Terms of Service Addendum Update - January 4th, 2003

[Phrozen Heart]

Please review the following additions to the addendum of the Terms of Service agreement.

VII) You may want to think twice about responding to a thread where the previous post is over a few weeks old. Chances are very good the other participants have moved on to other concerns, or solved whatever problem they might have had at the time. The best reason for resurrecting a dead topic is to post situational updates if no current thread addresses the root issue. But most people start new topics even for updates, on the idea that a period of inactivity derails that thread\'s train of thought. Occasionally a thread will be *bumped* to jog people\'s memory about an outstanding issue, but this should be done very rarely and only for topics inactive longer than a week or two.

VIII) Did you just crash? Before you ask anybody how to fix it, be sure you collect the facts. Debugging errors is another form of detective work. Make note of recent changes you made, and what you were doing in the game right before the crash. There are two types of crashes in Diablo II: assertions and unhandled exceptions. Assertions are when the game code makes some test of data and a potentially invalid condition is discovered. A popup with an assertion message appears (easiest to see in windowed mode), and debug information is posted to your debug file (the one in your install directory named D2yymmdd.txt). An unhandled exception occurs when an invalid condition has already occurred, and Windows (not the game) chokes on the results. Here you must look to the debug file for more information. None of us are mind readers, so the more information you provide, the more likely we are able to answer your question.

IX) Members announcing updates to their sites or projects should use the same threads previous announcements were posted to. Creating new threads over and over to announce updates causes unnecessary clutter in the forum, and loses continuity in the subject. It also degrades the search feature.