Just a reminder, we are a family-oriented group

[ezdays]

As a family-oriented forum, we strive to keep our topics and wording such that you wouldn't care if your mother or your pre-teen daughter came here to read your posts. We do not want to discourage anyone from posting just about anything, even off-topic stuff, but note the word "just". After all, we are like family here, but just to keep things from getting out of hand, or becoming offensive to a bunch of us, here are a few things to watch out for before posting:

1. Topics about religion and politics usually wind up in a shouting match, with no winners. Try to avoid these subjects, for no matter how innocent they start out, they always wind up in the tank and usually with some hurt feelings.
   
2. Try to avoid words of a sexual or profane nature, even obscure ones. We have filters that catch a lot of common ones and replace those words with **** or another word that you probably didn't want, but we can't filter those that we don't know. If you post one that is suspect, we'll look it up, and add it to our list of banned words if necessary.
   
3. Do not try to avoid this by using symbols in place of letters. Our moderators here will catch you and they will edit or delete your post.
   
4. Do your best to not hijack a thread. It's not uncommon to take a thread in a different direction, but you can always start a new thread if your post is totally out of the ballpark from the topic being discussed.

We will always let you know if we've edited or deleted your post or ask you to do it, and we'll tell you why. Don't feel badly if that happens to your post, it's nothing against you personally and we may be erring on the side of caution. Let us know if you don't agree. We have a reputation for being a forum where anyone can come without feeling offended, embarrassed or not welcome. That's lasted now for over ten years and we're proud of that record. We are pleased with the quality of modelers and train enthusiasts that we attract here and we want to keep all of you coming back. We have all made new friends as well, and that means a lot to us all.