What is this place

Well it's a forum, more accurately the forum. Taking its name from the place in rome¹ it serves the pretty much the same purpose: a debating page for people to air their views on whatever topic they have on their mind and a place to find the answers to those irritating questions that you can't quite get an answer to anywhere else.

Why is it here?

When I joined h2g2 (less than a year ago) I, like most new users, ended up spending a lot of time around askh2g2. I really enjoyed getting into some of the serious debates that were floating around, god fact or fiction, that sort of thing. Recently (Though I'm told by some of the older users this has been happening for quite some time.) ask has become covered in word games and trivialities and I found myself dissapointedly looking through pages of topics in the vain hope of finding one thread that I wanted to comment on. I made a post on the topic and found that I was not alone. So I decided to found this page in the hope of seeing interesting debates form once more."Probably this will be a futile gesture that few will see and less will care about but I'm not the sort to whinge about a problem without at least attempting to address it." - quoth me on starting the page. I think I'll update it to: "This might just work"

So whats welcome here?

I found a post by Dr Deckchair Funderlik which I felt puts it most eloquently. Questions and answers based on serious intent. Questions posed in order to satisfy a need by finding an answer, this may be practical, intellectual or both. For example asking for peoples views on a recent politcal decision is okay, equally asking what some celebrity dyes their hair with for making a costume is fine. Specifically what I do not want to see are word games, questions trival enough that five minutes searching the internet gives an answer and mundane questions in which the answer could not conceviably matter (So whats the weather like where you are?).

Netiquette

One of the main differences between this and ask is that I would like to see some degree of intelligence apparent in its users (I'm already dead) Some things are fine. I understand digibox users have trouble with capitalisation not an issue, and there are going to be spelling mistakes and typos, no worries. Please, however try to make what you write readable to the population at large and don't go out of your way to make it difficuly with ALL or mIxeD capitalisation or |_33T 5p34K ² *shudder* It goes without saying that trolls will be lynched.

Whats wrong with...this entry

I expect I've offended someone by now, most days I don't seem to need to get out of bed. ³ I never really mean to, if theres something that you think needs improving - or is just plain wrong shout up, I'll see what I can do about fixing it.

Also this is thre first guide ML I've done and its all a bit naff, if anyone wants it spruced up they'll have to say how.

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¹ Suprisingly also called The Forum
² I hate the leetspeak even more now, I just spent half an hour trying to make Guide ML work to find that it was some of the punctuation in l33t causing it to fail. Grr. Arg.
³ Of course that could be the problem...