Netiquette on Total France Forum

The following 'Netiquette' has evolved from members' suggestions, and through correspondence with regular users. It is intended to make searching easier, and to assist posters in receiving quicker answers. However, it should not be taken as a substitute for the Terms of Use.

The Total France Netiquette is very short because:

Nobody likes loads of 'guidelines'
Our Forum is used by sensible people, so there shouldn't be any need to continuously re-emphasise the obvious rules of any 'general access' forum ('No libel, no racism, no hate flames, no offensive language, no pornography, no personal attacks ...' etc)
Netiquette should be easy to remember and implement

NETIQUETTE

General Posting Conduct:

Libellous posts will not be tolerated and could see the member's account deactivated (see Forum Terms of Use for more about 'restricted postings'). Defaming someone in a post on a public forum make the forum liable for your libel!

When posting, please be courteous, objective and respectful of the views of others, no matter how much they may vary from yours. Hostile or offensive language will be removed without warning. Personal attacks will not be tolerated and could lead to a de-activation of membership. Generally speaking, if you talk to others as you'd expect to be spoken to then there should be no problems.

And please remember: an argument takes two – often the best strategy is to turn a blind eye to something about which you feel you cannot disagree without becoming emotionally involved. Or to simply walk away from reading or contributing to offensive discussions, and report them instead to a moderator.

The remainder of this netiquette applies principally to ALL posts EXCEPT those in the Chatterbox forum (the Chatterbox Forum is more informal than the other forums, so some aspects of netiquette are more relaxed there):

Location: Please do your best to pre-select the right forum for your topic using the following criteria:
- The forum titles should be self-explanatory, so find one that suits your subject
- If you cannot find a relevant forum, and your post is FRANCE-RELATED, then please post it in the Post-Box
- If you cannot find a relevant forum, and your post is NON-FRANCE-RELATED, then please post it in the Chatterbox
Relevance: Please attempt to keep your posts absolutely relevant to the original topic or thread title. Non-topic-related comments to other posters should be addressed via Private Message or email, rather than in posts. If you want to exchange 'off-topic' banter, the ChatterBox is the ideal place to do it.
Tangential Discussion: If the thread sparks a suggestion that could take it off in a different direction, please consider starting a 'New Topic' and discussing it there. This will make it MUCH easier for visitors to find information directly relevant to specific keywords and subjects.
Quoting: Please exercise care with the 'Quote' facility, by first editing out the irrelevant part of the post, or posts, you wish to quote from. Without this, some posts amount to no more than a few words referring to a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a quote of a ...
Please help others: If you see an unanswered post, with which you cannot assist, please take a moment to consider whether you know anyone who MAY know the answer. Often, a quick email, asking a friend to take a look at a post, can produce the answer the newcomer needs. The forum has a feature to help with this. At the bottom right-hand corner of any topic page is a link entitled 'Email this Topic to a Friend', which produces an auto-mail text box, with text you can modify to suit your needs.
Courtesy & Support: Total France is a virtual network enabling Francophiles to support each other. Please keep this in mind when posting and keep your posts courteous and supportive. You may not always agree with the content or style of everybody's posts, but even if you disagree – keep it civil and don't resort to personal attacks or name-calling, neither of which is not tolerated. A more detailed list of 'Posting Don'ts' can be found in the Forum Terms of Use
Forum Signatures (a.k.a. your 'sign-off', or the 'bit that appears at the bottom of your post'): If you choose to use a Signature below your post, it MUST conform strictly to the guidelines published here. Signatures which do not conform to these guidelines, especially those containing promotional URLs, will be scrutinised and may be removed without warning. In simple terms, a forum signature is a friendly 'sign-off' not an advertising billboard.
Er ... that's it.

FURTHER POSTING HELP

For those who want more guidance with posting, and general help with use of the Forum, the following questions have been listed. If you need help with anything not listed here, try clicking the 'Help' link at the top right of this page, or try the Forum FAQ for help with things like setting up your Profile, adding an image (avatar) to your name, of formatting the text in your posts.

Frequently Asked Questions

What sort of title should my post have?

Where should my post go?

What if I see a post, and know that the answer to it is already posted somewhere else?

To 'Quote' or not to 'Quote'?

What if I don't write or spell well?

How qualified do I have to be to answer a post?

What if I have a LOT of information to show or share?

What sort of title should my post have?

Preferably an appropriate, descriptive title that gives a good clue to the content. This allows visitors to locate information easily.

Examples of good titles include: "How to empty a septic tank", "Can you recommend a Notaire in the Correze?", "Fishing in the River Loire", etc.

Examples of bad titles include: "Help me!", "Confused!", "Don't know what to do!", "Walls", "Electricity", "Buying property", "Plugs???????", "Singed hair?!!??", "Help! Lemon sorbet or grappling iron?", etc. .

