Site Rules

Registering and participating at BarefootSailingclub.org constitutes agreement to abide by the guidelines set forth by Barefoot Sailing Club. We reserve the right to modify these rules at any time without giving prior notice to you.

There is no charge for joining this web site! This is a community of individuals who share a common interest in sailing. Please think before you post and keep your comments limited to the topic at hand and above all be nice. If you come across any violations to these guidelines or have any problems navigating the site, do not hesitate to let us know. We'll be happy to address your concerns.

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Forum Guidelines - 

Friends don't always agree on everything or even on most things. They can agree to disagree. When that happens, they try to keep their discussions logical and free from name calling and so forth, or more often they just spend their time on other topics. They don't take every opportunity to express their disagreement, incite argument, insult each other, and fan flames. When they are incapable of avoiding this sort of thing, they become much more disruptive than welcome.

Most of us, while we welcome perspectives on all sides of any issue, would not invite a frequently and apparently intentionally disruptive or rude person to a gathering of friends at our homes, nor to any other gathering of friends that they are hosting. With this in mind please take some time to review our site guidelines:

Be Courteous! 
We aim to ensure that the forum is an enjoyable place that you want to visit time and time again. Our underlying philosophy is that the strength of the member relationships we build here is what sets us apart from the other boards - we are friendlier, more civil, more insightful, more mature and more fun.

• Personal attacks on others will not be tolerated. Challenge others' points of view and opinions, but do so respectfully and thoughtfully.

• Do not post unsubstantiated gossip, libelous remarks or directly misleading information.

• Stay on topic by keeping discussions relevant and on track.

• Do not post the same discussion more than once or in many forums.

• The language of this forum is English. If you are not a native English speaker, do your best. We are glad to have you as a member and will be supportive and polite.

• Be mindful of yourself and others. This forum is not a democracy; it is privately owned and we make the rules. If rules are violated we retain the right at our discretion to remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or remove members. Any abuse toward our staff may/will result in immediate suspension of your account. Complaints about moderator decisions may not be made in posts; instead send a private message to a moderator, administrator or use the Contact Us form to reach the owner Cruisers Forum. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned. Do not repost deleted material.

• We take the "be nice" rule VERY seriously! We do not tolerate ANY rudeness.

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Be Appropriate!
Please don't post it here if you wouldn't say it to your grandmother. Posts containing explicit, obscene or vulgar language, images or links to websites with adult content/images or punctuation marks designed to "trick" our obscenity filter will be removed. Discussion of politics and religion is permitted only in association with the topic of this forum. 

Be Welcoming! 
Welcome newcomers to our growing community. Many of our community's members have a wealth of knowledge and much to share. Please help new members learn about how to find information and resources and how to get involved in the Community.

Be Ethical! 
Many participants have commercial interests associated with the forum topic and bring valuable information and expertise to share. With a few specific exceptions (see registered vendor section), participants may not use the Forum for commercial gain.

• Participants may not post to direct others to any pages at their own commercial website or website in which they have a commercial interest, including informational pages unless a vendor account has been established and then only in areas here where advertising is expressly permitted. Exception to this may be found in Signature standards (see below).

• Participants may not use the main Forums to direct others to the advertising Forums.

• Participants may not send out SPAM via our Private Message system.

• Members may have only one account. If duplicate accounts are discovered, they will be deleted or merged.

• Our user base is not a resource to be "mined" by individuals, groups, or businesses, for profit or not for profit.

• Participants may not bump threads unnecessarily. Bumping is posting useless information, posting one-liners or any other action to deliberately keep a thread hot.

• Trolling or cyber-bullying are NOT allowed and are grounds for account restriction or banishment. Trolling on this board includes posting controversial and often irrelevant or off-topic messages with the intention of (or anticipated result of) baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal, harmonious on-topic discussion, especially when a pattern of such posting is apparent.

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Posting standards: 
Forum members may use standard fonts available on the forum. The standard font size is 12. The use of bold, large or colored fonts should be used sparingly. Posts containing inappropriate formatting will be removed or modified at our discretion; e.g. all caps or excessive color. E-mail and web address are not appropriate forum user names.

About the First Amendment, censorship and your "right to free speech":
You do indeed have an absolute right to free speech. However this forum is privately owned and requires members to abide by our rules and by the decisions of our staff. If you cannot accept these guidelines we encourage you to contact one of the many good web hosting companies out there to and exercise that right to your heart's content.

