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Community Rules

Aquarium Advice Community Rules

Registering and participating at Aquariumadvice.com constitutes agreement to abide by the Social Knowledge Network Terms of Service (Social Knowledge is the company that owns this forum). We reserve the right to modify these rules at any time without giving prior notice to you. By using the services of this web site, you agree in advance to accept any changes.

There is no charge for joining this Forum! This is a community of individuals who share a common interest in Aquariums. Please think before you post and keep your comments limited to the topic at hand and above all be nice. If you come across any violations to these guidelines or have any problems navigating the site, do not hesitate to let us know through the Forums Contact Form. We'll be happy to address your concerns.

Be Courteous!
We aim to ensure that the forum is an enjoyable place that you want to visit time and time again. Our philosophy is that the strength of the member relationships we build here is what sets us apart from the other boards - we are friendlier, more civil, more insightful, more mature and more fun.

Our rules extend to all sections of the website including, chat rooms, blogs, galleries and private messaging.
Personal attacks on others will not be tolerated. Challenge others' points of view and opinions, but do so respectfully and thoughtfully. Excessive sarcasm, belligerence, insults, name calling, profanity, anger, offensive comments about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and national origin, are not acceptable.
Do not post libelous remarks or directly misleading information.
Stay on topic by keeping discussions relevant and on track.
Participants may not post or bump threads to pad post counts or to keep a thread active. Bumping is posting useless information, posting one-liners or other 'content-free' posts to deliberately keep a thread hot.
Do not post the same discussion more than once or in more than one forum.
Posts containing rude, explicit, obscene or vulgar language or abbreviations, images or links to websites with adult content/images or punctuation marks designed to "trick" our obscenity filter may be removed.
Be mindful of yourself and others. This forum is not a democracy; it is privately owned and we make the rules. If rules are violated we retain the right at our discretion to remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or remove members. Any abuse toward our staff may/will result in immediate suspension of your account.
Public discussion about moderation or moderator decisions is not allowed. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned. Do not repost deleted material.
Moderators may remove posts that contain information that is misleading or that might be potentially harmful to an ecosystem.
NO SPAM! Our user base is not a resource to be "mined" by individuals, groups, or businesses, for profit or not for profit. Participants may not post affiliate links or links to direct others to any pages at their own commercial website or website in which they have a commercial interest. Exception to this may be found in Signature Standards, Aquaria-Related Commercial Posting, Sponsoring Vendors and Commercial Members (see below).
Trolling and cyberstalking are NOT allowed and are grounds for account restriction or banishment. Trolling on this board includes posting controversial and often irrelevant or off-topic messages with the intention of (or anticipated result of) baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal, harmonious on-topic discussion, especially when a pattern of such posting is apparent.
Discussions about politics, weaponry, and religion are permitted only in association with the topic of this forum and will be closed or removed if they become disruptive.
Keep all comments on topic of the original post. If you have a question about something, please create a new thread. Posting another question in a thread started by another member is considered 'hijacking' and takes away from the original posting.
We take the "be nice" rule VERY seriously! We do not tolerate ANY rudeness.

Posting Standards
Forum members should use the standard fonts available on the forum. The standard font size is 2. The use of bold, large or colored fonts should be used sparingly. Posts containing inappropriate formatting will be removed or modified at our discretion; e.g. all caps or excessive color.

E-mail and web address are not appropriate forum user names.

Posts should be well formatted. Use paragraphs, punctuation, and capital letters appropriately. Excessive use of Netspeak/LOLspeak (internet slang) and texting shortcuts (b4, str8, etc) is not permitted. Posts with violations may be edited or deleted without notification.

The language of this forum is English. If you are not a native English speaker, do your best. We are glad to have you as a member and will be supportive and polite.

Do not post protected or copyrighted material . Information copyrighted or owned by any individual or entity other than the member should not be posted on the discussion forums without the consent of the owner. If such an event occurs, the individual posting the information shall be held solely responsible. You cannot legally post entire articles or news in the forum without permission from the copyright holder. Even if you attribute the article correctly it’s still copyright infringement. Under Fair Use provisions you can legally post a small abstract of an article - or perhaps the opening paragraph. In either case please post a link to source.The exception to this rule is press releases; they are meant for distribution and can be copied and posted in their entirety. If you are not sure if you can copy something then always err on the side of caution and simply post a link to the material.

