Frothers Unite! UK Issues
Help, someone said some rude words!
Someone said poo again, in a public forum? Dash it all to high heaven. Seriously, FU!UK is a place for everyone to kick back and relax, away from the heavy moderation and careful diplomacy of some other, more “professional” websites. Say what you feel, rant, rave and abuse each other because the moderators here will assume you are all grown up enough that you don’t need protecting from rude words (and frankly don’t give a feth in any case). If you take serious offence at a post someone has made, it may be that the moderator will need to step in and take charge... or it may be that you need to take a step back and lighten up a bit. This might not suit everyone but there you are. In general, if you don’t like what someone has said to you then you can either ignore them, or call them a witch. Either works.
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OK but this is really inappropriate material.
Porn and spam we will act on of course, please report these to a moderator who will delete the post. We do sometimes get rogue spambots peppering the boards with their evil Russian crap, just be sensible and remember not to click any links in a post that makes no sense, and don’t reply to any spam posts as it just makes the cleanup job harder. Registered members can now opt to ignore all posts made by their mortal enemies, if these are really spoiling their enjoyment of the site, using the using the Friend and Foes system.
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Where is the registration agreement then? Or code of conduct?
Code of conduct? Hahaha! Oh sorry, you were being serious. #kof#

OK so we took it down cos the default one wasn’t really relevant to what we do here and we haven’t really established a new one... one noble contributor (DemonEtrigan) supplied this draft which is quite well favoured and might serve as a good stopgap:

“Beware, by registering on this site you agree to the fact that you are at least the physical age to be considered an adult wherever the hell you come from. Unfortunately we can’t (and don’t want) to enforce a set of stupid rules that anybody who can live in normal society should already know. Just so you understand, people in here swear, take the lords name in vain, insult people, argue, swear, make reference to bodily functions and occasionally post links to disreputable sites....If any of that is likely to offend you, get the hell back to where you came from. By registering on this site you give up all rights to complain about being hurt, or offended by anything you read....Grow up!”

Thanks for that DemonE. Oh and we don’t need a COPPA agreement because we aren’t US based. If you don’t know what that is then don’t bother looking it up, its very dull.
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Are there no rules at all then?
There is one exception to our laissez-faire attitude to moderation. Frothers want a secure and relaxed environment where they are free to abuse each other without impediment, so to preserve our sanctum of anarchy we will take action against anyone abusing the forum itself.

In addition to the aforementioned spam and porn posts this includes creating spoof accounts (where it is not obvious that the account is a spoof), hijacking usernames or accounts, posting a rude word 400,000 times without spaces to feth up the page formatting and anything else that gives everyone (especially the moderators) a massive headache without being in the least bit funny.

Having a larf is fine, and if you are pushing the limits our first action will be a gentle nudge, but deliberate and repeated abuse will result in the webmaster sending his fighting uruk-monkeys to your house to move all of your furniture around while you are out.

No doubt some of you excellent creative types will find new and ingenious ways to spoil everyone’s enjoyment of the site to the extent that more rules will need to be grudgingly knocked together in the future and applied by the unpaid servants of the site. Just be aware that people who do such things on purpose are known, in the vernacular, as gak-licking zombie-fiddlers, have no friends, and never will.
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I am a miniatures/rpg/ccg/wargames company, can I post here?
Well of course you can. There are certain important things to bear in mind though.

Frothers Unite! UK is home to a wide range of professionals and experts who like to chill out after/during/instead of a hard days work. However it is chiefly a consumer site and they are mostly here in their role as consumers, with all the other schmoes, albeit as ones with an eye for different details. If you are lucky they will lend you the benefit of their wisdom (if you are really lucky they will stop after a while).
You are welcome to post news items on the appropriate forums, but do bear in mind that any comments in response will not be filtered or censored. Its a discussion board not a free advertising service. Sometimes its better to give us an idea and point us to the advertising blurb, if this is very long and likely to challenge attention spans- you don’t want people to be tired and irritable when they get to the bottom of your post, ’cos thats where the “reply” button is.
You are welcome to come and post as yourself, on any topic and in any vein, and kick back with the rest of us. Do bear in mind it is easy to get carried away in the atmosphere engendered by our laissez-faire, devil-may-care attitude to web etiquette and the anarchic crowd it seems to attract.

Be sensible - if you are posting under your professional name then don’t post anything that you wouldn’t want associated with your business. By all means maintain separate identities for professional and personal posting... its ok if everyone knows that “jamesF” is head of Tangent Figures Ltd but if he posted “fetharsepoo hahahaha” under his “Tangent Figures” login then the investors might not be too pleased.
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My livelihood is threatened by posters on your board giving a poor review to my products!
Oh feth off. Sorry but this isn’t a fanboy site like you might be used to, you aren’t supporting us with advertising revenue and there are no rules here about toning down an honest review to pass some sanitation test. Our tips to deal with such “threats” to your livelihood:

Take it on the chin - the criticism might be a lot harsher than you are used to, this is partly because we do not censor reader comments (see above) and partly because coming up with a great insult for a mediocre product is often better sport than providing balanced review. Yes we might get carried away sometimes but you will certainly get a more positive response by acknowledging criticism in good humour than by whinging. Mi casa, mis reglas.
If, under any hyperbole, there is a genuine misconception about your product, point this out and show us how wrong we are (a bad picture, for example, can lead people to believe a product line is worse than it actually is). Before you say it, no, holding a product in your hand is not neccessary to pointing out that it looks rubbish, but if bad pictures lead us to think so then we are doing you a favour by pointing that out. Its called public service bitching.
If, under any hyberbole, there is no reasoned critcism of your product at all, you could just ignore it or you could point out the failing. Sometimes people need a big nudge to articulate what they dislike about something and sometimes they are unable to get beyond “don’t like it”, in which case simply pointing this out demonstrates that the criticism is just down to a personal taste and is unlikely to sway other punters.
If your product is genuinely gak I’m afraid you are better off finding this out before you invest any more money in it. Anyway we’ve got no sympathy, you should have done some consumer testing before you launched.