Originally Posted by Garner

Hiya Tracey,

It's a bit of a long, complicated, and mostly unpleasant story, but the simplest answer to your question is malicious deceit. We once had one person use around a dozen different accounts to cause trouble. They'd do all sorts of things to annoy people, violating the various community rules and standards that they knew would be most effective at getting up our noses. They also used their subterfuge accounts to attack some of the community members, then had the audacity to use their 'real' account to suggest that the victims were responsible, faking the abuse to gain sympathy.

As a result of that sort of thing, we've remained permanantly wary of it ever since. Unfortunately, this has resulted in unfair suspicion placed on people who started off on the wrong foot ever since. As you may have gathered, we frown on abbreviated 'net speak' around here, so if someone from a younger generation or a community that finds that sort of thing acceptible shows up, and especially if there's another user with the same IP address, alarm bells go off deep in our bunker where we're busy at work developing finger print readers to secretly fit in every keyboard in the world.

While we do require an email account for registration, that's really just another measure to cut down on the account fraud and we generally communicate via the boards' Private Message (Clacks) function. So, with that explaination out of the way, welcome to the boards and thanks for clearing up the confusion.

If you haven't made use of the introduction thread yet, please do so! Are you responsible for turning Lachlan on to Pratchett, and are the rest of your family members as big into him as you two?