Forum Rules

We have a great community here and these rules are intended to help AnimalRescueKorea continue to be a valuable service for everyone by clarifying the responsibilities of its members. Thank you in advance for following these guidelines and for expressing your thoughts and opinions.

Remember, you alone are responsible for the material that you post. Avatars, titles, and signatures are subject to the same conditions as posts with respect to decency, and so forth.

Highly Recommended:

Start intelligent, well thought out threads.
Use a title that describes the content of your post.
Rate posts that you think are helpful and well-written.
Proofread before you post. We're not looking for textbook perfection, just a certain level of understandability. Take the time to check your spelling and grammar as best you can.
Search before you post and read old threads. Your question/topic may have been answered/discussed already. Bring old threads back to life if you feel you can contribute something new/beneficial to the discussion, if your question has not been fully answered, or if you want to get updated info on a topic previously discussed.
Consider eye-comfort by limiting your paragraphs to 3-4 sentences, then start a new paragraph. It's hard to read a big block of text.

Unacceptable Behaviour:

Black (or gray) marketing. Suggesting that non-military people get a member of the US military to purchase anything for them on base is ILLEGAL. By discussing this type of illegal activity on these forums you are putting this website at risk of prosecution for black marketing. Any discussion of buying or getting articles bought on a US military base will be removed.
Profanity. There's just no need.
Culture-bashing. Stereotypes or broad statements about other cultures, especially when negative, will not be tolerated.
"Shouting". Using all caps or special characters to draw extra attention to your post or to make your post "louder" is not acceptable. This includes using the thread rating system to call attention to your own post.
Personal attacks. Always feel free to respectfully disagree with people, question their ideas, or counter their statements. However, name-calling and open attacks have no place in our community.
Spamming. Starting threads or posts that contribute nothing to a forum, be it off topic or on topic. Posts that have no relation to the current thread or discussion as well as those posts that are intended to annoy are examples of spamming.
Thread hi-jacking. All posters must respect the rights of other members to post questions, comments and ideas that do not agree with their own, but please keep your posts "on topic", i.e. relevant to the subject(s) of the thread. Off-topic posts will be moved or removed.
Trolling. Pointless, inflammatory statements intended to start fights will be deleted immediately. Animal related topics can be highly emotional. Keep your language civil and avoid overgeneralizing about nations and cultures.

Unacceptable Content:

Copyrighted material. Do not copy & paste material from other sites into your post without permission from the copyright holders. Link to info from other sites instead.
Offensive material. Do not post or link to content that is libelous, defamatory, offensive, obscene, racist, abusive, that violates a third party's right to privacy, or that is otherwise inappropriate.
Graphic material. There are many horrific pictures of animal abuse already on the internet, please don't post them here. If you want to discuss an issue that has related graphic images, link to the material and include a warning and brief description so that others can make informed decision on what they view.
Adult content. In a broad sense, this includes pornographic material, gambling, drug abuse, etc.
Religion/ politics. These sensitive topics don't belong on this forum.

One Safety Tip:

It is NOT recommended that you post your email address in a public post. It attracts spam and is retrievable in search engines for all to see. Please use the private message (PM) function for exchanging addresses, telephone numbers, and personal info.

Enforcing rules:

The process of enforcing rules will begin with a public warning and/or PM and/or moderation. If the user does not comply with moderator requests and/or if multiple infractions occur, the result will be a temporary or permanent ban of the user in question.

The moderators will edit posts, threads, titles, and signatures that break forum policy. A PM will be sent to inform you of any editing or to request that you make changes yourself within 3 days. Failure to do so will result in deletion.

At the moderator's discretion posts/threads/titles, etc. deemed highly inappropriate or spam-like will be deleted immediately. A PM will be sent informing you of the changes.

NOTE: The administrators reserve the right to add, modify, or remove any of these rules at any time. Rule changes apply to past, current and future posts.

Thanks again for joining the ARK forums and helping build a great community.

Last updated May 5, 2009.
Author: Karen Busch