New here? Read this first

[FTL_Ian]

To gain full access to this forum, you must post a mandatory introduction. Please post a brand new thread for your introduction. So you are not confused with a spammer, please make sure your intro addresses these three things:

1. Tell us about yourself.
2. Why are you here?
3. How did you find the Shire Society?

If your intro does not address these points, your account will not be approved and will be subject to deletion.

The moderators of the Shire Society Forum are dedicated to peaceful evolution. Posts that advocate or threaten violence or bigotry are unwelcome, may be deleted, and their authors banned.

Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the user preferences here. Click your user icon in the top right, then select the gear icon. Here, in addition to setting basic profile information and photo you can also:

1. Set various notifications, including watching for all new posts in a given forum here. Scroll down to “Categories - Watched” and type in the forums you want to watch for new posts.

2. If there are participants you’d prefer to not hear from, you can “mute” them and not receive any notices about their posts. Scroll down to “Users - Muted”.

While the Shire Society is open to all peaceful people, this forum is private property and posting is a privilege, not a right. We reserve the right to refuse or remove access by anyone to this site for any reason, and to remove any posting from any forum for any reason.

Cross posting the same message to multiple areas of this forum is considered a form of spamming. Please insure each post is of an appropriate subject for the forum it is to be posted in. Moderators may move a post to a more appropriate area or delete a post that is not appropriate for this forum.

Please note that content is not edited or sanitized for your protection. This forum may contain offensive language and images. That said, trolling and chronic dissent and naysaying will be removed repeat offenders will be subject to temporary and permanent bans. Moderators have full discretion about assigning account restrictions. Your account may be deleted after 365 days of inactivity.

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The user agreement to which you consent to enter and use this forum:

Welcome to the Shire Society Forum. This forum is intended for discussion of liberty activism and community in the Shire. (Commonly known as the geographic area called New Hampshire.) People living outside the physical area of the Shire are welcome, as being in the Shire is also a state of mind, but please keep your posts related to moving to the Shire and the activism here. Debatarians should go somewhere else, as trolling is not welcome here.

To participate here you must agree with or have signed the Shire Society declaration at ShireSociety.com

By accepting these terms, you understand and are agreeing to the following: I am a mature sovereign individual or I have parental consent to view the material contained within this site. I understand that I am solely responsible for the content of my posted messages. Furthermore, I agree to indemnify and hold harmless the owners of this forum and its staff.

I will not post the following content: advocating violence or aggression, spam, racism, bigotry, flooding, advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes, and solicitations.

This forum has no obligations to me and I use it at my own risk. I understand that my posts can be viewed and saved by anyone surfing the site. I agree to abide by the rules in this thread and respect decisions of forum moderators.

[Dalebert]

People are always asking "what is a troll". It comes down to motivations. Therefore, you're never going to have a set of rules that will adequately define trolling. It's ultimately going to take a judgment call. But here's a primer.

A troll tries to stir up drama and get a reaction out of people, but what makes them a troll is WHY they do it and figuring that out requires examining a pattern of behavior. A troll might just be the digital version of an attention-seeker, someone who craves any attention even if it's bad, like a kid who throws tantrums or the drunk at a party. A troll might be doing it purely for entertainment, realizing how much fun you can have when you figure out how to push people's buttons and manipulate them. A troll might do it to feel better about themselves because they're a loser "in real life". Trolls are a sort of emotional parasite because they're having their fun at the expense of everyone else. Sometimes simply being a wrench in the forum is the end purpose of trolling. Someone may not want a forum to be successful for whatever its intended purposes are and they are just here to disrupt it. In any case, the motivations for stirring up drama are selfish and take place at the expense of others. That's why they ultimately will be the death of a forum and why the forums that stay really active and vital are the ones that are fairly heavily moderated.

I'm sure we all know drama queens in our personal lives–attention whores, high-maintenance friends, etc. They can literally be exhausting to be around. I've heard some people described as emotional energy vortexes. That's what a troll is in the virtual world.

It should be acknowledged that someone can also appear to be stirring up drama when they post something that simply inspires cognitive dissonance when they're trying to make a valid point. A discussion on a touchy subject can get heated and might even get kind of personal, insults going back and forth, etc. It's still not necessarily trolling if the motivations are sincere. And the occasional dramatic thread by itself is not necessarily trolling. It should also be noted that some people just don't play nice with others and while not intentionally "trolling" are still disruptive enough of the goals of a forum to seriously interfere with its intended purposes.

Unfortunately, the nature of the beast is that it takes a judgment call, and that's why decent forums have active moderators who have been designated that role by the owner of the forum. Fortunately, there are countless forums out there that may suit your tastes better if you disagree strongly enough with the judgment of the moderators here.

Since this is a liberty-oriented forum, consider the analogy that this is more like a private club than a public park. It will not suffer from the tragedy of the commons where people can argue endlessly over the bureaucracy and the space deteriorates from neglect. Service may be refused to anyone for any reason.

[FTL_Ian]

About posting housing information:

Please note that homes/apts/rooms you post should keep to either liberty-friendly landlords/sellers or be in close proximity to other Shire participants.  This site is not intended to be a repository of available units on the market.  There are sites that do that a lot better than this forum.  If you'd like to link to such a site/resource, please do in one of the general info threads in the housing subsections.

If there is not yet a dedicated housing subforum for your area, just post in the general forum until there is enough interest to justify creating a new housing subforum for the area in question.