NE Forum Moderation

[Baroclinic Zone]

Now that we are heading into winter, we wanted to remind people that moderation will get stricter and these are some ideas we came up with, as a group, to improve the quality and experience in our Forum. Please read and adhere to them. We feel this is the best time to get this going since there aren't real threats on the horizon and we can get the word out and make sure everyone is aware of these new guidelines.

1. OT banter will have to be kept in "Off Topic". If the post is not on topic, it will be moved/deleted.

2. Limit, the one allotted banter/obs thread to weather related banter and weather observations only. All other posts that are deemed off topic will be moved/deleted. The banter thread was never intended to be a general anything goes topic. It is intended to be weather related but not topic specific.

3. When we do have a specific threat, create dual threads. One thread would be for hardcore analysis that anyone post can post in but the post needs to be strictly scientific and not a generalization post of a model or something similar in nature. The second thread will be for the casual poster who does not have as much knowledge but wants to still be part of the discussion. This thread will still be moderated and any post not specific to the discussion will be deleted/moved.

4. Delete any offensive,sexual, or innuendo post.

5. Reduce the excessive trolling of other members of our group. This will be difficult given that many of us know each other personally as friends and what's done in our forum is more playful than it is an attack on anyone. Excessive trolling is against forum rules.

6. This is a discussion forum not a chat. We have a chat feature that is basically never utilized. Try using that. A lot of our threads move pretty quickly and we don't want good discussion to get buried amongst banter.

7. Simple emoticon/image responses and single word replies will be deleted. They add nothing to the discussion and are a waste of time and space.

8. Please keep threads limited to ~1000 posts. This reduces the load of the servers.