Ocarinas United

UPDATED: 5/7/08

[font=Courier New]The Ocarinas United Posting Guidelines[/font]

Welcome to Ocarinas United!

We're glad you're here. To assist you in enjoying Ocarinas United, here are a few important guidelines

A: Ocarinas United (OU) Posting Guidelines
The Ocarinas United (OU) forum is a moderated ocarina forum. Member involvement in forum management and structure is encouraged. A handful of volunteers try to help keep OU a pleasant, useful, and entertaining site for the OU community. However, the tone of the board is largely set by the posting members. To that end, here are the basic guidelines for posting behavior and content on OU:

1) Please be polite and civil to others. Please refrain from personal attacks, accusations, excessive profanity, and discriminatory comments (gender, race, faith, political, etc.) against people or parties on or off the forum.

2) Please post in the appropriate forum. Posts and debates unrelated to ocarinas should take place in the Off-topic Forum. Respect the rights of those who do desire to discuss off-topic. Posts such as "this is a useless conversation", "This board should go back to ocarinas" should not be encouraged, as long as the discussion they refer to is "polite and civil", as defined above.

3) Try to title your posts to clearly express the content. Thread drift happens. If you feel your posts are becoming significantly off-topic, start a new thread with the appropriate subject line and in the appropriate forum.

4) Rules concerning Commercial postings:
a. Members are free to advertise their products or services.
b. Direct solicitation should be done in the "Buyer's Guide" forum, but if a question about your fees, prices, services, etc. is asked in a thread in another forum, feel free to answer it.
c. Other posts that can potentially be interpreted as commercially tinted, can be made in all forums, as long as they are related to the category.
d. We encourage you to add your site or business contact in your signature. This way, "who does/sells what" will be clear to everyone.
e. Please do post helpful links. OU wishes to be part of the larger ocarina and music community.


Disregard for these guidelines may result in suspension of posting privileges, removal of posts, or even loss of membership to the offending member.



B: Guidelines for dealing with problematic posts or threads.
1) If you post something and regret your wording or wish to remove it, the easiest thing to do is click the “Edit” button at the top of the post. You cannot remove a post (if it is not the latest one) or thread but you can delete the entire content of your post.

2) If you feel your post should be deleted you may contact the Admin team or the Expert Forum Moderator and request removal.

3) If you have an issue with any post or thread, yours or someone else’s, you can contact a Moderator or Administrator. The Moderators and Admin team can not read every post on the group, your help in identifying a problem is appreciated.

4) If you think your words might be inflammatory, then they probably are. Consider using your internal editor before clicking the “Post New Topic” or “Add Reply” button. And you can always Preview a post before submitting it by clicking the “Preview Post” button.

5) If you have any questions or comments, or think a posts warrants editing or removal, please report that post to the Moderators or the Admin team. You may contact the Moderators Team via their email address, or a PM.

6) If a staff member finds a user's posts to be breaking any of the these rules or guidelines, the user will be contacted through a private message addressing the rules which were violated and given a warning. After the third violation, the user will be placed under a temporary one week ban. After the one week has passed, the user will be contacted and asked if they would like to continue being active. If they agree to follow the rules, they ban will be lifted. If the user continues to violate the rules, he will banned until further notice.

C: The Moderator and Admin Team's responsibilities

1) Attempt to keep the board organized and user-friendly as well as entertaining

2) Resolve technical issues

3) Help keep the board flame free. To the extent that we can make 1-3 happen, we reserve the right to do the following:
a. Request that a member alter or move their post as necessary
b. Move questionable posts from view until the participants are notified and the issue can be resolved
c. Move a post to an appropriate forum
d. Close discussion on a thread, leaving previous replies intact but disallowing further discussion


We hope to have only very rare occasion to remove any post. The thread/post will not be deleted immediately. Review by the admin team and in discussion with the contributors may however determine that complete removal of the thread is necessary.

Moderators and Administrators may act according to the above guidelines as individuals when necessary. However, in most cases we will discuss moderation actions as a team before taking any action.[b]