Welcome New Users and Lurkers!
We’re glad to have people here to discuss IF of all kinds.
We understand it can be daunting to post for that first time and we know some people like to create posts in a word processor or text editor before posting to review and spell-check - we can appreciate that!
Just be aware that if you’re a brand new user and you copy-paste your entire first post into the forum and send it quickly, the forum may temporarily put your account on hold and ask the Moderation team to review your message - which we will usually do within a couple of hours.
The reason for this is that a typical spammer behavior is to create new accounts on many forums and quickly paste the same spam message in wanting to sell shoes or write our PhD dissertation for us, and that’s what this forum security process is trying to prevent.
It’s not a problem if this happens and you’re a real person not selling us anything. We just need to manually review your post and approve it before your message and posting privileges are restored. This temporary safeguard will not count against you (unless you are a spammer selling us shoes or dissertation services, in which case we usually just delete the account.)
New users can prevent this by actually composing the message by hand and typing it into the forum. You’ll find the forum does have spell check, formatting options, and you can close out your message and return to it - Discourse will ask if you’d like to save your draft for later when you close out of the edit window:
Your saved draft text will appear the next time you reply to the topic, or you can access per-thread drafts from “My Posts” in the main menu that appears on the left. Press the “hamburger” (three horizontal lines) icon to show the main menu on the left.
The automatic content review process is only triggered for new users when posts take less than 3 seconds to create.
Welcome again, and we hope you enjoy the intfiction forum!
-Forum Staff