The MaCFP Discussion Group has been created to enable open scientific and technical communication within the fire modeling community. While this group was established and is managed by the Organizing Committee of the MaCFP Working group, we intend for this to be an open forum for multi-directional communication between all individuals involved in the fire modeling community, both experimentalists and modelers. Thus, MaCFP Committee Memebers will reply when it is appropriate for them to do so, and may limit their participation in some topics when it is not.
To further these objectives, the Discussion Group operates according to the following policies:
The MaCFP Discussion Group does not permit anonymous public posting to the group. Anyone with a free Google Account can request an invitation to join. As part of the invitation request process, new members must respond to a simple statement, "Please state your reason for joining this group." This will help Managers to determine if an applicant is a spam robot or a new member. Managers read the responses to help determine if the request is from a user or from an automated system. If new members do not respond to the inquiry statement, then the request will be deleted and the new member applicant will have to resubmit an invitation request. Personally identifiable information is not required for the Google account, and personal names do not need to be associated with the account used during group participation. Information used for registration is used solely for controlling access to the group and to provide a means to restrict participation for those who violate the Group Policies.
The Membership list is only accessible to Discussion Group Managers. This precaution helps reduce access to member contact information by potential malicious users. At the same time, all individual messages to the group contain contact information in the email address associated with the registered Google Account. This information is made public through the message meta-data.
Members of the Organizing Committee of the MaCFP Working group are assigned as Owners and Managers of the Discussion Group. The role of Owners and Managers are defined on the GoogleGroups Help FAQ as: "The original owner is the person who created the group, invited the first members, and chose the group's posting and access settings. Once the owner selects a member to be a manager, both the owner and the manager can approve posts, invite new members, create managers, and change the group's management settings. Only the owner, however, can create a co-owner, transfer ownership to another user, or remove the group."
Posts are immediately emailed to all members who elect the email delivery option. However, all posts are reviewed by MaCFP Committee Members and any post that violates the policies herein may be taken down without notice. Participants must also comply with applicable policies, regulations, and laws of their own locality.
The Group Owners and Managers will delete posts which obviously infringe upon copyrights or which are clearly off-topic or not relevant to technical discussions such as Spam, personal attacks, political statements, religious statements, cursing or other foul language, pornographic information or statements based on race, age, creed, color, sex, handicap, or sexual orientation. Information provided by a NIST employee is subject to applicable laws and policies.
- First search through existing threads on the forum to see if someone else has started a similar discussion.
- Give your new discussion thread a meaningful title related to your question/problem.
- Reply to our replies and not new posts --- It is hard to follow a thread if it is continually broken.
- If referring to measurement data available on the MaCFP data respoitory, include the Git revision number.
- Keep in mind the differences in time zones and please be patient. Users from all around the world participate in these forums and most of us need to sleep some time.
Do not post copyrighted material to the Discussion Forum unless you personally own the rights to the material. If group managers observe copyrighted material being posted, the offending post will be deleted and the user who made the post will be warned. Repeated violations will result in the user being banned.