New Members

[Paul]

Hello,

Welcome aboard.

What we're trying to do here is support the community in the wake of Freeplay 2009. There's been a flurry of activity and interest in a bunch of different initiatives, and what we want to do is provide a central place for discussing them.

The forum is split in two - public and private.

Public Forums
The public forums are open to the whole world, so bear in mind what you say. There's this Forum, How to Join, a General Conversation Forum, where you can talk about anything, and a Feedback forum, designed to gather comments on Freeplay, associated events, the website, or anything else we've helped put together. There's also space for Announcements and Freeplay events that aren't for public use, but for us to keep you informed about what's happening with Freeplay

Private Forums
To gain access to the private forums, you need to register for the forums generally, then send us an approval request at forum@freeplay.net.au and we'll grant you access.

Once you're inside, you'll find space for News and Reviews, Get Togethers, Events, Looking for Help, Feedback, and Team Forums.

News and Reviews is a place for posting information, reviews, or anything of interest to the braoder indie community.

Get Togethers is a space for talking about informal gatherings taking place around Melbourne.

Events is designed for discussion about more structured events.

Looking for help is where you can post if you're looking for a team to join, or someone to join your team.

Feedback is where you can post looking for feedback on your work. It's broken down to games, code, art, and design.

Team Forums is where we can set up team-specific forums if you're working on a project and looking for an online space to keep things.

We're still feeling our way through this, so if there are any ideas you have for new forums, let us know. We can't guarantee we'll set one up, but if it fits with what we're trying to do with Freeplay & there's enough interest, we'll see what we can do.

Rules
We don't have many rules, so please take some time to read through the ones that we do have.

We don't believe in heavy moderation, so we won't be actively policing threads. We will, however, respond to complaints from members about specific posts. That said, don't abuse the moderation features of the forum. We want this to be an active, vibrant community, and we imagine that will involve some level of disagreement. In all conversations, be constructive, be polite, and remember that there's another person on the other side of the keyboard. Also, remember that the games industry is a small place and that there are people here who you may end up working with in the future or might meet outside of the forum, so treat what you post as something you'd be fine with saying in real life.

There are a few things we won't put up with though:

Active trolling, flame-baiting, or trying to deliberately get a rise out of someone. There's a fine line between being terribly amusing and pissing someone off. Err on the side of caution whenever you're unsure.

Anything overtly sexist, racist, or bigoted. That's not why we're here, and there's less of a fine line about posting this content.

Anything commercial or 'spam'. This is a community forum about independent games development, and we want to keep it that way, so no products, services, or anything related to making money. We'll automatically delete those posts.

Posting comments from the private section outside of the forum. There's a reason they're private - so that people can talk about what they want, without worrying about the larger outside world.

If you're unsure about any of these, feel free to pm or email the admins - forum@freeplay.net.au

Cheers,
Paul.