Naz, Being Sensible and Forum Etiquette

[Samwise]

A short note on recent events.

The owner of forum account "naz2000007" recently earned themselves a ban. On more than one occasion they are known to have taken advantage of a gift of Acorn gear from another forum member, including in this topic. Despite making promises to the original donator to pass on items from those collections to other members, they chose not to and purposely ignored communications on the subject. Unfortunately, there are people like this. We chose not to ban at the time, as they hadn't yet breached any of our expected forum behaviour even though they had proven to be less than honourable in real life - though we tried to keep an eye on their activities in the trading forums.

To modern times, and this recent topic by "Jane" appeared unusual. This user's other posts referenced specific subjects that user naz2000007 had discussed in previous messages. A thorough investigation proved enough to convince the admin team that the same user had created this second account in order to trade without drawing attention to themselves. After pulling at the threads, we discovered that the Jane account had been very busy - not in the public forum, but it had been used to approach a lot of our members by PM. This was enough, on balance, to warrant a permanent ban. We simply cannot condone people masquerading under multiple accounts, especially ones which are used separately for trading.

We cannot be held responsible for what happens in the trading forums or for deals done via PM. This must be done at your own risk. If you aren't comfortable with this - use eBay. Be sensible - if someone approaches you to trade via PM who is not posting in the forums, this may be a sign that they are not entirely what they seem. Please report it to the moderators if you receive an unsolicited message from anyone suspicious, so that it can be investigated and hopefully stop anyone being taken advantage of.

It's perhaps also worth reminding everyone at this point that the "etiquette" of this forum, such as it is, is relatively simple - do not hide behind multiple accounts to deceive people, and keep your posts family-friendly: we have a wide range of members, from school age to pensioners. If you don't get on with someone, use the tools in the User Control Panel to help you filter what posts you see. If you see anyone being rude either to yourself or to anyone else, please report it ASAP so our moderators and admins can investigate. Do not respond to the troll. There are a few other guidelines our moderators work to wrt the size of sigs and such like, but rather than publish a long list of forbidden actions we simply deal with such things via a quiet PM. This system has worked for the last decade and we're rather hopeful it will continue to do so in the future.

Thanks, everyone,

Sam.

(On behalf of myself, Dave M and the *. / STH moderators team)