Ask The Law: Important Info, Read This First (updated 1/21/06)

[TROLL]

Overview
Ask The Law is a new forum aimed at helping TST members understand common laws and how they affect us. We have two guest police officers on the site who have agreed to help out with any questions we have so we can get confident answers and hopefully dispell some common misconceptions and misunderstandings about laws.
They are not here to give legal advice, only to give factual information. They are not here to spy on us or cause trouble, only to help us understand the law better. Please be respectful and appreciative that they is taking the time to help us out.

Forum Structure
This forum is set up a little differently than the rest to help keep answers concise and accurate. Any Registered User may post a new thread, but Registered Users are not able to reply to other's threads. Replies are reserved for the Officers on the site, 04CROWNVIC and undercover.
A new feature allows you to your own threads if you would like to post a followup question, however.

Updated 1/21/06

[teh DIRT]

Just to further detail the reasons why users can only start thread and not post answers:

Question:
I'm not prevy to all the inner workings of what users have rights to what areas of the forums, but it seems that I can start a thread in the ask the law area, but I can't reply to a thread, this might be the case for other users as well, which in turn could be why there is no traffic in that area except for new posts? just somehting to look into.


Answer:


When the Ask the Law forum was first created it was our intention to have an official police officer monitor the forum and answer questions asked in there. This is a lot to ask of them already being that 99% of the people here aren't law abiding citizens (in a motor vehicle sense) and they have to answer countless questions about :"is my tint to dark" or "i got pulled over while racing, wtf?" On top of that there have been times where users aren't that friendly with the officers.

Nonetheless, they have agreed to help us out and answer the questions they feel they are able to. When the forum opened a few months back, anyone could start a thread and also post a comment on it. An issue arised where a lot of people were answering questions that our officers were meant to answer. While it is great that the members here want to help the other members, in this case it wasnt good...for 2 reasons.

1. An answer from Joe Scmoe aka 96turboracer (just an example) does not carry the same weight as an answer from 04crownvic (one of our officers) because Mr. Schmoe is not an officer, he was not trained for it and his answer has no real backbone. Even if it is the same answer as the officers, the officers answer is prefered.

2. We could allow everyone to post answers to questions asked in the Ask The Law forum, but then the officers who DONATE the little leisure time they have might feel unappreciated in the fact that everyone else thinks they can answer the questions that they were trained to answer. On top of that we try and get the officers to frequent here as much as possible, if they feel they aren't needed than they won't be here often, hence the slow answer rate.


Overall, I/we appreciate that everyone wants to help out eachother but it is in our best interest that we keep the Ask the Law forum the way it is.

Thanks
-pete