Forum Rules

[Mark Townsend]

Here is the first version of the forum rules. Points were taken from the rules of forums I visit regularly and shouldn't cause any concern for most members.

1. Do not flame or personally insult another user. Please do not use Apophysis.org discussion forums to harass, threaten or attack anyone, or behave in any way that would cause annoyance or distress to other users.

2. Commercial messages and messages from businesses or organizations are discouraged. These forums are for use by our members and non members - they are not to be aggressively used as a medium for marketing or selling to our users. Spam is not tolerated here under any circumstance.

3. You may not insult or defame Apophysis.org, including any of its administrators or moderators. You may not post the contents (in part or whole) of any email or private message that you may receive from any Apophysis adminstrator or moderator without our prior permission.

4. Do not behave in any way that disrupts the flow of an ongoing discussion or that spoils the atmosphere within the forum.

5. Do not impersonate another person.

6. Do not collect or distribute personal data concerning other Apophysis.org members without first obtaining the consent of Apophysis.org and the members concerned.

7. Do not use the forums to make complaints about Apophysis.org. If you are unsatisfied about something, please consider other forum members, and contuct us directly.

8. Do not recruit our members to join another website forum or chat group, whether personal or otherwise. Adding a link to a specific personal website that is utterly relevant to both your posting and the forum topic is permitted on infrequent occasions. If you have a suggestion for a new forum, please contact the site admin. If you are approached to join another group/site as a result of your Apophysis.org membership/posts on our forums, please advise us.

9. We encourage a healthy exchange of opinions and disagreements are allowed! By all means challenge an opinion – but please do it respectfully. Name calling, insults and foul and abusive language will not be tolerated. This includes the use of offensive nicknames and usernames.

10. Members are asked to not act as “back seat moderators”. If members note an issue which contravenes something in this policy document they are welcome to bring it to our attention. Please use the “post report” feature to report posts. Do not respond to such topics yourself.

11. Members should remember this board is aimed at a general audience. Posting pornographic or generally offensive text, images, links, etc. will not be tolerated.

12. Members are asked only to post in English, as this is an English speaking community.

13. Members should respect the bandwidth of other users and sites. The use of inline image tags pointing to data stored on third party systems for which the user has not received permission to link to may be removed.

14. Members should post in a way which is consistent with "normal writing". That is users should not post excessive numbers of emoticons, large, small or coloured text, etc. Similarly users should not SHOUT or use excessive punctuation (e.g. ! and ?) in topic titles or posts.

15. The administration and moderating teams reserve the right to edit, remove or put on moderation queue any post at any time. The determination of what is construed as indecent, vulgar, spam, etc. as noted in these points is up to Team Members and not users.

16. The above forum rules where applicable also apply to private messaging. If members recieve a private message which contravenes something in this policy document they are welcome to bring it to our attention. Please use the “report private message” feature to report private messages.

Apophysis.org reserves the right to modify these rules at any time. Reasonable effort will be made to inform members of any changes.