Rules

The basics

• Be decent to each other. Argue with ideas all you want, but do not attack the person making them.
• No harassment, threats, stalking, or hate speech. Slurs aimed at anyone are an automatic suspension.
• No personal information. Do not post anyone’s home address, phone number, email, workplace schedule, licence plate, or photos of their home. This includes information about yourself that you would not want shared around.
• No illegal content, and no buying, selling, or arranging anything illegal.
• No graphic or sexual images. Keep everything safe to open at work or on the bus.
• One account per person. No impersonating anyone, and no new account to get around a suspension. Ban evasion gets the new account banned permanently.

Posting

• Post in the forum that fits, and give your thread a title that says what it is about.
• Search before starting a thread. If the topic is already going, join that conversation instead of splitting it.
• No spam. No advertising your business, services, events, or channels without permission, and no referral or affiliate links.
• Do not flood the forum: no posting the same thing in several forums, and no bumping your own thread over and over.
• If you are posting about a business you own or work for, say so. Undisclosed self-promotion is treated as spam.
• Respect copyright. Short quotes with a link to the source are fine; do not paste whole articles.

Sharing news

• In the News Articles forum, the thread title must be the article’s exact headline, and the first post must link to the article.
• Save your opinions for the replies. The opening post is the article, not your take on it.
• Links must go to a recognized news outlet. The forum checks this automatically.

Anonymous forums

• Nobody posts under their real name there, and you may not try to identify anyone, including yourself.
• Everything above still applies. Anonymous does not mean anything goes, and moderators can see which account is behind every post.
• Anonymous posting is a privilege. It can be taken away from an account on its own, for a set time or permanently, without affecting the rest of the account.

Enforcement

• Some words and phrases are blocked automatically. If your post will not go through, you will be told why, and you can fix it and post again.
• Serious offences, including slurs, add a flag to the account and can bring an automatic suspension. Repeat offences stack: a third suspension in a month becomes a ban.
• When an account is banned, its posts and replies come down with it. If the ban is lifted, they come back.
• Moderators and admins make the final call. If you think a call was wrong, message a moderator politely and explain. Arguing in the thread will not change it.
• See something that breaks the rules? Report it and move on. Do not quote it, fight it, or feed it.