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Where should my post go?

Usually, this is a simple matter to sort out. Using the criteria listed in the Netiquette above, it is possible to accurately place around 99% of posts. Occasionally, however, there will be posts that present difficulties - perhaps because they span two subjects. In this case, don't waste too much energy in deliberating. Just post it where you think is most appropriate, and then send a Private Message to MONIKA, asking her to look at the post. She's really good at categorising posts, and if it needs to be moved then she will do it for you.

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What if I see a post, and know that the answer to it is already posted somewhere else?

This happens frequently, particularly as many topics are raised time and again on a large forum. If you encounter this, we would really appreciate you looking through the TotalFrance forum, finding the other post with the information in it, and posting a link to it under the new topic.

Occasionally, people see a post where they know the information is held on another site. They then post a link to the external site. In the case of copyrighted material on official sites, linking in this way is unavoidable, because copying the information and pasting it into your post would be illegal.

However, if it is possible for you to distill the information into a post of your own, rather than linking to an external site, then it is much more efficient.

This is particularly so in the case of links to posts on other forums. Not only are other forums sometimes 'down', and unreachable for periods of time, but their own housekeeping policies may mean that the thread is soon moved, pruned or deleted, meaning that the link is then out-of-date and redundant. Trying to check through the forum for redundant external links is enormously difficult and time-consuming, so if we can keep the majority of our links 'internal' then it speeds up the forum admin work a lot.

TIP: If you cut and paste a link directly into the posting text box, the Forum software will recognise it as a link and will format it as such automatically, without you needing to use any special code. Just copy the full link from your browser's address bar, and paste it into your posting text box.

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To 'Quote' or not to 'Quote'?

One of the most useful forum functions is the ability to quote somebody else's post. You can quote the whole thing or just some details from within it. To do this, click on the 'Quote' button above the post you wish to refer to. This will copy the whole post into a new post text window and place it between quote 'brackets'. If you want to quote the whole post, then just leave this text as it is.

HOWEVER, it usually makes more sense, and is certainly more considerate of other users, if you quote just a specific sentence or two, or even just a few words, that relate to precisely what you want to address. To achieve this, just delete any parts of the text you want to discard ... BUT make sure you leave the [quote] and [/quote] brackets in place around the remaining text so that it looks like this:

[quote] All the world's a stage [/quote]

NB One of the commonest formatting problems occurs when members delete parts of a quoted post, hoping to keep the rest inside quote brackets, but accidentally delete one of the quote brackets ... so they suddenly look like this:

[quote] All the world's a stage /quote]

The loss of the penultimate single square bracket breaks the formatting code, and the quote function will no longer work. For trouble-free quoting, please make sure your quote brackets are intact .

TIP: As a point of general netiquette on many forums, it is usually considered 'bad form' to just hit the quote button without then editing the contents to let others know, in a flash, specifically what you wish to reference. This is especially so with 'nested' quotes (quotes, within quotes, within quotes, within quotes, etc) done because no one could be bothered to edit the quoted parts properly.

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What if I don't write or spell well?

By and large, the TF forum is tolerant of all posting foibles, with users far too polite, or far too busy, or far too focused, or far to laid back, or far too drunk, to take issue over 'petty' stuff like spelling, syntax, grammar, etc. Usually, visitors are MUCH more interested in what you have to say, rather than in how you say it ... although, of course, one is always more likely to be listened to if one's point of view is easy to comprehend.

TIP: As a further point of 'form', you should remember that some Forum users get concerned ABOUT POSTS THAT ARE TYPED ALL IN CAPITALS LIKE THIS because it is considered to be 'shouting'.

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How qualified do I have to be to answer a post?

This is a difficult question, because the answer varies from question to question. Obviously, in a complex technical question like: "How can I change tri-phase 400v electrical supply to mono-phase 240v?", a little knowledge on the part of respondents could be a dangerous thing. An answer that states: "I'm not really sure, but I think you twist the wires together" is not only wrong but could also cause a serious accident.

Conversely, a post from someone looking for emotional support in new surroundings requires the respondent to have no qualifications beyond caring about the welfare of others.

In the majority of cases, however, questions get answered piecemeal, and answers are gradually assembled from the combined efforts of numerous posters. In most cases, therefore, the motto to follow is: "If you know more than the person posing the question, you are probably qualified to provide some help."

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What if I have a LOT of information to show or share?

A forum post can hold a HUGE amount of information, all of which can be formatted to increase readability.

However, if you do have a large document - especially if it contains photos or illustrations that would be difficult to include in a post - please contact us directly. Instead of using a Forum post, we can code the information into a 'Fact Sheet' that we can store in our 'Reference' section.

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