bittah.com :: bittah Network Rules & Guidelines

bittah.com!~ // Everything Tribes, Tribes 2, Tribes: Vengeance in Australia and New Zealand

Latest Posts

Quick Stats 0 playing

0 playing

7 browsing
25 chatting
talking

/ FAQ

1.0 Definitions
1.1 What is bittah?
1.2 The bittah Network?
1.3 Administrators
1.4 Moderators
1.5 IRC Operators

2.0 Network related
2.1 Who runs this circus?
2.2 The bittah core group structure

3.0 Network Rules and Guidelines
3.1 Overview
3.2 Procedure
3.3 Forum guidelines
3.4 Actions which wont be tolerated on the website
3.5 Actions that wont be tolerated on IRC
3.6 Appeals

4.0 Other
4.1 Im interested in the technical aspects of the site, what backend do you use?
4.2 Whats the deal with the new template?

1.0 Definitions

1.1 What is bittah?
bittah.com is the hub of the Australian and New Zealand Tribes community. We offer a medium for communication, nothing more. This simplicity and understanding of our members has seen us grow from a small core community site to an increasingly growing tribal community. We pride ourselves on not having a community more interested in posting 1rd in the latest photoshop my mum thread and not having to listen to someone demand what we can and can not do with our site.

Bittah was forged out of blood sweat and tears officially in June 2002. At the time, the central AU/NZ tribes site (snaggs.com) was becoming increasingly slow due to troubles with the backend and the physical pipe it was connected to. Put simply, it was dying. After months of this situation, squirrel talk began between a few people in the community about rebuilding snaggs as the situation was becoming extremely frustrating. Due to many reasons, we decided collectively to start a new site which better represented the tribes community as a whole instead of one main figure. At the time the latest interweb buzz word travelling the servers was "bittah" as in, bitterness. Everything fell into place after that. "Standard" had actually registered bittah.com months earlier for his future personal site. He offered the domain registration for the cause and the rest is history.
Back to top

1.2 The bittah Network?
The bittah network encompasses the website, the bittah IRC service, and any online gaming servers carrying the bittah.com tag.
Back to top

1.3 Administrators
These are the individuals tasked with rights and responsibilities directly related to the running, maintenance, moderation and direction of the network. Admins can either be identified as having 'admin' rank images and a red title on the forums or just by being an egotistical bastard ;)
Back to top

1.4 Moderators
These are the individuals who control the information being posted on our forums. Please see the forum rules for the guidelines they follow on our sites. Like admins, moderators will be identifiable with a moderator rank image and a bold title on the forums.
Back to top

1.5 IRC Operators
Commonly referred to as IRC Operators (or opers), these individuals have admin control over the running of the bittah IRC servers.

If you need to contact an IRC Operator visit the chat support page.
Back to top

2.0 Network related

2.1 Who runs this circus?

- Moderators

"Chameleon"
gfx guy / moderator

Age: ?
Location: ?
Occupation: ?
Gaming history:
- ?
Aliases: ?
Contact: ?

"Rae"
gfx guy / moderator

Age: 21
Location: Perth, Australia
Occupation: No idea
Gaming history:
- No idea.
Aliases: raven
Contact: n/a

Benji "DOOPY_LOOPY" Chung
moderator

Age: 25
Location: Sydney, Australia
Occupation: Student/IT
Gaming history:
- long
Aliases: DOOPY, DOOPS, Quasi_Anon
Contact: Forum PM

Gavin "Kronic250" Hatherly
lan king / moderator

Age: 23
Location: Sydney, Australia
Occupation: www.gameswarehouse.com.au
Gaming history:
- Bought my first PC to play Tribes 2
Aliases: kron, Gav-, gavina
Contact: Forum PM

- IRC Opers

"Mental Trousers"
IRC Operator

Age: ??
Location: New Zealand
Occupation: ??
Gaming history:
- Tribes 1 ??
- Tribes 2 ??
Aliases: MT
Contact: ??

