RULES

1. DO
1. Respect your fellow forum members.
2. Caption your topic with a descriptive and appropriate caption.
3. Place your thread in the appropriate forum.
4. Stay on topic.
5. Contribute to the discussion.
6. Support stated facts with citations when possible and practicable.
7. Write your posts in standard English.
8. Observe good posting etiquette.
9. Use the default font, except when appropriate for emphasis.
10. Respect copyrights, trademarks and servicemarks, and intellectual and artistic property and expression.
11. Give proper attribution to content quoted from, copied from, and/or belonging to another party.
12. Respect bandwidth, both of this site, and sites linked to.
13. Refer anything needing moderation by private message to forum moderator(s).
14. Refer any mistreatment or misuse of privilege by private message to the forum administrator.
2. DO NOT
1. Flame, abuse, disrespect, bully, intimidate, bait, harrass, libel, slander, etc.
2. Post false "facts," false accusations, misrepresentations, misinformation, falsehoods, slander, etc.
3. Alter the quoted words of another member to misrepresent what was said.
4. Post anything offensive, vulgar, obscene, abusive, or racist, whether text, images, or links to same.
5. Post links to viruses, spyware, or any kind of malware.
6. Post or otherwise infringe upon copyrighted material or others' intellectual or artistic property without permission, except as permitted under Fair Use.
7. Hotlink images on other websites without permission.
8. Make excessive use of emoticons, punctuation, non-default text fonts and colors in the "serious" forums.
9. Post frequent "empty" posts (posts without relevant content).
10. Double or cross post.
11. Start a new thread on a topic that already has an active thread.
12. Spam or troll.
13. Solicit or promote your website, business, or service except in the sub-forum provided for that purpose, and as permitted in your signature.
14. Act as or misrepresent yourself as a moderator or an administrator if you are not.
15. Edit your posts to delete rule infractions subsequent to a warning.
16. Edit your posts to materially alter or delete content after the thread has been appended.
17. Criticize forum rules, policies, procedures, staff, or administrative actions except in the sub-forum provided for that purpose.
18. Argue with forum staff about policies, procedures, or administrative actions.
19. Register multiple accounts under different usernames.
20. Use an email address or website address as your username.
21. Provide material misrepresentations in an account application and/or member profile.
3. APPLICABILITY
1. All posting rules also apply to the private message system.
2. All posting rules applicable to content also apply to signatures and avatars.
3. All posting rules applicable to content also apply to websites linked to in posts and signatures, as far as can be normally and reasonably ascertained from a casual inspection of the website.
4. SIGNATURES & AVATARS
1. A member's signature may contain up to five lines of text,
   or one line of text and images up to 120 pixels in height,
   or two lines of text and images up to 100 pixels in height.
2. Text in signatures is limited to the default font size or smaller.
3. The combined total width of all signature images may not be wider than 600 pixels.
4. The maximum number of images is limited to three.
5. A member's avatar shall not be larger than 110 pixels high by 110 pixels wide.
6. The signature image(s) shall not exceed 125KB total file size(s), and the avatar image shall not exceed 20KB file size.
7. Signatures and avatars with excessive or irritating animation or graphics or colors may be disallowed.
8. Of the text lines, no more than two may be links. Affiliate and referral links are permitted provided they are discreet, and there is no solicitation to click on the link in either the signature or the post.
9. If an image is a "clickable" graphic (ie underlying the image is a hidden url), the graphic shall also count as one of the two links permitted.
5. IMAGES
1. Images embedded in posts shall not be larger than 800 pixels wide.
2. All images must be hosted on your own image host.
3. Posted images prone to frequent unavailability and/or slow downloading are subject to removal.
6. PROMOTIONS & SOLICITATIONS
1. Members with more than 95 posts may open and maintain one thread in each advertising forum.
2. This thread may be used to promote or advertise the member's website, business, cause, or anything else the member wishes to promote or advertise, subject to administrator approval.
3. Posts in this forum are subject to the same rules.
4. Only legitimate and lawful activities and entities are allowed to be promoted or advertised.
7. ACTIVITY
1. Accounts inactive for more than six months may require reactivation to restore posting priveleges.
8. ENFORCEMENT
1. The levels of enforcement from lowest to highest are: reminder, warning, suspension and ban.
2. A reminder may be issued in cases where the violation is not intentional, repetitive, or egregious. Reminders do not count toward suspensions and bans, but are noted in the member's record.
3. It is solely at the staff's discretion as to whether, which and when rules are enforced, and whether a reminder or a warning is issued.
4. A second warning about the same rule results in a seven-day account suspension.
5. A third warning about the same rule results in a permanent ban.
6. Using offensive language with or about, harassing or intimidating staff results in a seven-day suspension.
7. Arguing with staff about an enforcement action results in a seven-day suspension.
8. More than three warnings of any combination of rules within a 30-day period results in a seven-day suspension.
9. A member is only permitted two suspensions; circumstances which would produce a third suspension result instead in a permanent ban.
10. Posts in violation may be edited or deleted without notice.
11. At their discretion, staff may enforce an immediate suspension for an egregious rule violation.
12. Attempts to circumvent an enforcement action may result in a permanent ban.
13. Members may appeal enforcement actions by sending one and only one private message or email stating the member's case to the administrator.
9. Not used
10. WAIVERS
1. A member with good and reasonable cause may apply to the administrator for waivers of certain rules and limitations.
11. ABUSE
1. If a member experiences abuse of his/her private messages, including any and all rule violations, the member is requested to forward the abusive message(s) to the administrator.
2. The Privacy Policy does not cover abuses of the private messaging system.
3. The Administrator has full authority and discretion to deal with private message abuse as he sees fit.
12. Revision 1.10 08-23-09

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