threegee

The rules are the rules you agree to when you join. If you want them changed then re-write them yourself and submit them. If they look reasonable and legal then we'll adopt them.

The moderators have no such details. See above. There you are then... I appologise! I couldn't possibly answer that on the grounds of client confidentiality, but look at the start of the thread! P.S. The government wants even more of your details. They want you to pay £80 for an ID card so they can monitor you. They have access to loads of personal information about you, can even track your movements from your mobile phone. Who are you going to complain to? When you complain can you be sure that even your complaints won't be monitored and you marked as an agitator? These are the real questions!

Nope - you haven't answered my questions - just ignored them! And what makes you think I was talking about you?

What do the moderators know that no one else knows? Why would anyone post anything which is confidential? If they post it it's no longer confidential - innit! Seems to me we've got a case bad case of anti-authoritarianism here. Lots of practise at school? And.. from someone who wants to be moderator too!!???

The moderators operate strictly in accordance with the MI5 & MI6 rulebooks.

Who needs publicity when you've got employees of the Royal Family promoting the show! They must have at least quadrupled the audience for the very thing they are complaining about!

Almost certainly what.

No I didn't. Don't think that Eclipse know that either. As they offer packages with 8 static IPs they can't be quite that desperate. Having to share the same bank account would be darned awkward for their business customers too!! :D

This isn't at all true. The rents on Bedlington Front Street are some of the lowest commercial rents in the area. Significantly less than on Ashington high street. I've sat in on several negotiations in recent years. The ownership if fairly broad. Point to a property and I will find out who owns it, assuming I don't know already. A lack of parking places in Bedlington!? So evil Mr Out-Of-Town Developer is going to make a fast buck at the Town's expense is he? Do you know how much it costs to keep a commercial property empty these days? This money goes back to WDC in the form of the UBR, which is supposed to be spent on local amenities. It's also loaded onto the prospective tenant. The latter is just one of the reasons why we really do have empty shops. Please please do!

This is interesting. Turning a shop into flats would make the owner money? Some examples where this has happened maybe? If this has happened then why would anyone have a problem with it? Why wouldn't it be for the general good? I think that what we are getting at here is exactly what is wrong with our Town; but maybe not in the way that you think!

Not at all true! The Bedders CoT have no such powers, and are in reality just a nice old club of almost-near-retirement businessmen who meet up for a chin wag! They'd be happy to see almost any kind of shop but an empty one. I speak as one who has never been a member personally, but has sometimes got so close to the action that it seems uncanny! :D The real reason for the empty shops... oops, got to go to a chin wag - back soon!

So... you've heard my (and other people's) arguments why not. Now see the movie: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6705375.stm Believe me, if there's one think you will learn as you get older it's that you can't trust big government. By the time most people wake up to this fact it could well be too late. You don't have to look too far around our World - or too far back in history - before this stark truth stares you in the face. "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." -- Thomas Jefferson.

AAMOF I met Helen Savage early last year. Or rather she spotted me getting off an aeroplane near London, else I'd probably have walked straight past her. Anyway, she's more than happy with her lot despite the fact that she has made a far bit of money for the tabloid press. A more decent person it would be had to find. The fact that her partner has stuck by her through all shows a lot of strength of character on both their parts. More strength of character than the average Sun or NOTW reader I'd guess! Do too many people here know who Dusty Springfield was, or has there been a revival I never noticed?

There's nothing wrong in talking about coloured people. The law says only that you can't incite racial hatred. But.. if you want to talk seriously about coloured people then perhaps you should start a serious discussion in the correct place?

The former!

As an experiment there's a now a new Forum called Chat Central (working title). It's the only place where off-topic remarks and incessant banter will be permitted. That leaves his Forum for serious discussion on the Town, and other serious issues of the day. Threads started off here in a light vein will be rapidly moved to the new Forum. Off-topic posts added to serious threads in this Forum will be deleted - don't complain! Though the moderator(s) may, at their sole discretion, and without having to explain why to anyone, split a thread and move the off-topic tail to the new forum (even change the title) - BUT DON'T COUNT ON IT! In future threads in this Forum that seem to have reached some sort of conclusion will be closed. If you want one reopened to add something then contact the moderator(s). This is because some of the threads have grown to ridiculous lengths making them of little future use to anyone. The experiment continues! [uPDATE] ..ummm.. and of course people starting off apparently serious threads about local topics in the Chat forum may well find them moved here. Or was that a test of the new system?

