DIY Doctor Forum Rules

It is our aim to supply you our users with the best online help, advice, question and answer and discussion platform for DIY and Home Improvement on the internet and to ensure that any information supplied is safe and reliable and delivered in a friendly and non abusive manner some rules have to be stipulated.

General Guidelines

In some instances there may be a slight delay in the posting of your question or answer due to the fact that before any content is added it is moderated for relevance and reliability etc….

You may also find that you do not receive any answers to questions you have posted immediately. In this case please be patient someone should respond to you shortly. A great number of users that post answers and advice are volunteers and are not paid and do so of their own free will so please take the time out to thank them if they have assisted you.

In light of the above it is also good practice to add a final post to your question once solved just to round it all up and confirm what you did to solve it so that the next user that comes along with the same or very similar query has the answer right there and then.

On browsing around the forum you may notice that there are quite a few different forum areas. The forum categories listed under the “DIY and Home Improvement Forums” heading are to be used for help, information and advice only. For more general chit chat and banter please use the “Members Private Discussion and Chat” area found in the “Members Area”.

If you are a tradesman we have also supplied a specific “Trades” forum. This area is for specific trades discussion only and can include chat and banter about any aspect of your specific trade so please only use this area if you are a tradesman.

Any information and advice supplied on this forum is given in good faith and no member(s) can be held responsible for it.

If you are unsure about any supplied advice please please consult the relative trade professional. Please also read our forum and site disclaimer and privacy policy:

• www.diydoctor.org.uk/forums/ucp.php?mode=register (ensure you click on the date option that is correct for your age)
• www.diydoctor.org.uk/disclaimer/
• www.diydoctor.org.uk/privacypolicy.htm

Board Emails

On the very odd occasion our forum administrators may need to mass email all members. This may be to highlight an error, inform of some arising issues such as down time due to a software upgrade or server move etc…. In these instances it is necessary that we inform all users and for the reason the mass mailing facility supplied as standard in our forum software is enabled by default and cannot be disabled on a user level.

Private Messaging

Due to previous abuse of this particular feature of the forum we have had to regrettably disable it.

Posting Questions and Answers – spamming, bad language, links to adult/warez sites, SEO and self promoting links

Under no circumstances do we accept spam posts or links, abusive bad language, links to adult sites and content, links to warez sites and illegal download sites, links to pharmaceutical related sites selling drugs of any kind (legal prescription or illegal) and links that have obviously been posted for seo purposes.

As all content is moderated and monitored all posts will be evaluated for their validity and relevance by the moderation and administration team and it is up to them as to what they determine qualifies as any of the above.

If any user(s) is found to be submitting posts that meet any of the above criteria then they will be banned immediately so please be aware of this.

Respect Other Users and be Nice

As has been previously stated, our forum area is a platform for sharing information help, advice and ideas it is not a platform for abusing or belittling others. What one person may see as a joke others might not find as funny so when posting please be aware of this and be as objective as possible. On this note we are not a bunch of kill-joys and jokes and light banter can sometimes brighten someone's day, but please keep it good natured.

If any users are found to be repeatedly unnecessarily course, offensive or abusive then they will be banned without warning.

Welcome Area

Within this area you should find all the information you will need in order to get started with posting your questions, assisting and answering other questions, adding images to your posts, resizing images, adding links to posts and dealing with any issues or problems that you encounter.

Members Area

This area is reserved for our members only. If you wish to enjoy the benefits that this area of our forum provides then all you need to do is create an account, it's free and easy. To create an account please view the “Welcome” area on the forum index page: https://www.diydoctor.org.uk/forums/find-out-how-to-use-forum.html. Within this area you will find several sections:

• Offers and Discounts: This area features a great many offers and discounts that we have found on the web and also some that have been offered exclusively to DIY Doctor and our users.
• TV/Media Opportunities: Occasionally DIY Doctor receive offers from various TV and media companies looking for participants that may be interested in appearing on TV, in magazines and also an array of other printed and digital mediums. This area is reserved specifically for any offers of this nature.
• Have Your Say: This area is to allow any users of our site to let us know if there is anything that we have missed or if there is anything that we can do to improve our site and our service.
• Members Private Discussion: This area is specifically for non-DIY and Home Improvement related chat. Members are allowed to discuss any topics they wish but please be respectful to all and everyone.
• Trades Forum: This forum area is specifically for tradespeople to discuss any aspect of their relative trade.

Tool and Product Reviews - What is this for?

This area of our forum is divided into 2 sections - the forum at the top of the page lists several categories that DIY Doctor posts information on concerning the recent tool and product reviews that we have been carrying out. With each of these reviews you our users are also free to leave comments and opinions on our reviews or your own opinions and reviews of the tools or product in question.

Below this top section you will see a topics area. Within this area you are free to create your own reviews or topics asking other users for their own opinions on tools and products.

Classifieds

This area does pretty much what it says on the tin. Within this forum you will see a number of different sections from household appliances to tools and other items.

Within each of these sections you are able to post adverts for any items that relate to the category all for FREE. Ensure that you describe the item in full (including any damage that may be present), state the price, include images and also some contact details (phone number or email address).

We do however advise that YOU DO NOT post any of your address details and only state the area in which you are located e.g. Bristol, Manchester etc.... and discuss more detailed address information with any interested parties privately. This is a publicly accessible forum that attracts upwards of 150,000 users per month and any details added will be on full view and for this reason we are not responsible for who may be viewing them.

General Chat

Keep it clean, tidy and respectful and be aware that we do get under 18's using this site.

DIY and Home Improvement Forums

The only real rule that we have that is specific to all of our DIY help and advice forums (aside from the general forum usage rules listed on this page) is that we ask when posting questions just to make sure that you are posting in the correct forum that is related to your query and that you do not double post e.g. post the same question in 2 different forums.

Posting of Images

In some cases it can be really useful to post images when asking or answering a question as they can really help to reinforce text information.

Images can be easily attached during the creation of your question or answer. For more information on how to do this please see our how to by clicking here. If you are posting images to support your question please also see our help section on resizing images

Signatures

At present we do not support profile signatures due to the current makeup of our forum software. We are however working on a fix for this and will introduce this feature at a later date.

Reporting posts

Due to the size of our forum occasionally things can be missed so if you are browsing and come across anything that should not be displaying e.g. spam, inappropriate links etc…. please make us aware of it by clicking on the appropriate icon detailed in the image below:

Banned Users

If you are unfortunate enough to have been banned then there is a good chance that you have violated one of the above rules however occasionally we do make mistakes so if you do not think that you should not have been banned or would like an explanation as to why you have been banned then please email web@diydoctor.org.uk quoting your user name.