The Terms of Service

[DarkDragon]

I. Severe Infractions

1. Do not hack, impersonate a member of the staff, or attempt or conspire in any other way to harm the forums, websites, projects, or their administration.

2. Do not register for the sole purpose of advertising.

Any member violating any of the above rules will be banned at least one year and possibly longer depending on the severity of the infraction and staff discretion.


II. Major Infractions

1. Do not post flames (personal attack against other members) in any forum other than General Bitching, where it is allowed. Flaming can consist of name calling, derogatory words, excessive yelling, trolling, or anything else that targets another member in a hateful fashion.

2. Banned members are prohibited from interacting with the boards in any way during the ban. Do not register a new account, solicit a non-banned member to post for you, or evade a ban in any other way while banned. If you are banned and solicit another member to post on behalf of you, the ban will be extended and the other member will receive a proxy infraction.

3. Some AGN members are children, and some view the boards at work. Do not post porn or other sexually explicit material. If you feel something is bordering the line, use the spoiler tags with a warning.

4. Do not post or link to copywritten content, including ROMs, as it exposes AGN to legal liability.

III. Other Infractions

1. Do not spam. Spam includes wildly off-topic posts, posts designed to inflate post count, advertisements, patent nonsense, complaints about moderator actions, etc. Though double-posting and grave digging are not specifically prohibited, pointlessly resurrecting or "bumping" threads is also considered spamming.

2. Do not post messages by proxy for a banned member.

3. Do not publicly request that a thread be closed, a member be banned or unbanned, or otherwise rent-a-mod. If you think a post or thread is in violation of the rules, use the Report Button.

4. Other behavior, judged by consensus of the staff to be disruptive or unnacceptable, may also be grounds for a minor infraction.

IV. Punishment

Banned from AGN for length of time determined by number and severity of infractions.


V. Appeal

All infractions can be discussed by any member of the staff. If you disagree with an infraction you have received, respond to the private message sent by the staff member who gave you the infraction so that the staff can further discuss your argument.

Do not complain about infractions in a public forum. Such complaints will be considered spam.

[Din]

This will be a whole lot of help to new members. Thanks.

[Aegix Drakan]

>_> And maybe some older members too.

good going there DDragon.

[Trevelyan_06]

Good job on highlighting the important parts DD. Maybe it'll help a few people that would have otherwise not understood something for whatever reason. Unfortunately, I think you're going to always have people that break the rules for the simple fact that, when you're wearing your ass as a hat, it's hard to read the TOS.

[DarkDragon]

These should be the same (modulo some grammatical corrections) as the ones that were posted before Glenn deleted them.

[ZTC]

Nice job on streamlining the rules.

[Prrkitty]

And special thanks goes to zcAmazing for pointing me in the right direction so we could recover our updated TOS (since Glenn decided to be a jerk and delete them completely from the forums).

[Anarchy_Balsac]

Hmm, while I agree with most of the adjustments, I do have one small thing I wish to question in the interest of healthy skepticism. That is, while I understand that the existence of certain members is the reason that the clean slate policy was abandoned, couldn't it have just been amended to make it so that those who've been perma banned several times could just never have their ban lifted? My concern is that members who make mistakes every once in a while(like say, every 6 months or less) will eventually be banned for good despite the fact that they aren't particularly destructive members. They may even be perfectly constructive most of the time and contribute a lot, but if I am reading the policy right, they will be banned on the 4th offense even if all 4 are nearly a year apart or so.

[DarkDragon]

Well, nothing was adjusted - these are the same as the TOS posted last August by cyberkitten, which reflected the consensus of the staff at that time.

All non-serious infractions are currently set up in vBulletin to expire after 6 months, though this expiration is not mentioned in the TOS. As far as I know no staff discussion has yet taken place addressing this inconsistency.

[zcAmazing]

You're welcome. How nice of you, Prrkitty.

I seldomly find problems that may need to be taken care of anywhere in the forums (and require anyone's help). I still possess a text file of the TOS in my computer (copied from the Google cache). The main thing for me is the reporting of bugs in ZC.

Now, either you or DarkDragon go to the sticky thread in the New Members Forum and edit the link if you can. It is an old link to a TOS but shows a vBulletin message.

Bye.

EDIT: P.S. Just to get the history of the deleted TOS, here are the three links to all the pages that were in the deleted TOS. They are Google cached snapshots. I recommend you save the documents before Google refreshes them.

http://72.14.253.104/search?sourceid...hp%3Ft%3D98787
http://72.14.253.104/search?sourceid...787%26page%3D2
http://72.14.253.104/search?sourceid...787%26page%3D3