Fan Articles Policies

[Moonsword]

Fan Articles

Fan Articles is a special board for fan-generated analysis and discussion of canon material.  This board is only for canon material - if you want to discuss your own homebrew campaign rules, that goes to Fan Designs.  So do any specific non-canon designs.  This allows the developers and freelancers to take part in various threads, without worrying about seeing fan designs and thus preventing any concerns over unintentional use of fan designs or rules.

Six week bans on covering specific new material out of new releases of PDFs are referred to as "Moratoriums" are in place at the request of the Powers That Be.  These moratoriums apply to all series that tend to dwell heavily on the specifics of a given unit.  Please note that the moratorium policy applies to all releases, not just those listed for authorial convenience.  Product-level exceptions to this policy will be noted until the point at which they would normally fall out of moratorium is reached.

From time to time, very specific exceptions on individual units may be made at the discretion of Catalyst Game Labs.  These exceptions will be handled by selected authors contacted by other channels.  Once the moratorium period on a given product is up, you're welcome to grab anything and don't worry, we're not going to snag all the fun stuff for ourselves.  These spoiler articles will deliberately be leaving some of the more interesting, juicier units until after the moratorium expires.

Moratorium Exceptions: None

Best regards,
Moonsword, Moderator

[Moonsword]

Fan Article Recommendations

These are just a few recommendations to help keep a consistent quality among articles and convenience for readers.  We're not addressing style or snark here.  Every article author has their own way of doing things and plenty of us have tarred and feathered various designs over the years, including a couple of us who are on the moderation staff now.

• If you're discussing a specific unit, please include the TRO or other product that design comes from.  That makes it much easier for interested fans to find more information by referring them to the book instead of having to go to the MUL (or even to Sarna) to look it up.
• If you don't mind, a link over to the MUL and even to CSO goes a long way in getting people more information and an idea what the mini, if any, looks like.
• Try to use the MUL's images for the art.  If it doesn't have an image yet and you have time for us to get to it, you can always post in the Master Unit List Errata Thread and one of the MUL Team members can address the problem.

Links

Links with text are coded with the URL inside the [url] tag, wrapped around the text you want to use as a link.  Like this:

[url=bg.battletech.com]BattleTech Homepage[/url]
BattleTech Homepage

SMF will also automatically wrap anything it recognizes as a URL with an anchor tag unless it's prevented from doing so by a [code] or [nobbc] tag, as below.

www.battletech.com
www.battletech.com

Images

Image tags are wrapped around the target URL:

[img]http://bg.battletech.com/forums/Themes/BT/images//staff/bm_tw_red.png[/img]


If you want to make the image itself a link, you wrap the image in a URL tag:
[url=bg.battletech.com][img]http://bg.battletech.com/forums/Themes/BT/images//staff/bm_tw_red.png[/img][/url]


If you see an underline, that's because of how your browser is rendering the HTML markup generated by SMF from the post's BBCode.

[Moonsword]

Good news, BattleMech fans!  As the latest Recognition Guides are being released, selected items will have an article written to reveal the newest additions to the BattleTech universe in the context of their history.

These articles are an exception to the moratorium policy.  Please do not write articles other than those selected and released by Beemers until the normal moratorium is up!