Official News - page 5

GUIDANCE ON USING THE NOTICEBOARD

by Hazed

The electronic noticeboard in Fed2 allows you to post messages which can be read by other players. The game rules give you some guidance about posting on the board, but we do not set down in great detail exactly the kind of post that can and cannot be put on the board because most players use their common sense and know not to overdo things. However, sometimes players don't realize the implications of the way they use the board, and in that case staff have to step in and ask them to change the way they post.

The noticeboard is a common resource which is available to everybody. Unlike in the old version of Fed, in Fed2 there is no restriction on the number of posts you can have on the board at once time. The board is very large so in theory there is room for everybody to post as much as they like. But in practice, the important posts are the "top ten" - the ten most recent posts that show up when you type 'READ'. Earlier posts can be seen with the 'READ ALL' command but it's those top ten posts that have the most immediate impact. I think everybody would agree that a player who posted ten posts one after the other to take up every single slot would be abusing the privilege! But where do you draw the line? How many posts is too many?

As a general rule, I would say that having two posts on the board is acceptable, and having more than that is not. There are some circumstances where it would be acceptable to go over this limit, but they'd have to be judged on a case by case basis, taking into account what the posts were actually saying and their relevance to the game.

Yes, relevance is an important issue too. The noticeboard is primarily intended for messages that are related to the game in some way, but there is a long tradition of posting non-Fed-related quotations that the poster considers to be amusing or significant in some way - in fact, much of the Fed Funnies section of the Fed2 Star is made up of these. But the less Fed-related the message is, the less tolerant staff will be about multiple posts.

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