Forum rules and regulations

[Aerosoft Team [Inactive Account] 51558]

I like to post a short note on forum behavior as we have had a few nasty incidents and we banned a few people (some apologized and are back). Most of these problems are caused by users not understanding what kind of forum this is. See, these forums are an integral part of our total online presence. We use them for support but they are also part of our Public Relations and Marketing. They are in other words owned and controlled by Aerosoft.

Other forums are community forums. They are a service of a company to the community or are totally run and organized by the users themselves. Good examples are the forums at AVSIM or FlightSim. They are most certainly not part of a controlled marketing or public relation department.

In our forums we decide what is possible and what is not. And in contrast to certain rumors that is rather a lot. We got very relaxed rules on many things and we got members that are not welcome on other sites. You can use far stronger language then on many US based sites and our list of banned words is very small. We welcome your comments, even if you do not agree with us. We are by far, by a large margin, the biggest developer and publisher of flight simulation add-ons and with many customer come many people who do not agree with something.

But we simply insist that you are polite in you public posts. Give arguments and make your point and we will respond with our point of view. If you are a customer and got a problem explain it and give us the opportunity to fix the issue, we got a few prizes for support and we know we are pretty good in that aspect. There are hundreds of these conversations in our forums.

If you feel that you should be able to shout, insult us (and our customers), ignore all arguments and just want to be a troll, we'll simply ignore you, delete the post, ban you and move on to discuss issues with the people that play nice. The forum users got a lot to say about that. If we see a user that got a lot of down votes he will most likely be asked to stay out for a while. If we see that some people up-voted an obvious troll we will ask them what they thought was valuable about the message they voted up. Even trolls come with friends right?

All in all we got a very simple idea on what can be posted and what not. If you ever doubt just think about this. Would you say it to somebody if he was sitting across you at diner? If you would, post it, if not rephrase. The keyword as in all dealing with other people is respect.

There is one thing that will get you banned even faster than calling one of my support officers a blithering idiot and that is making fun of somebody's languages skills. For the majority of people (like me) the language they use on the forum is not their native language and often they are not confident. A joker correcting their language mistakes will make sure they will never come back. The rule is simple, as long as we understand what you are talking about, your post is perfect.