Forum specific rules may not be seen

[Hexsplosions]

Merry Christmas IPS team! 🎅🤶🎄

I have some feedback on the user of forum specific rules to improve the display of them, particularly in ensuring that users posting in forums are aware of forum-specific rules.

I use a set of rules for our sales area of our community. It is a dedicated forum space for our users to advertise their property for sale to others. In doing so, we expect them to abide by a set of rules:

As you can see, these are clearly displayed as soon as a user enters the specific forum. These are set in the ACP in the area specifically provided for this purpose:

If a user follows a fairly traditional workflow, by navigating to the specific forum to create a new post, the rules are seen. However, we now have a different workflow available to users where this will not be the case. There is, on the forum index, a 'Start new topic' button:

Clicking this button requires you to select a forum to create the new topic in:

A user's workflow may instead therefore be to:

1. visit the index;
2. click on the 'Start new topic' button; and
3. select a forum to post this in.

When this workflow is followed, the user in question never sees the forum-specific rules. They are taken to the editor on which the forum specific rules are not displayed:

This means that, in the event of a dispute, the user can validly claim to have been unaware of any specific rules they may have breached.

Although this can be remedied on a case-by-case basis through tactful moderation, it would be better and more efficient to simply ensure the forum specific rules are visible to users using this workflow to create new topics.

Thanks for reading. 🙂

[Sonya*]

I assume that the rules are also not displayed if the topic is created through "Create+" menu. 

[Hexsplosions]

2 minutes ago, Sonya* said:

I assume that the rules are also not displayed if the topic is created through "Create+" menu. 

You assume correctly, it is the same. 🙂