1. No bad language. Posts that contain bad language will be deleted without warning.
2. No personal attacks of any kind.
3. No criticism of products that you are not satisfied with. This is for legal protection.
4. No plagiarism of any kind. This includes the upload of images that you do not own.
5. No posts that are not microscopy-related.
6. Keep image size appropriate. Crop away parts that are not relevant.
7. If possible use an external image hosting site and then link the image to save server space (which is limited per user anyway).
8. No posts with the only intent of advertising. Sometimes links are to products are useful for microscopy. In this case I will make a decision.
9. Search the forum first for answers to your questions before you post a question.
Personal attacks, insults, expletives etc.
Please report posts that are offending. Any member who posts personal attacks and/or insults directed to another forum member or someone who uses bad language can and will be blocked/removed without warning. The offending posts will also be removed. It is possible not display the posts of certain other users. Click on the offending member's name to view the profile. There click on the link "add foe" to not display the posts of this member. Do not provoke other members and do not respond to offending posts as this will simply increase the spiraling. I will also remove posts that respond. Should members receive abusive Personal Messages (PMs), then please also inform the forum admin. I will block/remove the user as well. The forum is about microscopy not about personal feuds. The administrator will decide if the violation justifies a removal from the forum.
Spam posts
Please report spam posts, I will remove them and the member that posted them. Some posts might be considered "useful advertising", where a member promotes a microscopy-related product. Once other users have responded to such a post in a useful way, it will be difficult/impossible for me to remove this post without breaking the thread.
Accessing the site
There are two Web addresses that you can use, and both lead to this very forum:
1. http://www.microscopy-forum.com
2. http://www.microbehunter.com/microscopy-forum
Registering
The procedure for registering is very straight forward:
1. Click the "Register" link in the top left corner.
2. Agree to the Terms and Conditions
3. Fill in username, password and email
4. Type in the code
5. Confirm by clicking the link in the email.
6. You have to type the answer to a question as an anti-spam measure.
7. Important: I will have to manually approve.
Inserting pictures
There are two ways of making pictures visible inside one post.
1. You can upload a picture to an external image hosting service (Photobucket, Flickr, etc.) and then include the link to the picture inside the post. Copy paste the complete link (including the beginning http://) and then surround the link with the
for Flickr, go to share and copy paste the BBCode into the forum
2. You can upload pictures to the forum. Below the edit box there is the option to upload attachments. Select the picture that you want to upload ("choose file") and then upload it. you can also add a caption to each image. There is a limit to 5 pictures per post, each picture can not be larger than 512KB and can not be larger than 1024x1024. Larger images take much loading time and can not be displayed properly inside the available space. If these size requirement are not met, then it will not upload. There is also a maximum storage space allocated to each user. These restrictions are necessary, otherwise there is not enough server space available. I might have to adjust these values, however. This is not the most flexible method if you want to present many pictures. It is really important, that you do not upload pictures which you did not make yourself (copyright issue). To manage your files, you have to visit the User Control Panel (UCP) on the top right corner. After the upload, select the picture from the dropdown list below the edit box and click "Place inline".
Inserting Youtube videos
Directly copy-pasting the youtube link into the edit box will not display the video (it will only show a link to the video, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XROxpVE5rEg). This is for security reasons. If you want to embed a video, so that it actually shows up, then you must follow the following steps:

Oliver.