Waiting for approval is going to be a bit of a downfall in this forum I reckon. This post won't see the light of day because the mod won't pass it for public viewing. This won't be a very popular feature of an otherwise good forum.
I would hope the owner will see sense and return to the standard format pretty quickly because I for one probably won't be making many visits.

I am a mod in other forums so if I see anything risky I deal with it quickly, but to vett every post will not work. Good idea in principal but not in practice.

ps: emotics don't work either.... ;-(

BonzoDog. I am sorry that you feel that our Terms are unacceptable; the website terms are there for the protection of all the users of the website. They were put together after taking advice from a number of parties, including the Police, local councils, solicitors, and a number of press associations. By getting and following this advice we are able to work closely with all these groups and a number of corporate companies towards improving the communities in which we live. This we believe is a benefit to everyone.

In recent months there has been cases in the UK were people have been taken to court for libel, slander and copyright offences from items they have written on forums. Some have happened even though the forum post only appeared online for a few hours. Our terms help to prevent this.

Unfortunately there is no standard regarding forums, it depends on the software that is being used. Some like PhpBB do not allow the forum posts to be checked before being published, others allow a more flexible approach to the forum. Checking forum posts before publishing is common, for example the BBC check the posts on a large number of their forums before publishing as do some other corporate and press associations.

We reserve the right to change the rules regarding the forum and can change the system so all posts are published then moderated after publication. Unfortunately this has been tried on this and other sites of the Now Portal Group and it has been abused with both unsuitable forum posts and spam. These posts caused more issues and problems for the community and therefore currently we choose to check all posts prior to publication. Our forum rules state we will aim to approve all forum posts within 12 hours. Currently most posts are approved in 1-2 hours

I have checked the emoticons, and if you click on those to the left of the box in which you type your forum post then they do currently work.

It's all down to freedom of speech admin, and if you're going to play God and check every message for something you don't agree with then this forum will just revert to your online toy, or just an information list.

I don't know of any other local forum that does it this strange way, not even The Gazette needs drastic measures like this. I can except that the BBC does because it's a huge national organisation, but this is a local forum for ordinary people and they don't like asking permission to talk in their own community of Basingstoke.

Are you getting my point yet?

I like to see local forums but I don't want to join in someones game. I can see your friends are here already, but I'm afraid they're only chatting with each other.
If you want to talk to the whole town then you'll have to open the doors to everyone. On your own head be it?

(and the emoticons bbCode (or anything else) still don't work - which is a pity)

We are open to both the whole town and to the rest of the Basingstoke and Deane Borough. We promote freedom of speech within our site, however within the UK freedom of speech comes with responsibilities, you cannot incite racial or religious hatred, you cannot abuse, harass or defame.

We will publish any article, comment or forum post as long as it complies with our terms. If it complies then it will be published, even if we personally do not like or agree with it. The Basingstoke-Now website is not an online toy, we are a professional organisation and part of a nationwide group of community websites. We publish all of our Terms of use and Privacy policy and rules for the parts of the site. We include full contact details including phone number and address. We also are fully registered under the Data Protection Act, as any website which takes any personal information needs to be registered. This is unlike the majority of community websites in Basingstoke and shows we are professional and we try to protect all of our users. Unfortunately we recognise that there will be some who don’t agree with our policy. That is their right and we accept that everyone has their own view. We also cannot understand why there is such an issue between moderation after publication and moderation before publication. If the post complies it will be published, if it doesn’t then it won’t.

We will constantly review our policy and if we feel that changing to moderation after publication is required we will look at it, after taking legal advice.

This forum isn’t PhpBB so unfortunately BBcode will not work with it. You can have emoticons by click on the emoticons images and there are other codes to provide url links and quotes etc. Just click on the help to find out how to use the forum and all its features.