We have a few basic rules about the use of this site that I need to make clear again here:
1. No commercial advertising via the messageboard or directly to people who have put their email on this site. If someone has requested particular information (ie they have specifically asked for a seller of something to contact them) then that is the ONLY exception where a private message is allowed. Commercial advertisers are welcome to buy advertising on the site and help subsidise the costs of running mindat.org. It is not fair to those who pay for advertising to expect to have a free advert here.
2. No offensive, abusive, rude or overly-confrontational behaviour. There is a grey area between what is offensive and what is normal "heated" conversation about things we are passionate about, but if we judge that you have "stepped over the line" your message may be edited or withdrawn and you may face blocking from the site.
3. No uploading of copyrighted material (be it photographs or text) without the explicit permission of the copyright owner. Material that is out of copyright, or extracts that are covered under "fair-use" rules are excepted. If you have any doubt about something please ask on the messageboard.
4. ABSOLUTELY NO USE OF DOWNLOAD UTILITIES OR WEB COPIERS. These tools are designed to make offline copies of websites. To copy the whole mindat.org website from a standard broadband connection would take days, if not weeks. But while it does that, it overloads the server to the extent it makes it very slow for other people to use the site. As such, anyone caught using such a tool to download content from the site automatically will be banned from using mindat.org. I reserve the right to charge for reactivation of an IP address blocked in this manner because it takes a significant amount of my time to deal with these problems.
5. No URLs or company names in message signatures. This is regarded as advertising, even if the websites are non-commercial. URLs posted must be specificially related to the message content.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2008 12:48PM by Jolyon Ralph.