At times the moderation team will pull a post (or thread) out of the view of the general membership to discuss issues, arguments, or other concerns that might be going on in that discussion. When this happens please do NOT start another thread asking why the original post/thread was pulled the moderation team will either return the post/thread or communicate with the members involved about it being removed permanently and why.

Do not post protected / copyrighted content:
Information copyrighted or owned by any individual or entity other than the member should not be posted on the discussion forums without the consent of the owner. Copyrighted material includes images and text produced and owned by others. If such an event occurs, the individual posting the information shall be held solely responsible. You cannot legally post entire articles or news in the forum without permission from the copyright holder. Even if you attribute the article correctly it’s still copyright infringement. Under Fair Use provisions you can legally post a small abstract of an article - or perhaps the opening paragraph. The exception to this rule is press releases; they are meant for distribution and can be copied and distributed. If you are not sure if you can copy something then always err on the side of caution and simply post a link to the material.

Signature Standards: 
Signatures must be setup in your profile rather than manually added to your messages. They will appear at the bottom of every post you make.

• Signatures must be kept to a maximum of three lines (including blank lines) and contain no more than two links (non-commercial).

• Signature may not include email addresses, links to competing websites, prompts to contact or a sales pitch.

• Signatures must follow our forums posting standards and only one line may be bolded.

• Registered commercial vendors may have up to 3 signature lines and two links. Only one link may be to a site in which they have a commercial interest.

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Classifieds posting rules:
Our classifieds system is offered as a benefit of membership. We expect ads placed to be related to the topic of this forum.

• Place only one ad per item - do not post or repost an ad in more than one section of the classifieds.

• Do not place ads directing others to an e-bay or other online sale or directing others to another website.

• Ads may be removed by our staff at any time for any reason.

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Commercial Parties (For-profit companies and Industry professionals): 
The forum does not discourage nor endorse any commercial entity and is not intended for soliciting business (authorized commercial parties must keep any post that hints at advertising strictly to the vendors forums). Our purpose is sharing knowledge so others can benefit. The BFSC Forum may, at it's discretion, grant vendor account status to industry professionals who are already members in good standing. Authorized commercial participants must adhere to all the forum policies including these specifically set out for commercial participants.

• Members who have a commercial interest in participating in our community will be identified as commercial vendors at our discretion. We enforce a very strict policy regarding solicitation of our membership by commercial participants.

• Commercial vendors may not quote prices in any forum except the Vendors Forum.

• Commercial vendors may not use any section of the forum except the Vendors Forum to discuss their products or services unless answering a direct question and even in this case vendors may not quote prices (unless in Vendors Forums).

• Commercial vendors may not use the main Forums to direct others to the Vendors Forums.

• Commercial vendors may place a (1) link to their company website in their signature line (font size 2).

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Dealer/Vendor and Customer Disputes:
This forum is not intended to be a mechanism for people to vent frustrations about vendors or sales from private parties. Please settle your differences with the seller, manufacturer and dealer through the long-established legal or arbitration systems or the Better Business Bureau but not through our community.

Official Warnings and 3 Strikes System:
Our moderation team takes every effort to make sure members are aware of our rules before issuing an Official Warning or a Strike. It is customary (but not required) for the moderation team to send a Private Message (PM) to the member informing them of our rules and asking them to adhere to them in their ongoing participation.

Once we know a member is aware of our Community Rules and we see that he/she has violated them, we will issue an Official Warning. Following the Official Warning we use a 3 Strikes and you are out policy. If the member continues to violate our Community Rules we will give them a Strike for each violation and on the third Strike you will be banned. It is up to the moderation team to decide if this is a temporary or permanent ban.

Disabling accounts:
We may delete accounts that have no posts. If the account has many posts, completely deleting the account can significantly disrupt thread continuity. In that event, we may (if requested) disable your account. When we disable your account we do the following: 

• Change the user name. 
• Remove signature content 
• Remove any info from the profile that might be identifying or replace it with fictitious info 
• Remove all subscriptions 
• Remove avatar 
• Remove e-mail address or alter as well as personal web site info 
• Change account options to refuse PM's and E-mails from users and admins 
• After doing all this - ban account 

Where you make use of the communication features to share information with other individuals, however, (e.g., sending a personal message to another BFSC Forum user) we generally cannot remove such communications. Also, if someone quoted your post, the original user name will be shown as having been quoted (which we cannot purge out). 

If you would like to disable your account, please use the contact us form at the bottom of the page to make this request.

Someone has to interpret the above guidelines and how they apply to this forum. Ultimately it's up to our site administrator to make this decision. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please feel free to contact us.