The Fountain Pen Network Posting Guidelines and Terms Of Use

Welcome to the Fountain Pen Network! We're glad you're here. To assist you in enjoying The Fountain Pen Network, here are a few important guidelines, along with our Terms Of Use. Viewing of, registering for access to, or posting on The Fountain Pen Network constitute your agreement to these guidelines and the Terms Of Use set forth below.

A: FPN Posting Guidelines The Fountain Pen Network (FPN) is a moderated pen forum. A handful of volunteers try to help keep FPN a pleasant, useful, and entertaining site for the pen 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 FPN: 1) Please be polite and civil to others. Please refrain from personal attacks, excessive profanity, and discriminatory comments (gender, race, faith, political, etc.) 2) Please post in the appropriate forum. Off-topic posts and debates should take place in the Chatter 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 pens" 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) FPN is a sponsor-free site hosted on a server paid for by anonymous donations and proceeds from actions initiated by the FPN Admin Team, such as ink sales etc.. There are only a few minor limitations for commercial postings: a. Members are free to advertise their products or services. b. Direct solicitation should be done in the "Trade" 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 (for example, pictures in the Picture forum). Full-fledged commercials will be moved to the appropriate forums, however. 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. FPN wishes to be part of the larger pen 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 or thread but you can delete the entire content of your post, as long as you edit within 24 hours of posting. 2) If you feel your post should be deleted or edited when the 24 hours limit has passed, you may contact the Admin team or the Expert Forum Moderator and request removal or editing assistance. 3) If you have an issue with any post, thread, or PM, yours or someone else’s, the easiest way to request admin help is to click the “Report” button. 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 email at fpnmods@gmail.com, and the Admin team at fpnadmin@gmail.com, or alternatively send a PM to member FPN Admin Team.

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.

D: Terms of Use The Fountain Pen Network, the Fountain Pen Network Forums and all Administrators and Moderators (hereafter called FPN) shall not be held responsible for any damages you may suffer as a result of any message posted by you or any other person on FPN or arising out of or related to your use or inability to use The Fountain Pen Network and shall not be held liable for any warranty, whether implied or expressed by FPN or on The Fountain Pen Network. As a member of FPN, you must observe all applicable federal, state and local law, including United States copyright, trademark, and obscenity law. In addition, you will not post any material which is defamatory, abusive, vulgar, hateful, racist, harassing, obscene, profane, sexually oriented, threatening, invasive of a person's privacy, which infringes intellectual property or other proprietary rights of any party, advocates any illegal or dangerous activity, or is otherwise violative of any law, that contains any virus or other harmful component, and/or any material deemed offensive or inappropriate by FPN. You agree that FPN may preserve content and release it to governmental agencies, or other third-parties if it is believed that you have or may have committed illegal activities, violated these Terms Of Use or violated the rights of third parties. You may not, in connection with your use of The Fountain Pen Network, impersonate any individual or misrepresent your affiliation with any individual or group. FPN reserves the right to remove posts or terminate or take steps to terminate your access to The Fountain Pen Network, in whole or in part, without forewarning or public discussion , for any reason at it's sole discretion to preserve the character and harmony of the site. FPN reserves the right to modify these Terms Of Use at any time. Your continued participation will constitute your agreement to be bound by such modifications and updates.