Members, this post I am pasting below was from 18 months ago,...

Members, this post I am pasting below was from 18 months ago, and I understand this is a heated time in Australian Politics, but no excuses for being uncivil to each other.
There is absolutely no need to insult other members simply because they have different beliefs or opinions to your own.

Please be reminded to lift your games, debate nicely, and remain in control of your keyboard. Don't let any spamming fairies loose on it.

Here's the 18 month old content, and note suspensions may apply if members are in breach of these guidelines.


New political guidelines for posting:

Our politics, world events and breaking news forums are on notice. HotCopper is a membership based accessible forum that has compliance responsibilities.

Hate speech is illegal, social responsibility is owned by everybody, and there should be empathy for the mental health and well being of others.
HotCopper membership is diverse and content is read by 10's of 1,000's on a daily basis.

The recent short poll shows that the majority of members want political and similar threads to adhere to guidelines, whilst allowing some leeway for 'banter'.

So, this is what we will do:

• No personal insults.
• No broad brush generalised flames.
• Members cannot stoop to act as if they are in parliament.
• Banter, or argy bargy must in the main be civil.
• Content must be "above the line", i.e within reasonable social norms.

Mods will implement a warning system as follows:

• Posts moderated for flaming including use of diminishing language, discrimination, sexist, disallowed images or profanity after Wednesday 1st March constitutes a warning. Two moderations represents two warnings.
• A 3rd incidence will incur a one day suspension to pull you up and make sure you've been reading your alerts.
• On return from a 1 day suspension, expect 7 days suspension for any further breach of the guidelines.
• If after that the mods determine by discussion you are unable to change your ways and behave in an appropriate way, you may be given the opportunity to return after a months suspension, or they may decide permanent suspension has to happen to increase the quality of the HotCopper forums.

Please take care, and note that it's only a small number of posters who have made this necessary.

HotCopper intends to increase the overall quality of discussion, starting with curbing bad behaviour in the outlier forums.

Example of how you can improve your content:

Laurie Oaks has a long history of ripping politicians to shreds over their policy decisions but he never descends into the insult cesspool. You don't hear him calling the Prime Minister "Turdball" or any such like.....yet he can still reduce the PM to mince meat just with hard questions alone.