"Zed"
IRC Operator

Age: ??
Location: Sydney, Australia
Occupation: ??
Gaming history:
- Tribes 1 ??
- Tribes 2 ??
Aliases: bonezed ??
Contact: ??

Other IRCops
In addition to these operators some of the bittah staff are also involved with this task.
- gweebo
- Paradox
- Plasma

If you need to contact an IRCop for help visit the IRC Support page.

2.2 The bittah core group structure
While we do have semi-defined roles within the network many individuals share priviledges and or tasks with others. eg. Admins taking on forum moderation roles and Moderators providing site support/updates. We all try to keep an equal playing field as far as the core group goes so please feel free to contact any of the members listed above and theyll be glad to help with any queries you have, or point you in the right direction of the person you need to see.
Back to top

3.0 Network Rules and Guidelines

3.1 Overview
Whilst we have done our best to document the rules and guidelines that the bittah network will follow, we cant cover all bases. There will be times where you may be asked to stop doing what you are doing for a reason that may not be listed in detail below. For your sake, just agree; we try to be as diplomatic as possible but no good will come of you not complying / continuing being retarded. thx
Back to top

3.2 Procedure
All admins / opers / moderators are oblidged by these rules to take the following steps in relation to ANY action that contravenes the guidelines below.

1. Initial request to stop and identify the reason for not continuing the action
2. Final warning to cease

Non-compliance may result in ...

a) Removal of you from that service entirely
b) Temporarily restrict your access to any portion of that service or
c) Modify and correct the offending problem.

The admin reserves the right to ...

i. Determine the duration between Warnings #1 and #2 depending on the action.

ii. Determine the level of punishment in consultation with other admins.
iii. Determine the duration of the punishment. This may take into account past experiences, problem rating etc.
Example: If you continue satchelling your teams assets / players on an online server and you have done it before, admins will increase the duration of the ban. Logical yes?

3.3 Forum guidelines

Before posting, please ask yourself the following question: "Am I making a post which is either funny, informative, or interesting on any level AND THAT HASNT BEEN POSTED YET?" If you can answer "yes" to this, then please post. If you cannot, then refrain from posting.

Before replying, please ask yourself the following question: "Does my reply offer any significant advice, flow or help contribute to the conversation in any fashion?" If you can answer "yes" to this, then please reply. If you cannot, then refrain from replying until you can.

Lurk the forums before posting. Read old threads and understand the point of view and vibe of the forum before registering and posting 200 posts of inane drivvel inside 2 weeks. Remember that each forum has their own community ... just because a CS forum thinks you and your posts are cool doesnt mean they (and you) will be treated in the same light here.

Posts that contribute fuckall are, but not limited to, the following
- 'OFN': aka. Old fucking news. Great, youve seen it before; congrats. Having 1 person post that they have indeed seen something before is enough. Having 10 people say the same thing is not. Remember the internet does not revolve around you and others may not of seen it. Exception to this rule is if it has already been posted on this site.
- 'I PREDICT 10 PAGES~!'. Your the next Nostradamous; heres the bittah equivalent of the Golden STAR!@ Saying this has absolutely no contribution to the thread at all whether you were right or wrong. Dont do it.
- 'This thread is so shit'. Awesome. Since posting that intriguing point of view the thread will INSTANTLY start taking a turn for the better. A shit thread will die a natural death, it doesnt need retards like you bumping the thing.
- '1st' or any variation of it. While bittah hasnt degraded to anything like this yet, its still a warning. We dont care if you got 1st or last post. We care if you make a meaningful contribution which definately isnt the case here.
- Quote spamming. This means quoting a quote of a quote that someone has said. WOAH MAN we MIGHT of missed that eh~! Do it only if you need to in order to get your point of view across and or to answer a question.
- |_337 speak. Anyone who decides to speak continuously in this fashion needs to be shot ASAP and be chucked in a timewarp back to 1995. It was cool back then, it isnt now.
- 'HAY BILL ARE YOU ONLINE?!~'. Yes, no one has any idea wtf youre talking about .. GO FOR IT. We have private messages for a reason, no one cares that you need Billy bob to ring you asap or for poor Sally to send you their assignment. General rule, if only a handful of people know wtf you're on about then it isnt suitable for the forum. Use IRC for conversations, it will just appear like drivvel otherwise
- Cross-thread arguments. Yes we all know the ones we are talking about here. The ones where 2 or 3 people get so wound up about some ultimately piss-weak argument in a thread a year ago that they have decided that they will need to continue the argument in every, single fucking post from here on. NO ONE CARES. Continue the argument in the original thread; dont go polluting others.

