Ideally, at least while the forum is small, moderators pro-actively find any Code of Conduct violations on their own while reading and participating in the forums. However, we also need to rely on the community to self-police themselves by making use of the Report Post feature built into the software. The following steps will guide you through how it works and give you some tips that will help you help us when reviewing the report.

To report a post, click on the exclamation point in the bottom right-hand corner of the post. This guy: That will open up a new page that will give you some fields to provide us with details as to why you think that specific post needs to be reported.

The first field is Reason. This field contains a drop-down list providing you with several broad categories. If the reason you're reporting the post doesn't fit any of those choices, please make use of the "Other" option.

The next important field is Further Information. While the software allows that field to be left blank, we'd like to request that you make use of it. The more details you can give us here, the better chance we'll have to understand why you reported - especially in cases of subtle CoC issues. Certainly, there are some cases - such as a spambot - where little or no detail is needed. But for the most part, make an assumption that the mod who ends up dealing with the issue isn't aware of the thread, nor is he or she aware of any personal issues among posters.

If you wish to report the entire thread, then report the first post and tell us you think the whole thread is in violation. If you wish to report a series of posts, report the first one and in the Further Information field, make it clear to us that there is more than one post that needs to be dealt with. For example, if Poster X bypassed the site filters to insert a racial slur into his post and Poster Y quoted the post, please report Poster X, but also make mention of the quote by Poster Y later in the thread.

Do NOT use the thread report tool to grind your personal axe against another forum member. If you and John Doe don't get along, that's a shame - but it's also life. Do not use the thread report tool in an effort to get John Doe in trouble. Persistent misuse of the tool will result in a moderator lead having a discussion with you about it, and further misuse will result in a warning issued against your account.

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Hopefully, this quick guide aids you in your use of the tool. If you have any questions about the tool, please go ahead and ask them here. On occasion, we'll go through and purge this thread of posts, maintaining a FAQ as part of this post so information isn't lost.