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Forum Rules and Policies
This forum is intended to be a free speech area where people can say whatever they want, so there aren't many rules. But there are some:
1) You can't do anything illegal on the site. If it's illegal in the U.S., then it's going to get deleted and you could get banned depending on severity. This means doing something like posting child pornography, making a serious threat to kill someone, etc. - it does not mean talking about these things or the politics of them.
2) Respect the copyrights of people whose articles you link to. It's a politics site, so you're going to want to link to news articles or blogs sometimes. If you didn't write it, then make sure that you both provide a link in your post to the original person's web site and do not quote an article in its entirety here.
3) Spam will be deleted, but advertising a link to your site is not always spam. It is OK to link to your blog or site if you are writing a post relating to a political issue that your site or blog discusses. It is also OK to include a link in your signature regardless of whether your site is related to any political, philosophical, or religious issue (from the User CP) and write other posts in the forum, as long as they are real posts. It is not OK to spam the forum with short fake posts to show your signature to everyone, and it is not OK to start a thread that is solely about a commercial website and nothing else (i.e., "Cheap Viagra Here!!!" will be deleted).
It is OK to post threads discussing specific sites or blogs, including your own, if there is some valid reason for doing so - any politics related sites, blogs, or forums are usually going to be fine, but unless they are related to a specific topic those threads should go in the Lobby. For example, if you want to talk about a post on your blog about immigration, you can put a thread up in the Immigration forum. If you just want to talk about your blog in general, do it in the Lobby.
For non-political sites, it is more of a judgment call. Brand new users are under more scrutiny for spam than long-time ones.
4) Avoid repetitive off-topic posting. In extreme cases, repeated off-topic posting will be moved to a central location. This doesn't mean you can't go off on a tangent or post things unrelated to the topic of a thread. This is not a problem if you do it occasionally. It just means that if someone spams the forum with repeated messages for the purpose of interfering with discussion, those posts may be centralized somewhere.
Also avoid repetitive posting advertising other sites. If you have a blog, for example, you should not go into every discussion related to anything you have on your blog and post a link there.
Privacy Policy:
The program that runs this forum, VBulletin, keeps track of your IP Address (showing a general location of where a person is posting from), e-mail address, and that's about it involuntarily. IP Address and Location of a user will not be disclosed without permission. For your e-mail address, people can get it if you allow other forum members to e-mail you. You can voluntarily put in information about yourself in your profile, and that will be public.
Also, personal information about posters (meaning things like name, address, phone, etc.) will be deleted if requested by the poster.
Posting Policy:
Don't post here unless you give permission for your posts to stay up here. You're the writer and you can go publish what you wrote somewhere else, obviously. Posts will not be deleted if you change your mind later on, however, because that would disrupt the flow of conversation by leaving holes in the forum. Posting here implies the permission to leave it up on the Internet on this forum.
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