Warmly welcome to the forum. I cannot give you all recommendations about what you should and should not do in the forum. In the thread, I can only recommend you several fundamental things that might help you to be faster familiar with mechanism of the forum, how to contribute, what should do to be ranked up.

1. Be eagerly to learn new things, new terms/ definitions, new knowledge, new forum's rules too. Forum rules will continuously change over time, if you cannot catch new ones, you might do wrong things which violates new rules, then bad unexpected things might come (account banned, for instance).
2. Be ready to help other new users (I be here to help you today, so when you have more knowledge, please help back to other new ones), such as going to Others > Beginners & helps board for this mindful purpose.
3. Be as constructive as possible; don't and reduce as more as possible spam threads. Those threads will make the topic like a ugly, chaotic forum; really hard to find useful threads whichwill be covered by tons of shitty posts.
4. Dont's try copying and pasting; or plagiarising. Your account will be under extremely high risks of bans (at worst, permanent bans). Please quote original posts/ authors if you take someone's ideas and put them in your posts. Respect them and protect yourself.
5. Don't indulge in buying, selling, exchanging sMerits and Merits. There are admin, moderators, and higher-qualitied users -who will eagerly to spot you if you tried to abuse/ cheat the system. Be smart and don't do that.
Hope that my thread help you have clearer general view about the foru,m, how to survive and be a useful one in the forum.