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Board Guidelines and Rules

1. All areas of this site are private property. Interaction in the forum should be considered a privilege which may be revoked at any time as deemed necessary.

2. Copywritten material is not allowed to be posted to the forum.  Only hyperlinks to articles, journals, and papers are permitted.  When posting hyperlinks, you still must credit the owner(s), cite source, and author, as available.

3. Spamming is not allowed (i.e. repeating posts or threads).

4. Personal and business advertisement is allowed only through the inclusion of website link in the member profile. Marketing and/or advertising any commercial product, service and/or application by creating thread topics or repetitive mentions is prohibited. With site administration approval, community service/improvement promotions may be presented.

5. Comments which disrupt or inhibit the flow of conversations are not tolerated.

6. Etiquette requires each participant to be a good virtual citizen, considerate of forum visitors - active or inactive participants. Inappropriate behaviors/comments include, but are not limited to: vulgarity, abusive/excessive profane language, support or praise of illegal subject matter and/or activities, personal attacks, trolling, flaming, overt negativity, baiting, racial slurs, pornography, sexual innuendo, racism, sexism, xenophobia, religious bashing, or open support of terrorism, and homophobia.

a. Definition of a troll:
An Internet troll is either a person who sends messages on the Internet hoping to entice other users in to angry or fruitless responses, or a message sent by such a person. The term is frequently abused to slander opponents in heated debates and is frequently misapplied to those who are ignorant of etiquette.
Trolling is often described as an online version of the breaching experiment, where social boundaries and rules of etiquette are broken. Self-proclaimed trolls often style themselves as Devil's Advocates or gadflies or culture jammers, representing themselves as challenging the dominant discourse and assumptions of the forum they are trolling in an attempt to subvert and introduce different ways of thinking. Detractors who value etiquette claim that true Devil's Advocates generally identify themselves as such for the sake of etiquette, whereas trolls often consider etiquette to be something worth trolling in order to fight groupthink.
Trolls are sometimes caricatured as socially inept. This is often due to the fundamental attribution error, as it is impossible to know the real traits of an individual solely from their online discourse. Indeed, since intentional trolls are alleged to knowingly flout social boundaries, it is difficult to typecast them as socially inept since they have arguably proven adept at their goal.

Trolling includes...

• Generally being belligerent and antagonizing the same response from others, trolls often claim their actions are for the benefit others.
• Putting the forum down and encouraging people to leave.
• Flaming – An online argument that becomes nasty or derisive, where insulting a party to the discussion takes precedence over the objective merits of one side or another.
• Using several identities on a board to support your own arguments / stage pretend arguments or recruiting others to gang up to battle an individual or individual view.
• Strangling a single forum topic preventing any real discussion from taking place by insulting people or provoking people to insult him/her. A troll is usually an expert in reusing the same words of its opponents.

7. Deliberately misleading other participants is unacceptable. Information such as in thread titles, articles posted, and data cited must be accurate and appropriate. Opinion may not be presented as fact.  Threads intentionally given a misleading or ambiguous title will be closed. Threads which feature nothing but a website link will be closed and deleted.

8. Comments within each thread should relate to the initial topic. The dynamic flow of online discussions frequently require flexible topic boundaries to be productive. Participants should be mindful of the thread topic and avoid wild tangents.

9. Civic pride is one of the greatest assets of any community until degraded into petty ridicule of other communities. We will not be host to the mischievous degradation of any community. City by city comparisons are inevitable and often can provide insights to possible civic improvements. All forum members must be sensitive that these comparisons do not become an unproductive competition trying to tarnish another community.
Likewise, pursuing a similarly divisive approach with any topic will not be permitted. A healthy debate is always welcome, but decorum is a requirement. Bashing of other cities, particularly Dallas, is not allowed and may result in an immediate ban.

10. Please do not post threads that tie individuals to specific residential addresses.  Please respect other citizen's privacy.  They may not want their residence location posted for everyone to see.  Even if the name and address have been published in a recent news story, this news story will not be discussed in the forum if there is a direct reference to the residential location to the owner.  Posting of links to satellite images or the images itself on the forum that tie and individual to their home addresses will be prohibited.  Immediate deletion of the image, link, or thread will result.

11. These rules cover the foundation for a productive and informative discussion forum. A complete disregard of these guidelines by any individual can result in a permanent ban from the forum. The extent of any offense will be taken into consideration by forum administration. A minor offense will result in a warning, condisering the infraction may not have been intentional. However, should any participant warrant more than two warnings, it will be assumed this participant only has malicious intent and will result in a permanent ban from the site. In other words, three strikes and you are out.

12. There is a limit of one username per member/participant. If a user is discovered with more than one username, they will be banned. Each alias will also be banned from the forum.

13. When registering a user name, participants create a user profile. The software supporting the forum provides a user control panel with various options to personalize individual profiles. Additional features allow each user to create topic activity notification, manage/schedule an event calendar, buddy lists etc.

14. A private message center is included for use within the domain. Most basic features of traditional e-mail are available. Up to 50 total messages may be saved.

15. A community calendar is available for all users to view. The calendar includes events and activities covering the Fort Worth metro area, as well as forum community happenings. Only registered members are able post events to the calendar.

16. The same conditions of interaction which apply to public comments also apply to private messages and calender listings.

Registering w/non-ISP emails
At this time, this site allows non-ISP email registrations. However, you must ensure your email program's spam filter allows the automated forum mailer that contains the user activation code to be received. Without the receipt of this email and its directions within on activating the account, the forum software will not allow you to interact and post in the forum.