Towards the end of the registration or account creation process, most forums ask their users to verify that they’ve read and agree to the terms & conditions set by the forum.
Forum rules example
Registration to this forum is free! We do insist that you abide by the rules and policies detailed below. If you agree to the terms, please check the ‘I agree’ checkbox and press the ‘Register’ button below. If you would like to cancel the registration, click here to return to the forums index.
Although the administrators and moderators of this forum – This forum will attempt to keep all objectionable messages off this forum, it is impossible for us to review all messages. All messages do not express the views of the author, and the owners of this forum – These forums, nor will Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd. (developers of vBulletin) be held responsible for the content of any message.
By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws.
The owners of this forum reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason.
Forums: Ethics & etiquette
Not all forum members have genuine intentions of abiding by the forum rules and policies, most Internet users have unfortunately been desensitized from reading terms & conditions or such content in general, because more times than not the terms are too long and become too technical; and because of this some first timers have no ethics or etiquette and end up being booted from their first forum quickly indeed.
Experienced forum users take pleasure and time to actively contribute to their posts and replies and constantly thank and praise real genuine active reputable participants. One type of people disliked like spammers have been nicknamed “Trolls” on forums. Trolls post completely useless content in hopes of starting emotional discussions among other members; people look down on users who may be spamming the forum or are simply wasting others time. Well prepared forums have useful links besides each post enabling users to report particular members or violations of posts or replies.
Being positive, kind and courteous is what really means being a forum member. You can’t walk out in the middle of the mall and start yelling what you’re selling because no-one would listen to you, unfortunately some people just think they can get away with it on the Internet.
Being banned from a forum
Once banned from a forum for violating it’s terms of use, you will not be able to sign up and register again with the same email address or username and sometimes your IP (Internet Protocol) address (this is a number identifies your connection/computer on the Internet) may be put on a temporary ban list which can last several months.
Infamous forum spammers
Forums have been designed with safeguards, and in such a way to help identify spammers rather quickly. Spammers come to forums to promote their products and websites often times forcing administrators to disable forum features such as follow links (making them nofollow links so search engines don’t give that site love), closing threads, deleting threads and sometimes even closing down the forum altogether; because when forums aren’t looked after or moderated, they turn elsewhere in search of a better solutions.
Being sanctioned
When forum violators are brought into question, administrators sometimes have ways of sanctioning or punishing these people. Not being able to submit a post or reply for a given time is one such form of punishment, removing your signature many be another; this all depends on the functionality of your forum.