Ethical Fishkeeping:
The owners of Aquarium Advice adhere to basic standards of ethical fishkeeping. We believe that freshwater and saltwater aquarists are directly responsible for the health and well being of any aquatic animals in their care, be they fish or invertebrate. These responsibilities include providing a healthy aquatic environment, humane treatment, humane euthanasia (when required), as well as obtaining and disposing of aquatic animals in such a way that does not damage sensitive local ecosystems. Posts advocating the illegal collection of fish or invertebrates, inhumane treatment, flushing live animals down the toilet, or releasing them into the wild will be removed.

Signature Standards
Signatures must be setup in your profile rather than manually added to your messages. They will appear at the bottom of every post you make.

Signatures must be kept to a maximum of four lines (including blank lines) and contain no more than two links (non-commercial).
Signatures may not include email addresses, links to competing websites or forums, prompts to contact or a sales pitch.
Signatures must follow our forums posting standards and only one line may be bold.
Supporting members may have 4 signature lines and include an additional (non-commercial) link.

Classifieds Posting Rules
Our classifieds system is offered as a benefit of membership. We expect ads placed to be related to the topic of this forum; i.e. aquaria-related. Members who have been site members for 15 days AND who have 15 posts may use the classifieds section.

Place only one ad per item - do not post or repost an ad in more than one section of the classifieds.
Do not place ads directing others to e-bay or any other commercial website. You may, however, post a link to your own (non-commercial) website or blog with details about the item.
Ads may be removed by our staff at any time for any reason.
For specifics, please refer to the Sticky: General Guidelines for Posting Classified Ads.

Sponsoring Vendors
To support our commitment to provide a member-based aquarium resource community, Aquarium Advice accepts sponsorship and advertising from Aquaria-related companies. For information about how to become a site sponsor please visit this page. We value all of our members equally, and regard the expertise and experience Sponsoring Vendors and Commercial Members bring to the community as a value-added benefit for all members. Sponsoring Vendors must adhere to all forum policies including the following which specifically pertain to Sponsoring Vendors:

Sponsoring Vendors are encouraged to join in general forum conversations and post their views as all members do. Sponsoring Vendors may post information, including pricing information, about their product, service or company to answer specific questions posed by other members in any forum, but may not instigate promotional discussions (except in the Vendor Spotlight Forum.)
The Vendors Spotlight Forum is for Sponsoring Vendors to start discussions and is specifically dedicated to product announcements, specials, promotions and services. Only Sponsoring Vendors may post such announcements, specials, promotions and services, and only in the Vendors Forum.
Sponsoring Vendors may offer verifiable, objective facts that point out differences between their product and a competing product only if it serves to clarify an issue, but they may not post in a disparaging, demeaning or derogatory way about a competitor or a competitor's product, service or company.
Signature Standards: Sponsoring Vendor's signatures may contain a (1) link to their company website in their signature line (font size 2) and a 468 x 60 commercial banner (with embedded link). Phone numbers and/or e-mail addresses may only be posted in member profiles, not in signatures, unless they are part of a signature commercial banner.

Dealer/Vendor/Retailer and Customer Disputes
This forum is not intended to be a mechanism for people to soley vent frustrations about vendors or sales from private parties. Members may post only factual, first hand experiences regarding retailers and vendors. Posts containing opinion, second hand information or content deemed to be intentionally defamatory will be removed. Please settle your differences with the seller, manufacturer and dealer through other means but not through our community.

About the First Amendment and Your "right to free speech"
We believe in public freedom of speech but that right does not infer that others have to publish your speech. Aquarium Advice is not a public resource; it is privately owned and we require members to abide by our rules and by the decisions of our staff. If you post outside these guidelines your post may be edited or deleted - this does not violate your right to Free Speech.

Site Management, Member Concerns & Account Closure
If we feel site rules are violated we may remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or restrict account access. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned or any other member of our site team. Do not repost deleted material. This forum is largely self-policing, which means that moderators will respond and react to problems reported through the REPORT POST option, via the CONTACT FORM at the bottom of each page, or via PM. Do not hesitate to use these tools to report any problems regarding the forum.

Requests for changes to your account should be made by using the Contact Us link at the bottom of every forum page.

Participants may only have one account. Moderators may consolidate or delete multiple accounts.

We may remove accounts that have no posts. If the account has many posts, completely deleting the account can significantly disrupt thread continuity. In that event, we may (at our discretion) disable your account in some or all of the following ways: change the user name, remove signature content, subscriptions, avatar and identifying information or replace it with fictitious info. We may change account options to refuse contact and/or ban the account. Where communication features were used to share information with other individuals (e.g., sending a personal message to another Forum user) we generally cannot remove content. If someone quoted your post, the original user name will be shown as having been quoted (which we cannot purge).

Someone has to interpret the above guidelines and how they apply to this forum. Ultimately it's up to our site staff to make this decision. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please feel free to contact us.

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