3.4 Actions which wont be tolerated on the website
but once again, not limited to

Any attempt to circumvent any part of the website in order to access, modify, remove or exploit any part/service/data you would not otherwise have permission to do.
Disruption to the website / services such as. flood bots, packeting, defacing the site etc.
Any attempt to directly force/mislead the members into accessing/performing any action which they are unaware. ie. embedded exploits
Any organisation by any member, to solicit cheating, forum invasions or to generally make the running of the network a pain in the arse.
Any threatening comments, racial slurs, or defamatory pictures directed at another member of this network not thought to be spirited in good fun. Moderators discretion.
Any of the following actions by members towards the moderators,
- Insulting their decision
- Bitching and moaning about a custom title
- Threatening them
Back to top

3.5 Actions that wont be tolerated on IRC

Intentional (or not) spreading of any IRC worm/virus
Exploiting a client or daemon in order to access, modify, or remove any data/channel/access you would not otherwise have permissiong to do.
Loading floodbots to disrupt a channel and or person
Solicit direct warez trading or other illegally classed activites
Packet the IRCD to disrupt services
Circumvention of a serverwide ban

3.6 Appeals
If you have had some form of punishment you think was unjust, everyone has the opportunity to appeal that decision by contacting a member of the core group (Pulsed,Para,Plas) directly. Theyre decision will be final. There will usually be a cooling off period after the initial punishment has been invoked so both sides can remain focused.
Back to top

4.0 Other

4.1 Im interested in the technical aspects of the site, what backend do you use?
bittah's "backend" is a heavily modified phpBB 2.0.x core. Everything you see on the site runs in some way off the forum. We get asked a lot on what mods we run on the site. Some of these include, slashdot news mod, ignore mod, multivote and others which in all honesty i cant remember. Checkout phpBB's main site, or phpbbhacks for all the mods you could ever need. A lot of the modifications we have made inhouse so please if your keen to know how we did something give us a prod and we would only be too eager to help. phpBB > *
Back to top

4.2 Whats the deal with the new template?
The new template has been heavily modified to try to conform to the XHTML and CSS2 W3C standards. While this has been an extremely painful experience at times, we have managed to shrink the template code by about 30-50% on most pages. This reduction was mainly due to optimizations using CSS2 box layouts; this is the new trend in web design which actually lets you design table-less layouts. Yes thats right, if you view this page's source, you should hopefully see no heavy markup, just content. There are hundreds of sites to lookup regarding XHTML and CSS, id highly recommend it ... google is your friend :). The pages on the new template should now be noticeably quicker on slower connections (which also helps us because it decreases our bandwidth). The only downside is that the pages may render differently depending on your browser. But never fear, the changes should be minor on all the latest browsers (IE5.5+, Moz7, Opera5+ etc) ... however on earlier versions the template is untested and will more than likely render horribly wrong. This is due to the unsupported CSS functions in the older browsers .... please update your browser if this happens to you. We really dont see the point in catering for the 0.001% of our visitors who use browsers that do not support CSS, im sorry but get with the times.
Back to top

All times are GMT + 10 Hours