GrandDuchess
Heir Apparent
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2004
- Messages
- 3,402
- City
- Somwhere
- Country
- Sweden
THE ROYAL FORUMS NEWSLETTER – SEPTEMBER 2005 *
Welcome to the September 2005 edition of The Royal Forums’ newsletter.
This time of year always makes me think of a particular song, if only for it’s mame, “See You in September” by The Happenings:
See you in September
See you when the summer's through
Here we are (bye, baby, goodbye)
Saying goodbye at the station (bye, baby, goodbye)
Summer vacation (bye, baby bye, baby)
Is taking you away (bye, baby, goodbye)
It was my goodbye calling to friends on the last day of school I wouldn’t see over the summer. Pigtailed and in a summer dress or shorts, clutching school projects and paintings done over the course of the year, and a report card full of A's (
), I would gleefully yell out “Have a good summer! See you in September!” as I ran all the way home, thoughts of summer playing already filling my head. As an adult, September is less of a transition for me. It doesn’t mark the beginning of a new school year, new teachers, or even a new school as it does for some people. (The one September “tradition” I do still observe however is new clothes for fall!) But it is still a transition of sorts—summer’s not quite over and fall’s not quite here yet. Although lazy weekends spent at the cottage sitting on the dock or relaxing at the beach are at an end, there are many things I look forward to as we dwell on the cusp of fall: apple picking followed by hot apple cider, the first leaves changing colours, and for some of us, a new television viewing season! And for those who live in countries that observe Daylight Saving Time (DST), an extra hour of sleep (or play!) when we “fall back” an hour in October.
For all of us here at The Royal Forums, the next several months brings forth a cornucopia of royal treats to look forward to: the birth of two royal heirs (Denmark and Spain), the birth of the Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Belgium's third baby, the Dutch baptisms of Princess Alexia and Felecia van Lippe-Biesterfeld van Vollenhoven, the Greek baptism of Carlos Morales, the Dutch wedding of Prince Floris and Aimé Söhngen, and the Japanese wedding of Princess Sayako and Yoshiki Kuroda.
We have much to look forward in the coming months—and I hope that you’ll spend that extra hour of DST here at TRF. I know I will be—and preferably sipping a mug of hot apple cider while doing it!
/Alexandria & The Royal Forums Team
PS. If there is a royal person or residence, or a special piece of jewellery you would like to see covered in a future issue of our newsletter, please let us know here. Our member comments and suggestions are always welcome.
FORUM NOTES
This newsletter, as well as the previous Summer Edition, is due to the tremendous efforts of GrandDuchess, whom in the last two months not only taken on moderating duties but has taken on the newsletter with great enthusiasm and initiative. Our future newsletters will be even more wonderful no doubt because of GrandDuchess' participation in them—so a great round of applause and much appreciate should be sent her way!
Recently one of the TRF Team’s Super Moderators, Lena, personally decided that she wanted to leave the team and take back her ordinary member status. We would like to acknowledge her by saying that we have appreciated her very much in the team, she has been a valuable member of the workforce in all and everything, and we thank her for the time she spent on moderating here on the forums. Thank you Lena!
The TRF Team is very pleased to welcome the additions of pdas1201 and Warren to our moderating team. Both have been active and respectable contributors and we know that they will prove to be a valuable asset to the managing work here on the forums.
To celebrate The Royal Forums’ 1st Jubilee, the TRF Team has issued a banner contest for the members of our forum. The banner should be no larger than 760x80 pixels, and the images feature the current monarchs (and their spouses) or future monarchs (and their spouses), and preferable it should also reflect the geographical diversity of the Royal Houses covered here on the forums. The winner will get their banner displayed at the top of the forum where the current banner now is, and will also be awarded some special member privileges. The closing date of the contest is 4 September. Click here to read more.
The TRF Team has recently done a little re-organization of the forums. We did this to make it more efficient and easier to navigate, and with this a few new main forums appeared on the front page. We hope that our members are happy with this, any comments or ideas can be left in this thread.
Administrators and SuperModerators have recently been getting a number of questions and complaints from some of the members about why their post counts sometimes drop. There are two reasons for this.
First, the Moderation Team go through older threads from time to time and delete old posts with broken links or ones containing photos that have been duplicated in other posts. We realize that this will decrease the post counts of the members whose posts are deleted, but this is a necessary piece of "housekeeping" to help conserve bandwidth and to make the threads more readable.
Second, we've recently been seeing attempts by several people to increase their post counts by posting large numbers of short posts that really don't say anything or by posting related photos or articles in separate posts rather than together in one post. This wastes bandwidth, clogs up threads with inanities, disrupts the flow of conversation, and generally reduces the quality of the threads, as well as taking a lot of time for moderators to merge or edit posts. Far from being a good thing, this tendency is liable to get a person labeled as a troublemaker. While we have tried to tolerate this in the past, it's happening on a sufficiently large scale that these posts are now being deleted.
The Administrators and SuperModerators are not impressed by people with post counts in the thousands who got those numbers by spamming the boards with hundreds of posts saying "Thank you for posting," "Got any more information?," "awwwww, isn't he/she cute?," "this is what I listened to just now" and on and on and on ad nauseam. This sort of behavior does not make a person an asset to this forum. A post like that once in a while is fine. Twenty or thirty times a day most emphatically is not.
We would like to remind people that the quality of their posts, not just the quantity, is the important thing. If people aren't posting interesting and informative posts, then they're damaging the forum, not contributing to it.
While we're glad that people enjoy the Member Titles such as Royal Highness and Majesty, the Moderation Team would appreciate if posters did not abuse the system in order to get these titles. We do NOT want to see this site descend into juvenile chat as though people were teens texting back and forth. Nor do we want to see news and photo threads reaching their ten-page limit every few days because someone has posted a dozen photos or links about the same event in different posts rather than together. If people don't have something positive or interesting to contribute to the boards, the best thing is to wait until you do.
Therefore, the Moderation Team will ignore further complaints regarding decreased post count. Members who continue to try and increase their post count with repeated abuses as described above will be subject to warning and eventual suspension.
If anyone has questions about this, feel free to PM a member of the Moderation Team.
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