I try to maintain a certain standard on urmston.net because if I didn't then the majority of posts would look like mobile phone text messages, which is not what I want. The following is a list of rules governing the posting of items to urmston.net; some of which are compulsory and some are only advisory.
Compulsory: any post breaking the following rules will not be authorised
A post that starts with a lowercase letter Sometimes I get blamed for not authorising a particular post but I do try to authorise every genuine post. Howerver, any post that starts with a lowercase letter is automatically deleted without me even seeing it.
A sentence which does not start with a capital letter and end with a full stop. Pretty basic stuff but to be fair, if you do have a problem with this, if you let me know then I will do my best to accomodate you.
A post containing a word matching the list of banned words on my database is automatically deleted without me even seeing it. I have every possible combination of these words too thanks to some guy online who created logical expressions to deal with every swear word that he could think of. So if your swear word contains spaces or dashes or even if the word is jumbled up, this guy's script does the trick. It worked on every one that I tested anyway.
A post written completely in UPPERCASE or lowercase will be automatically deleted
A post where the poster as given their name with a single initial.
I can't authorise any posts where information has been copied from another source - such as a quote from a newspaper or copied from another website. However you can put a link to the webpage.
I can't authorise any post that accuses an identifiable person of doing something unless it has been made official. For example, someone who has an ASBO can be talked about but I can't authorise a post that accuses Johnny Rotten from down the road of selling drugs.
Slagging off a local business isn't really fair either as the same person (a competitor maybe) could post negative comments about the same business using ten different names. Praise a local business by all means but negative comments probably won't be posted. It's okay to have a go at non-local businesses though and pubs are fair game as it's in the public interest to identfy poorly run pubs.
I don't want to authorise any topics that deal with racial, religious or minory group issues as it's bound to offend someone somewhere. Furthermore, I have no quarms about passing the details of any racial comments submitted to the website on to the police together with your IP address and the exact time of the post. I collect actual IP addresses - the ones that can be traced to the user, not proxy IPs.
I won't authorise any post that refers to vigilante or a similar action for obvious reasons.
I will stop authorising all posts for a particular IP address if I think that the same person is posting under different names.
Advisory: any post that breaks the following rules runs may not be authorised.
Any post where there is an excessive amount of names, town names etc, in lowercase. I don't mind changing some but when I get home from a busy day at work and someone has posted, "pete and john used to live on flixton road and sarah and bev used to live on chassen road" etc, I'll just delete it.
A post that contains shortcuts for words such as "U" instead of "you" or other common text message shortcuts may not be authorised.
Any post that contains lowercase "i" when referring to oneself. No one in the UK has ever been taught to use lowercase "i" when referring to oneself; it is always an uppercase "I". I'll change the odd one but if the post contains "i" or "i'm" too many times then I probably won't bother authorising it.
A post where the title or the name of the poster is in all UPPERCASE or all lowercase may be deleted.
I'm getting fed-up too with people entering things like "Anon", "Neighbour" or "Me" for their name. How hard can it be to think up a sensible unique name? It just makes it easier for people to answer you if they can refer to a name.
Anyone targetting an individual on the forum or an actual person runs the risk of not having their post authorised. Basically I tend to be more tollerant towards regular visitors to urmston.net than I am towards one-off posters, as long as no legal boundaries are crossed.