About the ER Discussions Forum

greenspun.com : LUSENET : ER Discussions : Policy

What is this place?

This forum is desinged to compliment the alt.tv.er Web pages. It is not supposed to replace or supplant the newsgroup of the same name but rather be an adjunct discussion forum. Technical questions about the Web site should be directed to the feedback page within the site itself; this message board is mostly for discussion relating to the show and the episodes.

Ideally, this forum would be used as a dynamic FAQ that picks up where the static one leaves off. I don't particularly mind the occasional chatty thread, but lord knows I didn't set out to build and maintain a $650,000 chat server. If you want to chat with other ER fans, there are other forums on the net where you can do that (including Usenet).

New: As of September 2000, I've finally written a guide detailing what I think is a good topic for this bboard.

Please note that no one involved in the production or maintenance of this site or this forum has anything at all to do with the producers of the television show, so griping about how offended you were probably should go directly to Warner Brothers or NBC rather than here. The forum administrator and moderator reserves the right to delete any message within this forum for any reason, including "because he was in a bad mood." Typical reasons for deletion include duplication of posts (you should have found a more appropriate thread), improper formatting (don't post in all caps), blatant threats, flaming, and off-topicness (go somewhere else), and because your name contains the letter "E" somewhere.

E-mail address validity has been implemented. If you post using an invalid e-mail address, the system will begin weeding your posts out automatically. If you're concerned about spammers, don't be; spammers don't like to follow .tcl links very much, and each message is a .tcl URL. Note that this system only checks for invalid or unresolvable hostnames at the moment.

This is being done to solve technical problems within this community and to cut down on the number of bouncing e-mail messages showing up in my mailbox.

Questions? Comments? E-mail erfaq@digiserve.com or phloem@fumbling.com.

How this System Works

This bboard software was written by Philip Greenspun and hosted for free by him started in 1995. Anyone could come in and create a forum and moderate the discussion. Most of the thousands of forums on this server were and are publicly searchable by Google and other Web indices.