I would like to use the POTN forum rules for my own non-photography forum.

I'm an avid bonsai grower. I'm also the incoming president of our local organization. We would like to set up a discussion forum for our members and guests.

Not to brown-nose the moderators here, but the people of POTN are some of the best behaved posters on the Internet. We stick to the photography and leave the personal attacks and attitudes out of it. This is why I want to model our rules off of the POTN rules. As our forum will involve people who also meet once a month, keeping things nice and cool is a critical requirement.

As we are all big on copyrights here, I know that I should get permission to post a modification of the POTN rules as those used by the bonsai group. How should I go about acknowledging the source of our rules? I'm adding new sections to the rules and rewriting some of the POTN rules. I am, of course, replacing all references to photography with bonsai. However, many of the rules are still verbatim copies of POTN text.

NOTE: I will not discuss the name of the group or the location of the new forum with any members here. I'm not here to advertise the new forum. Moderators may certainly contact me for this information as it pertains to my request and membership in good standing with POTN.

I suggest you send a PM to Pekka and ask him about this.

I don't really believe these rules are copyrighted, so chances are there's no problem modeling yours after them. The real secret is consistent moderating. You can't enforce the rules one day, and let them slide the next.

Also, make sure your moderators are non-confrontational, if not outright friendly. Nothing will sour a member quicker than a crabby moderator telling them they have to do things "because I said so."

I think a lot of the sucess of this forum is the choice of moderators. Pekka does a good job of choosing the right people.

I'll agree. I'm not too familiar with these forums just yet (it's been my #1 visited forum for the past few weeks though), but this place seems on par with my other main forum that I frequent (been there since late '04, recently becoming a bit less active over there) with moderation. The classifieds section here is MUCH less safe and less protected, but it's also seen as a completely separate section of the forum where POTN staff doesn't moderate it (deal wise at least). However, the same things go. Consistent moderation is all you need.