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The Poet Sanctuary's Terms Of Service
The lay down of the golden rules
Last Updated: March 21, 2009

The Poet Sanctuary is provided as a free public service to you, the poet. As a free public service we reserve the right to refuse service to whomever we choose. As a member of our website you are subject to the following Terms Of Service which may be updated from time to time without notice.

We do our best to make The Poet Sanctuary one of the best free poetry communities on the web, however, as many sites, there are certain rules of the community that we ask our members and visitors to follow.

Proboards, our forum host, has a set of their own TOS terms that you must agree to when registering to join our community. To view these, please, click here.

We've set aside our own guidelines that we'd like our members to follow while posting in the community to keep things civil, interactive, and friendly. We ask our members to please follow these simple rules. Breaking these guidelines may cause your account to be suspended for a period of time warranted by our Admin staff depending on your offense or may even merit banishment from our forums in which you will no longer be able to be an active participant in our community. As a free service, we reserve the right to do so.

General Forum Posting Guidelines

In order to keep TPS active we ask that you reply to at least 3 posts to every one that you make. TPS's moderators and administrative staff work hard to insure that at least 3 replies are made to each post presented within the forum; however, it's up to the members as well to keep things running smoothly and successfully. Also, please limit yourself to posting 3 new pieces of work in a given board per day; we are not partial to flooding of the boards. We also ask that you do not post the same poem in more than one board, if you do so, it will be deleted to avoid flooding as well.

NOTE: The Poet Sanctuary is a free managed community. We reserve the right to remove, edit, or move any messages for any reason. Please note however that you will receive a notification via Private Message when this is done.

All text posted at this site express the views of the author, and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the owners and administrators of this site.

All submitted items are Copyright � to their submitter/original author.
All the rest Copyright � 2002- 2009 by The Poet Sanctuary
Please copyright your material; we are not responsible for stolen work.

All logos and trademarks in this site are property of their respective owners.

The Poet Sanctuary's General Terms Of Service

We ask that you limit yourself to posting 3 new pieces of work per day. Posting mass numbers of work will not give you a lot of feedback and more than likely will ward members away from viewing your posts.

For each post you make, we ask that you leave feedback on 3 other pieces. These reviews should be made to other author's posts and not your own. Comments and soft critiques are very valuable here. We have a separate board for those of you looking for the harsh spectrum of things; The Writer's Workshop

Upon placing your work on our forum, you should make an offline copy for yourself. TPS is not responsible for any lost work. On the account that you are banned from our forum we are not responsible nor are we entitled to send you a copy of your posted material; same goes for Private Messages.

We will not stand posts that illy speak of other members from other poetry sites and members of TPS. Any posts found containing this subject matter will be deleted. TPS is made of respect and we recommend you acquire much of that same respect when posting. If you wish to speak of someone in an ill fashion, please keep their identity confidential and to yourself. TPS does not tolerate slander or harassment of our members either privately or publicly.

Respect each other and your differences. Try to limit your discussions on politics and religion. It is of course allowed to discuss, however, try not to post anything discriminating or disrespectful. If discussions of this sort cause an uproar the thread will be removed.

Happen to have a personal disagreement with someone at the board? Deal with it like an adult through private messages! Do not post threads within our discussion board or argue within a poetry thread. Things of this sort need to be dealt with outside of public view.

FLAMING IS NOT ENCOURAGED OR TOLERATED! Soft critiques are welcome, however, downgrading an author's piece simply because you do not like it is rude and selfish. Offenders of such will be sent one warning, if a complaint against the offender is filed again he or she will be banned from the forum; no questions asked.

REPORT TOS VIOLATIONS! If you stumble upon a thread/comment that you find personally offensive or feel may be against our Terms Of Service please report it to the administrative staff. Due to TPS's large capacity of users our staff is unable to monitor the boards closely, though we do try our best.

Picture/Avatar Restrictions - TPS does not allow images which display nudity or obscene profanity in its midst. TPS is regarded as a family oriented site as our member age range starts at the age of 13. Any images found on TPS containing this material will be removed and the postee of these images Warned/Banned

Explicit Material - TPS is regarded as a family oriented site. We do not allow overly explicit material. Posts with the following content will be deleted if found on the forum; posts that include subject matter of bashing ones race, sexual orientation, and religion. We also do not accept overly sexual oriented and crude work, this includes crude bathroom humor. If you happen to post a piece that does have some explicit material please put an Explicit/Language/ or Mature warning in the title of your piece before you post it! If you're not sure that your piece is too overly explicit for posting, please send it to an admin for approval beforehand!

Account Warnings - TPS has a three strikes and you're out policy! Upon major violations of our Terms Of Service offenders will find a 1% - 3% red bar warning on their profiles. The red bar warning is only viewable to those with the warning on their accounts and the Administrative staff. Once the account has reached 3% (3 Warnings) the account is then permanently banned. Also, once you receive a % warning, it becomes a permanent fixture to your account; we will not take it away regardless of how much time has passed! As a warning; do not try creating a new account to rid yourself of these warnings, those found creating an additional account will be banned!

Banishment - Upon creating a membership with our web site you have agreed that we may permanently terminate your membership should you violate any TOS written or unwritten without prior notification. As a free service we reserve the right to terminate all and any accounts that have breached our terms; same goes for accounts with matching IP addresses. TPS is not and cannot be held liable for your or others' actions.

Copyrights - The Poet Sanctuary IS NOT and CANNOT be held responsible for any lost or stolen work. It is up to the author to properly copyright their material before posting it anywhere on the Internet. TPS is provided as a free service to showcase you're work; we do not hold any legal rights to your work. Note: We have set up the forum to where only members who have registered an account may view author's postings however that is the only security measure we and many other posting sites have. We strongly recommend that you copyright your material before sharing it on the Internet in any shape of form.

Plagiarism - The Poet Sanctuary does not tolerate plagiarism! We are strongly against plagiarism. Any accounts found on the forum posting plagiarized (material that is not your own) work will be permanently banned immediately. (This excludes the Quote and Song Lyrics board) If you use something in your work that is NOT your own we strongly recommend that you give credit where credit is due.

The Poet Sanctuary's Anti-Spam Policy

THE POET SANCTUARY DOES NOT SUPPORT SPAM/ADVERTISING! Please, do not spam our members. If you'd like to exchange links with The Poet Sanctuary to advertise your website, join our link exchange which can be found here - Link Partners

Be warned, if you joined TPS for the soul purpose of ripping and spamming its members your ISP address is recorded and offenders reported of doing such will be banned from our forum without warning. United States Congress has passed a bill making internet Spam illegal, you should not be doing it anyhow!

Take note that all member e-mail addresses are hidden and private messages through the sites system are highly monitored, we will not support spam so do not do it here. Any spam found on the site will be removed; this goes for profile signatures and thread posts as well.

FORUM STAFF
Feel free to send us a Private Message if you have any questions or need assistance!

Main Webmaster
DragonsOfRose

Other Administrators
Moirae
LadyB
SE
QueenJellybean

Co-Administrators
Chelle
RD
Inflames
ShadowWolf
MidnightInEden
Mystiq
SirDaniel
AGold

We also have a handful of Moderators whom help us around the board. They are not listed here as they are an ever changing part of our staff.