- Interaction in the forum should be considered a privilege which may be revoked at any time as deemed necessary;
- Copyrighted material posted to the forum must credit the owner(s). When posting newspaper articles, internet articles, journals, papers, etc., please remember to cite source, author, and hyperlink as available. Best practice is to paraphrase key parts of an article and link to the remainder;
- Spamming is not allowed (i.e. repeating posts or threads) and will result in an immediate and permanent ban;
- Personal and business advertisement is allowed only through the inclusion of website link in the member profile. Marketing and/or advertising any commercial product, service and/or application by creating thread topics or repetitive mentions is prohibited. With site administration approval, community service/improvement promotions may be presented;
- Incendiary comments which disrupt or inhibit the amicable flow of conversations are not tolerated;
- Etiquette requires each participant to be a good virtual citizen, considerate of forum visitors - active or inactive participants. Inappropriate behaviors/comments include, but are not limited to: vulgarity, abusive/excessive profane language, support or praise of illegal subject matter and/or activities, personal attacks, trolling, flaming, overt negativity, baiting, racial slurs, pornography, sexual innuendo, racism, sexism, xenophobia, religious bashing, or open support of terrorism, and homophobia;
- Deliberately misleading other participants is unacceptable. Information such as in thread titles, articles posted, and data cited must be accurate and appropriate. Opinion may not be presented as fact. It is essential that new development discussions only include verifiable information. Threads intentionally given a misleading or ambiguous title will be closed. Threads which feature nothing but a website link will be closed;
- Comments within each thread should relate to the initial topic. The dynamic flow of online discussions frequently require flexible topic boundaries to be productive. Participants should be mindful of the thread topic and avoid wild tangents;
- These rules cover the foundation for a productive and informative discussion forum. A complete disregard of these guidelines by any individual can result in a permanent ban from the forum and all other GarlandCitizensForum.org features. The extent of any offense will be taken into consideration by forum administration. A minor offense will result in a warning, condisering the infraction may not have been intentional. However, should any participant warrant more than two warnings, it will be assumed this participant only has malicious intent and will result in a permanent ban from the site. Any serious infraction of the conditions of interaction will result in an immediate and permanent ban;
- Limit of two usernames per member is acceptable and must be clearly disclosed in each the signature blocks. Disregarding this rule will result in a permanent ban from the forum.
- Inactive members will be retired (inactive account) after 12 months;
- When registering a user name, participants create a user profile. The software supporting the forum provides a user control panel with various options to personalize individual profiles. Additional features allow each user to create topic activity notification, manage/schedule an event calendar, buddy lists etc.;
- A private message center is included for use within the domain. Most basic features of traditional e-mail are available.
- A community calendar is available for all users to view;
- The same conditions of interaction which apply to public comments also apply to private messages and calender listings. Under no circumstances should the use of the messaging or calendar features be used for inappropriate purposes;
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