General Posting Guidelines:
- Start new threads in the most relevant forum category.
- Don't create posts with nothing but a link. If you are going to link to a news article (for example), give a summary of it.
- It's okay to promote your own things, but wait until you have contributed something useful (posts-wise) to the forum.
- No commercial promotion is allowed without prior consent from the
site administrators.
- Personal attacks against people, or sites will not be tolerated. If you have an issue with someone or their site, take it up with them personally.
- While debating and discussing is fine, we will not tolerate rudeness, insulting posts, personal attacks, name calling or purposeless inflammatory posts.
- Spamming and trolling is not allowed. This includes using the forum's e-mail and Private Messaging system to spam other members.
- No nudity, partial nudity, animal cruelty, bodily mutilation or material that is sexually explicit, racist or harassing.
- You agree not to post messages with content that infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights of any party. You agree to give attribution to others when you quote or paraphrase materials owned by others. Please refer to our Forum Acceptable Use Policy in our Terms Of Use page for more information here.
- Don't "bump" threads and don't post duplicate threads.
- Discussion of illegal activities such as software and music piracy and other intellectual property violations are not allowed.
- No political threads. Please do not use German Car Zone to promote or engage in political debates or promote propaganda. There are plenty of forums out there that are specifically designed to discuss political ideas, debates and theory.
- No religious threads. Like the political thread rule, there are plenty of forums around to discuss the latest religious ideals.
- No Flaming. A "flame" is when you insult someone. Don’t use insults, swear or use any words that are deemed inappropriate, anywhere in the forum. If you flame someone, you are risking being banned. The staff can’t read EVERY single post on the forum; however, in the event that an inappropriate post is overlooked, there is a strong chance that some member will report it to the moderators. Any threads/posts of this type will be deleted.
- Following the previous rule, we reserve the right to remove offensive posts without notice.
- We also reserve the right to ban anyone who willfully violates our site rules.
- Also while these rules cover most common situations, they cannot anticipate everything. Consequently we reserve the right to take any actions we deem appropriate to ensure these forums are not disrupted or abused in any way.
- The staff has the final say on what is appropriate and what is not.
Infractions
Infractions are used as a mechanism to track violation of rules/guidelines by users.
Individually, an infraction doesn't do much of anything (unless it's a severe infraction), but if a user continues to accrue infractions within a certain timeframe, their account can be temporarily suspended.
I Don't Want Others To See My Infractions
- The only people that can see your infractions are moderators, admins and yourself.
Why Didn't Others Get An Infraction For The Same Thing?
- They probably did. You can't see other user's infractions (see above).
How Long Until An Infraction Expires?
- An infraction expires after a certain amount of time. That amount of time varies depending on the infraction. You can view the expiration date of your infractions in your User Control Panel.
How Many Infractions Until I'm Banned?
- If you are an established member, it would take 10 infraction points (some infractions are worth more than 1 point). You can view the number of infraction points you have under your User Control Panel.
Infraction bans are not permanent and your account will be available for use once enough infractions expire to the point that your total infraction points is below the ban level.
Why Not Warn People Via Private Message?
- It's just not practical when you try to manage a forum of this size. You run into a few problems...
- We can't know/remember who was warned about what historically. Especially when you have multiple moderators and/or admins doing things. The infraction system gives us a history for the user that we are able to easily reference.
- Infractions are quick and easy for us. Writing a personalized private message to a user would require a few people doing that full time. The infraction system is fast and does the same job (ultimately you want to inform the user that they shouldn't do whatever they are doing).
Policies
There are a couple things we do not do here. We do not edit/delete posts from a member simply because a different member does not like it and we do not resolve disputes between members.
Users are allowed a single account/username, and multiple accounts will result in all of them being banned.
It seems like common sense, but people seem to still do it... so for the ones with no sense at all, it's also not a terribly bright idea to try and impersonate someone you are not.
Changing Another Members Post
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There are two options you have for getting a post altered (or deleted) that was written by another member (contacting moderators/administrators to do it here is not an option you have).
The easiest method is to contact that member directly. They have the ability to edit their own posts for 24 hours after making the post. If the time frame is beyond 8 hours, the original poster can request the post be edited by an administrator.
The other option would be to execute a legal court order to do so. We will of course abide by any court order issued by a US court.
Disputes Between Members
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We do not have the time (or desire) to babysit members. If there is anyone that you don't get along with, you can choose to ignore them under your Buddy / Ignore Lists. Please don't ask to have a member banned simply because you don't get along with them. There are plenty of members that the administrators wouldn't consider friends, but it's not our job to silence members that we don't agree with.
