Okay it’s time for the long post. We have basic rules and things you need to know here, but if you don’t bother reading it we understand. I suggest reading the first section though (we kindly separated it by lines for you because it was so long).
You will soon realize that TORC isn’t as perfect as it looks. The site works hard to keep TORC a good and clean place, and that requires the help of each and every poster. Working behind the scenes are the two admin, Ted and Jon. We also have moderators, and you can find a list and their emails here. Their job is to patrol the boards and make sure everybody is following the Terms of Service, or TOS. There is always a link on the upper right hand corner of every page on TORC. This TOS is not like one that you would find when signing up for an online game site or an email address, this one is short and to the point, and it is HIGHLY recommended that you read it, in fact SO highly recommended that we are going to summarize it here for you. Think of them as the rules of the boards:
No spamming. Spamming is when you post pointless things that waste time and space. Starting a thread saying ‘I’m bored’ is a good example, or *bump*ing a thread. Spamming is also advertising for other websites. You can post a link to a website that you like, but we don’t want to see obvious advertisement. Another form of spam is replying to your own post, which is generally frowned upon here. If you make a mistake in a post or you want to add something you can just push the ‘edit’ button at the bottom of your post and change it.
No Flaming (or trolling, which is only added because Satch is a *$^@&#). That would be personal attacks. It’s good to get in debates with people, but you should be debating the topic, not calling the person a two headed ugly Satch or something.
No profanity or sexual innuendo. This is a family friendly site, so theoretically people of all ages should be able to enjoy posting here. Profanity is the easiest way to get yourself in a lot of trouble with the admin and mods. Blocking out words with *’s are also not allowed. The general rule for profanity is if you can recognize what the word is, it shouldn’t be there. The easiest way to be safe is just not to swear. Sexual innuendo you will see used sometimes, and that isn’t allowed either, mostly for the younger posters on our board, even though we know that’s almost all that high school students talk about.
No Netspeak. we dun wanna c postz lik diz because itz rlly hard 2 read nad sum people wud say itz an insult 2 tolkien and itz rlly annoyin and specially hard 2 read 4 people hoo dun speak english az a 1st language. (By the way you may see some people posting with a bit of netspeak (mostly just a !!111 at the end of a sentence though), generally in movies and by older posters. It’s used as a joke, and can be quite funny).
If you’re under 18, for your own safety you are not supposed to supply your town name, age, or name.
If you use any of these things above you can (and probably) will be sent an email by a moderator, which we call a warning, and your post will be edited. Take the warnings seriously, because it doesn’t take a lot of them to be banned, and we don’t want you guys to be kicked off the site. Obviously I haven’t covered everything in the TOS, yet my summary is probably still longer.
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Before you start posting, I’d recommend just lurking through some forums for a start to see what they’re like and where you’d like to post. If you want to take a look at the forums we have, click here.
Movies-Fandom and
Tom’s House are more light hearted forums with word games and what we call sw00ning (which would be something like “Oh Elwen I love you! *sw000000000n*” )
Alliances and Guilds is home to various “clubs” which are based around or dedicated to Tolkien. Take a look at the thread on the top of the main page to see if there are any guilds you may like to join.
The Role Playing forums,
The Pony (Tolkien’s Middle Earth) and
The Green Dragon Inn (Tolkien influenced) are generally pretty serious places and do not take kindly to spam or needless posts if you’re not part of the RP, so check out the welcome threads in there if you’d like to join one of them. The Welcome forum has The Lucky Fortune Inn which is where anyone can go and role play if they don’t feel confident joining a serious RP yet.
Books Tolkien and
Books Other are for discussions of books, surprise surprise.
Languages is where you can go if you want to learn one of Tolkien’s languages or just ask something about a language. Please PLEASE do not start any irrelevant threads in there because I will take it to heart. …I’m not kidding though.
And last but not least of this brief *ahem* summary of the forums on TORC, is
Movies - LotR which is a delightfully sarcastic forum dedicated to the discussion of the Movies (technically) but if you go in there posting away without seriously taking a look around, they will eat you. You have been warned. My advice is to lurk in there for at LEAST a week before actually posting, but 2-3 weeks is advisable.
Anyways, the rest of the forums kinda summarise themselves, so have a great time looking around. If you want to post something look to see if there’s a thread which you could post in which is relevant, if you can see anything then use the search function to make sure you’re not about to post a duplicate or already well talked about thread.
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If you want to know who the moderators of the board are, click
here.
Some things people often want to know when they first join TORC (that stands for theonering.com which is the old link to the site, although it still works) is how to do smileys:

= : D

= : )

= : (

= : ?

= 8 )

= : x

= : P

= : oops:

= : roll:

= : wink: ; )

= : Q

= = : )

= > - O

= : angry:

= : nono:

= : rofl:

= : |

= : o

= : shock:

= : lol:

= : cry:

= : evil:

= : twisted:

= : !:

: = : ?:
:idea: = : idea:
:arrow: = : arrow:
People also ask what the titles under your user name are, and they are as follows:
Petitioner to the Council – 0 posts
Citizen of Imladris - 20 posts
Shield Bearer – 100 posts
Rider of the Mark - 500 posts
Ranger of the North - 1,000 posts
Mariner - 5,000 posts
Ringbearer - 10,000 posts
(custom titles can be made if you buy Premiere Memebership)
Aaaaaanyways, after this insanely long ramble about various parts of TORC I’d like to first thank Blackwood for the couple of things I *cough* borrowed from one of his lengthy threads, and erm… welcome to TORC.
