Geekdo Community Rules

Hello everybody! My name is Scott Alden, and I'd like to welcome y'all to the Geekdo community.

Everyone is welcome to stay and participate in our community as long as you follow our rules. If you cannot or will not follow our rules, you will be asked to leave. But they are pretty easy rules to follow, and are designed to make sure that all users feel welcome and comfortable contributing to the community.

These rules are in addition to those covered under the Geekdo Terms of Service. These Geekdo Community Rules apply to all of your User Submissions, as defined in the Terms of Service, including without limitation forum threads, forum replies, review, session reports, GeekLists, photographs, files, hyperlinks, ratings, tags, comments, and any other visual or textual content.

Community Rules

The Short List

• Use common courtesy
• Respect others

The Long List

• Following the spirit of these rules is at least as important as following the rules themselves.

The following are prohibited:

• Anything that violates the Geekdo Terms of Service
• Mis-attributing the original author or creator of content, either directly or by omission.
• Gratuitous depictions of violence, nudity, and sexuality
• Spam
• Disruptive content, including but not limited to:
  • Excessive profanity
  • Trolling
  • Flooding
  • Racism and bigotry
  • Raising issues of religion, sex, or politics outside of the designated Religion, Sex, and Politics forum
  • Accusing other users of committing rules violations - See the User Driven Moderating section below
    • Do not quote inappropriate posts in your replies--this defeats the purpose of the User Driven Moderating system.
  • Otherwise being a nuisance.
• Personal attacks, but not limited to:
  • Statements that abuse, harass, mock, insult, stalk, demean, threaten, or otherwise belittle another user, directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, even if the other user started it, and even if you think the other user deserves it.
  • Providing personal information about any person for malevolent purposes, including libel, slander, defamation, or harassment.
• Requesting or providing information or materials that allows others to create, purchase, or download unofficial replications of a game or other works protected by copyright without the permission of the rights holder.
• Discussing unauthorized ways to block ads. We depend on ads for the revenue necessary to maintain the site. We offer members who contribute to the site the option of disabling any and all ads.
• Sharing who is on your hide list is a zero-tolerance offense and will result in immediate restrictions placed on your account privileges.

Advertising and other Self-Promotion

• A new product or service relevant to the topic of this site may be announced in a single post in the Press Releases forum.
• Active advertisers are given more leeway to promote goods and services they provide.

Forum moderators have the final say in determining whether a given post falls under one of these exceptions or if it is inappropriate.

Private Messages

All of the rules governing general content also extend to private messages.

If you are the recipient of an inappropriate private message, please forward the entire exchange to our Community Manager

User Driven Moderating

You can moderate the forums yourself by clicking the thumbs up button on threads and individual posts, or flagging them as rules violations by clicking the icon. Here are some moderating guidelines to get you started:

• Give thumbs up to posts you like. We encourage the liberal use of the thumbs up button.
• Label a post as a Rules Violation if it blatantly violates our rules.
• Do not moderate maliciously or label something as a Rules Violation simply because you disagree with it; instead use the Personal hide option.
• Go easy on new users.

Anything that receives enough Rules Violation flags will be automatically "collapsed," so that it takes an extra click to read it.

Forum moderators periodically review posts that have been flagged to see if they require official moderation. Please do not complain about having your content hidden.

If you feel a post requires immediate attention, please GeekMail the link with a description to our Community Manager

Moderation Consequences

• Your posts will be flagged for rules violations by the other users in the community - people will not see them.
• You may have posting privileges suspended or you may even be banned from the site. We reserve the right to immediately terminate or suspend anyone who fails to abide by our rules. The decision to suspend or terminate accounts will be made at the sole discretion of the site administrators. All account terminations (bannings) are to be considered final.
  • The length of a suspension will depend primarily on your history of past warnings and suspensions. All things being equal, each subsequent violation will bring a longer suspension regardless of the perceived severity of the specific offense.
  • Context matters. Individual posts are evaluated in the context of both the thread and other recent posts by the user.
  • Bypassing a suspension with another account will get you permanently banned from the site.
• Threads which degenerate into flame wars will be locked by moderators, regardless of who is at fault.