[From The Mayor] Tuesday, November 27

[Phillip Dampier]

Happy Tuesday.  A few quick words about two changes we've made here.

First, deleting a message here no longer will reduce your post count.  Once you write a message, you earn the count that appears next to your username in your profile.  Choosing to delete a message for whatever reason won't eliminate the credit you earn for every post here.

Second, in order to provide a more consistent and friendly community, we've begun allowing residents to report Private Messages sent after 11/26/07 which consist of personal attacks, spam, or anything that promotes illegal conduct.  You'll see a button to report any offending messages for administrative review.  While we encourage people to work out any differences they might have with one another privately, the rule against personal attacks does extend throughout the site.  We also want to know about any account that signs on here to spam our community.  We've been effective at controlling this in the past but want to make sure we can respond rapidly to any attempt to bother our residents with unsolicited PM advertising.  New users will need to enter a "captcha code" (those angled letters and numbers in a box you have to retype) for their first few PM's sent, which helps prevent automated spammers from registering for an account here and then automatically spamming members in their PM boxes.  Legitimate new residents here will see that captcha code thing go away after their first few PMs are sent.

Among the many questions we receive occasionally from residents was one dealing with the chat room system.  Namely, do moderators have access to transcripts of chat sessions in the chat room system?  The answer to this is no.  Moderators can only observe conversations in the chat room system if they are in that room with you, just as is the case with residents.  We always suggest that participants in chat remember that anyone can enter a room at anytime, so conducting yourself with appropriate decorum is always a good idea just in case you type something unflattering just as someone enters the chat room.  We've had people get into some bad situations when they've sent private IMs to the wrong person.  Keeping things positive and friendly makes sure nobody gets into a social faux pas.

Finally, we couldn't get around to introducing the holiday color scheme last evening, but look forward to trying to tackle this project later tonight.

You can read earlier editions of this newsletter in the Mini Forum Public Notices, Community Announcements & FAQ's.