that I am in any way superior to the administrators of these forums, only that I wanted something more relaxed, where people didn't have to worry so much about being scolded for posting in the wrong forum, bumping an old thread, or not noticing that there was already a thread on the subject they wanted to talk about. This doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it when you make an effort to post on topic and in the right place, but that these are problems that I can easily fix, and they're not worth raising my blood pressure over.

Simplified, the rules to this forum are stolen from the old Usenet groups:

1. Try not to be be too offensive.
2. Try not to be too easily offended.

Since this forum is open only to those who are fifty or older, I think it's fair to say that we're all adults here. As such, we should realize that not everyone holds the same opinions as we do, and that we are going to enjoy some people more than others. I strongly considered not having any political or religious forums here because these are the topics that are the most likely to cause problems for a forum administrator, and particularly when the administrator likes to participate in his own forum. You will not be banned from the forum for disagreeing with me in a political or religious discussion. I use this account, rather than my Admin account, to make it clear that I am just a regular member of the forum. Treat me with the same respect that you'd treat anyone else here, and you're good.

Things are pretty relaxed here, and my hopes are that no one takes advantage of that, and that we can continue a relaxed atmosphere.

 

In a gardening forum, I've had someone go off the deep end because I didn't compost the way he did, so you never know.

 

Unreasonably upset.

 

That is my favorite part of the forum, too.

 

Disputes will occur from time to time, and sometimes people may cross a line. My hope is that we won't become too easily offended because I have no interest in creating a forum where people are so afraid of saying something offensive that they don't say anything of interest at all, and I have absolutely no interest at all in playing umpire for disputes that began in someone else's forum. If you come here from another forum, great -- we're glad to have you -- but please don't try to make the SENIORSonly Club forum an extension of some other forum. If you behave here, you're good to go and I don't care if you've been banned from every other forum you've ever joined.

Every post in this forum has a [Report] button at the bottom of it.



If someone has posted something that you believe to be inappropriate, you may "Report" it through that button. All such reports will show up on my "Admin" account. Because I don't log into my "Admin" account unless I have something administrative to do, I may not receive it right away so if it is something that really can't wait, you may also let me know about it by private conversation to this account, as I am frequently in the forum under this account.

Please keep in mind that I am not here all the time. Today, for example, I have been moving stuff around the house because our house is being re-insulated, which requires that everything be moved at least two feet away from the walls and, for the next two or three days, we will have obnoxious people from the insulating company in the house, so I will probably be here only every now and then, but maybe more often. Our house was built in 1910, so parts of the house are insulated with paper from the paper mill and other parts were insulated with newspaper, which has since crumbled to the bottom. So they will be drilling holes in various places in the wall, spraying in the new insulation, then patching the holes or covering them with trim.

I try to pop into the forum often throughout the day, and am usually able to do so. But I am not here all the time.

However, and this is the important part, when someone posts something inappropriate in the forum, the best thing to do is to not respond to the objectionable post. This is important for a couple of reasons. First of all, replying to an objectionable post often simply prompts the person who posted it to continue along the same vein, making the problem worse. Secondly, once I receive your report about the post, I will be removing the objectionable post if I agree with your assessment. But if there has been thirty replies to the objectionable post, I will then have thirty-one posts to delete rather than just the one.