Hello and welcome to the Escape Artists forum! If you are seeing this message, you are likely to have just registered a new account and are about to make your first post on these forums. Before you do that, however, there are a couple of quick things you need to know:
1. The forums are a generally loose, friendly environment. We enjoy a good debate, but all members are expected to be respectful to each other and to the artists, narrators, hosts and editorial staff of Escape Artists. That's our
one rule. Of course, that goes both ways - civility is not only expected from you, it's also going to be granted to you. Don't feel shy about expressing your opinions just because you're new.
2. The one class of posters we don't like here are spammers. And unfortunately, their numbers have been growing (we get over 500 spambot accounts signing up each week). Because of that, we have taken several measures that affect new posters - they'll only offer a minor inconvenience to you but it's a good idea to be aware of them:
2.1. Most importantly,
accounts with 0 posts get purged daily. If you create an account and don't post in it, it will be deleted. If that happens, please just create a new account. If you post even a single post on the forums (assuming it is not itself spam), your account will be protected from this ever happening.
2.2.
New members cannot post links in their very first post. This is designed to stop bots. It is not meant to shut anyone up - if you're a genuine user trying to give us a link - say, you're a story author wanting to link to your blog, or a listener who discovered a cool online SF resource - you can get around this restriction by just posting something else first.
2.3.
New members cannot vote in polls before making their first post. This is because we've had problems with people voting, their accounts being purged, and then they vote again unaware that their old vote counted.
What all of the above means is simple -
you get the ability to fully participate in the forums after making a single post. So, now that you've joined - post something right away, and you don't have to worry about any of the above. A good place to post a short post saying hello that will allow you to post links later is
the new members thread.
That's it - on behalf of myself and the other forum moderators, I hope you find this forum as enjoyable as we do.
