Gated Community Fans

If you like FOX's The O.C. (which ends its four year run this evening) and ABC's Desperate Housewives, you won't be able to resist Bravo's The Real Housewives of Orange County. This hit reality series now in its second season follows the lives of five rich and famous working woman and their families in Orange County's Coto de Caza.

Fans of the show make their way to Bravo's site regularly to dish about the five main characters: Jo De La Rosa, Jeana Keough, Lauri Waring, Tammy Knickerbocker and Vicki Gunvalson on topics ranging from what they're wearing, driving, dating, eating, saying, singing, traveling and then some.

Real Housewive fans were recently warned and soon restricted by the "Bravo Board Boss" to tone down posts directed at the main characters on message boards.

"Because of certain posts to this message board, we've switched the Real Housewives message board to "moderator approval required". This means any comments you write to the boards will not show up immediately; Bravo staff has to go through and manually approve them.

This is not a change we're making lightly. We're usually *very* hands-off with our message boards for all of our shows. And we really really don't want to start banning people for bad behavior -- it's a *very* rare step for us -- but we've already had to do that to two different people on this board in the past week.

We're *not* interested in censoring people's opinions here, but we can't go on having runaway posts and comments that invade the Housewives' privacy (or their families' privacy). Oh, and posting their home phone numbers or personal e-mail addresses or private details in a public forum is *not* okay. You'd think that would be obvious to everyone, but apparently not.

So please feel free to talk about the show, but let's not get so carried away here, okay? Keep it clean, and keep it legal, that's all we're asking."

This show is about real people. Although they may reside in what some consider to be the land of phonies where money grows on trees, Jo, Vicki (known on Bravo's message board as "Icki") and all the others have feelings too.