Welcome to Fairfax Underground! A free and anonymous forum designed to improve communication between residents of Northern Virginia.
This forum was created in 2005 out of my personal frustration in trying to find local information on the internet. Fairfax Underground aims to be a public resource for all residents of Northern Virginia. In keeping with the anonymous public resource theme, you do not need an account to view or post messages to the Fairfax Underground forums. Although, if you do register an account you gain additional features such as private messaging and a designated nickname that cannot be forged.
The overwhelming majority of visitors use this site strictly as a resource and never contribute new content. There is nothing wrong with this but I must impress upon you that
there is only as much information available on the internet as you add to it. I implore you to please not be shy about posting in these forums. There is no matter too trivial as long as it's relevant.
Please take the opportunity to ask your neighbors whatever you are curious about. You don't have to provide your real name or email address, and the worst that can happen is that nobody responds. And perhaps a month from now someone will search google for the exact same thing and find your post. So go on, hit that Post New Topic button, what do you have to lose?
[Features]
Forums: The forums are the primary feature of Fairfax Underground. There are currently 4 sections:
* Fairfax General: Just about everything should go here. Anything of interest to Northern Virginia as a whole should be posted to this forum.
* Specific City/Town: "Local" forums for a specific town. Used for very specific things, ie. complain about potholes on a neighborhood street.
* NoVA Underground: Local forums for our neighbors in Arlington, Prince William and Loudoun.
* Off-Topic: Everything else
The forums are open and anonymous. Anything relevant will not be deleted or altered in any way. Occasionally, posts that are either direct personal attacks, spam, or complete garbage will be removed. For more information see the "Moderation" section below.
Arrest/Ticket Search: The Arrest/Ticket search is the second "primary" feature of Fairfax Underground, and the portion that actually draws the most traffic. Every week the Fairfax County Police Department
releases a list of the arrests and tickets that were processed during the previous week. For several years I have had a script pull down the latest weekly arrest list and compile the entries into a database. At the time of this writing there are 471,808 entries in the database, each representing a unique ticket or arrest by the Fairfax County Police Department. You can search through the arrest list based on information such as name, offense, street name, date, etc.
The database automatically updates itself at 8:00pm every Thursday night with the latest information.
To access the Arrest/Ticket Search click the link in the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Wiki:
A
wiki is a collaborative encyclopedia that anyone can add to or edit. The most popular wiki is
Wikipedia, an online collaborative encyclopedia.
The wiki feature on Fairfax Underground was a new addition in June 2006. It was created to be a way to better organize the information provided in the forums. For example, there are a couple threads in the forums on the topic of tattoos (examples:
1,
2), someone looking for information on tattoo parlors would have to sift through the posts in those threads for any relevant information. The
wiki page for Tattoo Parlors aims to summarize the information available in the threads in an easily accessible manner.
Anyone can create or edit articles in the wiki. As with the forums, you do not need an account to create or alter pages in the wiki.
[Moderation]
From time to time it may be necessary to delete or alter certain messages to guarantee the quality of this informational resource. Moderation of Fairfax Underground is almost non-existent except in extreme circumstances. The grounds for moderation or deletion of a post are:
* Spam
* Posting complete garbage that has nothing to do with the topic or thread
* Personal attacks on other posters
* Impersonation of other users
Posts are not edited for lewdness, correctness or vulgarity as long as they do not violate one of the rules above.
Users who repeatedly violate the rules will be warned. If the warning is not heeded the user will be banned from posting.
No legitimate post will ever be altered or deleted, regardless of how controversial, without a court order. Free, open, and anonymous means that you can express any thought, idea or opinion without fear of censorship.
Current moderators:
Cary,
ben
[Trolls]
Do not feed the trolls.
As with any anonymous forum, people will sometimes make inflammatory remarks for the pleasure of getting a reaction. These posters are called trolls. Please do not give them the pleasure of a response, they don't deserve it. Ignore them completely and go on with the discussion as if they never posted. Without the anticipated slew of angry responses trolls will get bored and leave.
Please do not let the trolls deter you from posting.
For more information about trolls see the
Wikipedia article.
[Privacy]
Your privacy is extremely important. As such:
No information obtained through this site will ever be sold or passed on in any way.
No information concerning the identity of a poster/viewer will ever be provided to any individual or organization.
[Search Engines]
Search engines such as Google are the primary referrer to this site bringing over 200 unique visitors a day.
Occasionally I will post what queries brought searchers to Fairfax Underground (examples
1,
2,
3)
For some reason this page is ranked higher on MSN search than Google. For an example see the results of a search for "arrests in fairfax county" on
MSN and
Google. At the time of this writing that query is listed as result #3 on MSN and #10 on Google. The Google result is actually a vast improvement as just a few weeks ago that same query wasn't even in the top 50.
Unfortunately, this higher score by MSN brings an influx of (sorry but) dumber MSN users to the forum.
Google ranks pages based on how many other pages link to them. So I ask you, if you have a webpage or a livejournal or blog or whatever, even if nobody ever looks at it but you and your mom, please provide a link somewhere to Fairfax Underground to help the search engine ranking. Thank you.
[How you can help]
The primary way you can help this community is to contribute. Contribute something, anything. Please do not be shy about creating or responding to threads. Even if the thread is about something as trivial as a neighbor's lawn that needs to be mowed, a teacher that angered you at school, or even the service at a local fast food joint. The point is that you're adding information to the internet, and believe it or not someone will come along and search for the trivial thing you posted about and find it very useful. There is only as much information on the internet as you put on it!
[Anything Else?]
If you have any other questions that are not covered here feel free to post them in this thread or email me at
cary@fairfaxunderground.com and I will be sure to get back to you soon.
Thanks and enjoy!
Edited 9 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2008 04:50PM by Cary.