whirl's

about...

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The unofficial and unauthorized help pages. Here you'll find important information (some of it is important to us :) about the pages and their contents in general. If all you need is a quick explanation about the rows of icons at the end of each page you might want to go there right away. We suggest you scan at least the following on the houserules as it gives a little explanation of which reasons we have to reject contributions (should the event occur). Finaly there's also a bit of legal stuff that needs to be adressed. Not that we're suspicious of anybody but to avoid any possible problem it's nice to be clear.

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disclaimer

If you're easily bored by legal stuff here's the summary: The authors of the page can not accept responsibility for the contents of these pages, nor for the value of the information therein. There. That wasn't so hard was it?
Authors and maintainers of this page and other pages found at this site branching from http://www.iaehv.nl/users/gryphon/index.html, after this to be called 'these pages' accept no responsibility for the contents of these pages, nor for the accuracy of the information therein. More specifically since part of the pages is maintained automatically the information may not be seen by the maintainers prior to publication.
Authors and maintainers of these pages reserve the right to alter, modify or remove any contribution made by others with or without their prior knowledge.
If any contribution(s) to these pages is found to be illegal, offensive, harassive or in any other way violates generally accepted terms of good taste, that contribution will be removed upon discovering or after the authors are made aware of the offending contribution(s). However since the www is an international forum generally accepted terms of good taste and laws about which is considered an illegal contribution may vary greatly from one person to another, as may one readers sense of ethics and morality differ from another reader the authors and maintainers of these pages are reluctant with removing posts that are not clearly in violation of above rules. If there is doubt we will try to contact the original author about modifications.
The authors and maintainers have no wish to censor these pages and will try to solve possible conflicts with the original authors of a contribution before taking action. If the content of a contribution threatens these pages however said contribution will be removed prior to that contact.
Decisions by authors and maintainers of these pages are allways final.


Copyright

Page design and layout, and the original artwork are copyright by CatDeSign.
Contents of these pages are copyright by the authors and maintainers of these pages. Where possible and appropriate the name and email of the original contributor is supplied. Unless the original contributors explicitely keep their copyrights this is granted to the authors and maintainers of these pages on publication here.
Works on which rests copyright or trademarks must be clearly marked as such in a contribution. The above disclaimer does not in any way affect copyrights or trademarks the contributor had no right to affect.
All contributions involving copyrights and trademarks must be valid under the Bernese convention on that subject.
Can some lawyer type please dust off the above? It does look impressive but it must also be somewhat legally binding.

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house rules

House rules are actually fairly simple. It all comes down to variations of: don't annoy others. Of course it wouldn't be at all fun to leave it at that, and no doubt people would start arguing that their post would not annoy others, or it should not do so anyway. To prevent some of the inevitable arguments there are a number of rules that help define clearly what we rather not see in your contribution to these pages.

  • Messages should not be offending or insulting. Most certainly they should not be obviously meant to be. In cases where messages inadvertently are perceived as offending or insulting attempts will be made to correct the situation.
  • Messages should be on topic. Naturally the discussion must be allowed to wander in different directions, but if we consider a message to be wildly astray from the current topic in a discussion we'll reject it.
  • Messages should if at all possible be short. Hopefully this will be an active page, but the drawback of that is that they will be big as well. Hopefully it can be avoided that the webspace for these pages should be paid for...
    • Please avoid repetition. If you have nothing new to contribute there's no point in making that clear. That also means that simply agreeing with somebody should be avoided (no 'me too' posts please)
    • For speed of loading please avoid inlined images, unless they're really small. On busy days even an image of a few kilobytes can take forever to load.
    • If you must add something that can't be said in a few lines please consider making it available from your own pages and provide only a short summary and pointer to your pages.
  • Be carefull with including HTML in your contributions. While we do not disallow it please try to make sure it can be viewed properly with other browsers than the latest netscape. Or at least that when viewed with another browser (e.g. lynx) your contribution at least still makes sense.
  • No advertising. There are separate pages available for games to advertise themselves, and those pages are clearly marked as such. On other pages it's even considered bad taste to point to the ads.
  • Bear in mind that many people have different values and beliefs from you. Things you consider quite ordinary may be offending to others, and the reverse is true, just because you feel something is rude or offensive doesn't mean the poster of that message has meant it to be. It is very easy for neither of the sides in an argument to be in the wrong.
  • No flames, flamewars, insults. And most assuredly no personal information about others in a discussion. If you get into shouting matches and namecalling you're most likely going to be banned from these pages. If you have a personal disagreement take that to a personal medium like email.
    This rule includes your personal opinions of a particular game, or of players on a particular game. If you have any problem with administrators of a game talk to them. These pages are meant for information about roleplaying games in general and discussions of that topic.
  • Decisions about what is allowed in these pages finally rests with the staff. They will in general inform you (but please allow some time as they have to do this in their free time) why a certain post is rejected, thus allowing you to change it. But that decision is final. Appealing through email that the post was not meant that way, or that the staff is censoring or anything is not going to change the decision. In this respect we are censoring and are fully aware of the fact.

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navigational helps

The row of icons at the end of each page helps to navigate through the pages more easily. As going up the tree is easy, simply follow the appropriate links most of them deal with moving down the tree. In many cases one or more of the navigations make no sense for the given page. This is signalled by the icons being grayed out. Selecting those icons has no effect. They're available just for reference, and to maintain a consistent layout.


Home icon. > Home Selecting this icon brings you back to the homepage, the root of all pages. From there you can explore other pages and other branches.
Back icon. > Back Many discussions are very long. To avoid excessive loading times such discussions are split over several pages. By selecting this button you will be returned to the start of the previous page in such a list.
Next icon. > Next If there's another page on the same topic selecting this icon will bring you to its begin. These pages in general can be identified by a simplified header.
Index Icon > Index If this page is reached from an indexpage selecting this icon returns you to that index. This helps you to avoid the use of the 'back' icon on your browser which is especially cumbersome if you've been reading a long list of pages on a particular topic.
Exit icon. > Exit This icon acts in much the same way as the Index icon, except that it returns you to the next lower main index page. E.g. selecting 'index' on a discussion page for mud building may return you to the list of topics for discussion. Selecting 'exit' on that same page is likely to return you to the main index page for muds.
Mail icon. > Mail us For those browsers that support this you can select this icon to start a program to email us. The proper adress is supplied. If your browser doesn't support this feature you can copy the correct email adress from this link.
Help icon. > Help If you want to find out more about the pages, its disclaimers and what all those funny icons mean. But you found out already didn't you?

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