By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 10:51 am

When you register you are required to include an email address that will be used to validate your registration.  If you do not supply a valid email address you will not be able to activate your membership.

After activating your membership, you must maintain a valid email address.  Members who do not maintain a valid email address will be deleted.

Email addresses are displayed to the site administrators and moderators, but not to the other members of the site.  You can control who can contact you by altering the settings in your account.  If, for example, you allow other members to contact you, they will not see your email address.  Your email address is hidden to them when they email you.  When you receive an email from another member, unless you respond to it, your email address will remain private.

We do not share your email address with anyone.  The only reason an administrator/moderator will contact you is if there is a need to communicate with you regarding site matters (not to spam or to receive advertising).

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 11:06 am

HTML is not allowed in comments or in forum topics/responses.  A modified version of HTML is used to allow you to format your entries.  Click pmCode Reference for additional information (will open in a small/pop up window).

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 12:33 pm

This post should not be taken to supersede or invalidate the site rules.  It is offered as guidance.

This is not a personal blog site where your personal issues/opinions on all things should be posted to the front page/wiki.  Providing to the membership individual personal blogs are a violation of our software license agreement.  We can have a group contributor site under license agreement (which is what the GunThing is), but this is a group site about guns and self-preparedness/self-defense related things, not everything under the sun.  People can discuss a lot of things in the forum, but they need to be aware that those things only stick around for six months.

People who want to blog about things not specifically related to the focus of this site should do that on their own blog site, such as BlogSpot (or any number of free blogging sites) or get their own domain to do that. 

You can link your blog URL in your signature without violating the rules about advertising here. 

Please do not post the entirety of a blog post here.  You may quote yourself and/or link to it, if it is appropriate to the content/subject of this site, but do not post the entirety of it.  By doing so, you are surrendering your copyright to that material. 

Please respect the copyrights of others and do not post copyrighted articles in their entirety.  (If anyone believes that their copyrights have been violated, please email the webmaster [webmaster-at-gunthing-dot-com] with a link, and it will be edited so that your copyrighted material is properly quoted or deleted according to Fair Use requirements.)

“Fair Use” allows copyrighted material to be excerpted or quoted, to provide the gist of the reference.  (See Fair Use at Wikipedia for more information.)

Keep in mind also that this site retains the copyrights for all things posted here, as spelled out in the terms of service, so anything that you want to retain the copyrights for should not be posted here.  If it is topical and easier to link your blog rather than responding to a specific post, link it and quote it, but otherwise we ask that you not turn this into a advertising campaign for your own blogs.

This site may not be used for classified advertising of any kind, unless submitted through BlogAds (or any other advertising agent authorized to sell advertising on this site).  With prior permission, members are allowed to mention in the forum that they are interested in selling something, but permission MUST be obtained first or the post will be deleted.  We are not responsible for the sale or transfer of any item, nor does membership or the limited permission to post a “for sale” item on this site constitute an endorsement or recommendation.

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 10:38 am

The security of the software (what you can and cannot do) is determined by registering on the site and is then determined by the member group you are assigned.  New members are assigned to the “NewMembers” group.  NewMembers may post to the forums and the wiki.  Members in the “members” group may also post to the front page of the site.  “Moderators” may do all of that, in addition to the ability to administrate the wiki and the forums.

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 10:08 am

ll folks in the “Members” member group have front page posting permissions.

This is VERY quick guide to do that:

Accessing the Control Panel:

1. Go to the front pages of the site (must be logged in for this to work).
2. On the left side bar there is a link, “Control Panel.” Click it.
3. You may need to login again, if so, use your same username/password.

The Control Panel will display.

To publish an entry to the front page:

From the Control Panel:

1. Hover or Click on the “Publish” tab.  This will display a choice of “departments” (ie, “weblogs").  These correspond to the various departments tabs on the front page:


• Gun Thing is the front front page.
• Reviews and Range Reports are the types of things that were in the Gun Encylopedia, but they can be anything you guys want them to be.
• Preparedness:  This roughly correlates to the SHTF forum, but could be more extensive than that.
• Lists:  These might be tools, guns, etc.
2. Select the weblog you want to post to.
3. Type in a title for the entry--(recommendation, make it a title that will be useful in searches, not commentary).
4. Type the contents of your post in the “body” field.  HTML is turned on.  Be sure to add double carriage returns between paragraphs, check spelling, etc.  You don’t need to add HTML as it will automatically format paragraphs and such, but you can add bolds or ther formatting as needed.  To upload in inline image there is a little document icon right below the “Quick Save” button.  Resize your images so that no image is wider/larger than the page width (max width about 500 to be safe).
5. Click on the category tab and CHOOSE A CATEGORY.  This is really important (and easy to forget to do). 

   The moderators and me have the ability to add new categories.  If one needs to be added, it can be added later and you can edit your post later to change it to the new one.

6. Click Submit and Voila! your post will appear on the front pages.

Editing a Post

1. Click the Edit tab on the Control Panel.  “Members” can only edit their own posts, not the posts entered by others.  The Moderators can edit/delete posts made my others.
2. Make your changes.
3. Click [Submit] to save your changes.

Member Issues:

When folks register for the site, they automatically are put in the “NewMembers” member group.  Moderators can change their member group to “Members” to allow them to post in the front pages.  If you have been a NewMember in good standing and would like to be moved to the Members group, please email the webmaster at webmaster-at-gunthing-dot-com (or contact one of the moderators).

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 10:47 am

Threads/comments posted on the forums are kept for six months.  At the end of each month (generally the last day of each month), the posts from the 7th month are deleted.

Members are encouraged to post reference content (or other content that has a longer lifespan than six months) to either the front page of the site or the wiki.

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 10:35 am

Please click here to view.  (The link also displays in the footer on each page.)

By Tech Support
Sun, Dec 30, 2007 10:49 am

This site does not allow anonymous posting.  You must register to post comments or to the forum.