Absolutely not! It's basically a good idea, but I was rather hoping someone would turn their brain on and fill in a few of the details.

OK let's get this straight: You want a forum for chat about the Town and a separate forum for General stuff? So what happens if someone starts a thread off about something of interest re. the Town then someone posts something off-topic. Does the tread then get moved, or does the off-topic stuff get deleted - to cries of censorship? Either way the moderator can't win! Should either or both of the forums be public? IMHO we don't want the chatter one public as it could detract from the Town to visitors, and we don't want the serious one public as local posters won't bother to join and make a commitment. Private forums don't attract anything like as much spam, because the main reason for spamming boards is not to get the spam read, but to place links to hijack our considerable search engine traffic. The aim is to get crap sites a search engine ranking, and search engines can't spider the private forums.

We've made the captchas (numbers you need to type in to register) a lot more difficult to OCR (read by a computer program). So far no bots managed to register overnight. Generally two or three manage to find the numbers after lots of tries. It's a shame when you have to make it more difficult for disabled people just to stop morons! Wouldn't know, never give the stuff the time of day. If other people took the same view it would all die out. Never been able to understand the mentality of people who will buy anything at all from spammers. It just takes that one in a million idiot to keep the whole sordid mess going.

Reet the forst teem bonny lass! Dozens of links posted, but they never saw the the backlight of anyone's LCD.

Google on Alexdunkant and you will find that its a mindless bot written by mindless people! No place for those here, but they would be a lot easier to detect if genuine members filled in a few fields in their profiles. We may have to make some of these "required fields" at some point.

How can you protect something that isn't an absolute measure in the first place? A DNA profile is open to interpretation. It's not like a cell has a check summed electronically readable code in it. It's smears on gel of various densities, and the result depends on the processing technology and interpretation. You are only dealing with probabilities! History shows that courts have a very poor record of comprehending such things... http://society.guardian.co.uk/nhsperforman...1511799,00.html ..which is how OJ walked, and why it's just a matter of time before some innocent person doesn't. An ID card system is only as secure as its weakest link; all the rest is illusion. How can you ever be sure that the person presenting that ID card is the person who is entitled to hold it? Or how can you be sure it was issued to the right person in the first place? Answer is that you can't! We've plenty of methods of ID already, and anyone who thinks that all the hassle and huge expense of another one is going to improve anyone's lot is kidding themselves! Like very many things the govt brings in it's likely to be counterproductive for Joe Average. It will be misused too, and all the assurances about this protection or that safeguard will ultimately go out of the window. This has happened time and time again in history, and is a standard tactic of big government.

"Just a minute sir, we'll only detain you for half a day whilst we speedily carry out a DNA profile on our new high-speed lightweight equipment! Of course it's not entirely accurate, and the result could be open to interpretation, so you have the right of appeal, and a second test - at your own considerable expense, of course!" I don't think you've thought this one through somehow. I wouldn't trust the UK govt with my fingerprints - see the recent carry-on in Scotland for example - and I'd rather suffer imprisonment before I conceded a DNA sample. Any large organisation follows its own agenda: generally the survival and increase in power of that organisation. When the organisation is large enough - as large as government - the problem becomes terminal. If you think differently then you haven't lived long enough. It would be the duty of any sane right thinking citizen to confound, confuse and bring down any such system of citizen control. And.. I'm very sure that millions would be queueing up to do so! Bring it on Mr Politician - this law abiding near model citizen will be the first to the barricades - you won't last the month out!

DNA will put you away unless your name is OJ There's no credible case for ID cards. Only another way for big government to exercise control over (and tax) honest people, and something else for the dishonest ones to steal and forge. Think of how many ID documents you already have. Is one more going to make anything more secure? Is losing or not carrying your ID card going to be a criminal offence? Yes, and a lot of harmless and innocent people are going to be needlessly hurt. No, and they are a totally useless waste of billions of pounds.