Guidelines - Please Read Before Posting

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Please be respecful
The Helpful Gardener is a relaxed and friendly place for discussing and sharing about gardening. Please help us keep it that way. Unlike other forums, we do not tolerate personal attacks, insults or rudeness. Anyone caught insulting another member may be permanently banned.

In exchange for the right to post on this forum we request that all members be polite, courteous, and respectful to each other.

How to learn the most
One of the best ways of learning is to contribute questions and comments. Participating in a forum, as opposed to lurking, will increase the amount of knowledge and fun you get out of our forum. So let's hear from you!

Duplicate Posts
Please do not post your question more than once. Choose the best forum category for your discussion, give it the most descriptive title, then post your question once. For more information see this guide to how to get the most answers in a forum post.

The benefits of staying on topic
It's important to keep your responses on topic to what is under discussion. If you are inspired to ask a question about something that is compltely different or want to exand the discussion in a more general direction than the original poster intended, then please start a new discussion. Your post will receive a better response in it's own discussion with a descriptive title that more accurately reflects the topic of what you want to discuss. This will help you get more and better answers and make it easier for future members to research a particular topic.

Our commitment towards cultivating a friendly gardening community
Our rules are in place to cultivate the positive experience we are known for. If you have a question or comment about the rules, feel free to Private Mesage (PM) myself or any of the other moderators.

Copyrights
Please respect the copyrights of other websites, books, and publications. While quoting a small portion of a work for the purpose of discussion is generally seen as fair use, quoting multiple paragraphs is not. If quoting a small portion please leave an attribution otherwise we will consider removing the quote in its entirety as it's our policy to respect the copyrights of publishers. We especially appreciate that you respect the copyrights of other gardening forums by not quoting them here.

Religion and Politics
HelpfulGardener respects your religious and political beliefs. Religion and politics play a major role in people's lives around the world. Because this is a forum with people from all walks of life, we request that discussions and signatures about religion or politics be avoided because those topics are too personal and tend to be divisive, which works against our goal of bringing people together.

We want it so that when members enter the Helpful Gardener forum they can be confident of a friendly and sharing experience. The goal is to create a friendly community around gardening. Things that cause division work against that goal. This is why we have these policies in place. We respect your political and religious beliefs, but respectfully ask that those topics not be discussed on the forum.

Discussion of laws that affect gardening are fine. But let's remember to above all keep our discussions civil and polite.

If you have any questions about this policy, please contact myself or any of the moderators by Private Messaging.

Please Help Keep our Forum Family Friendly
Our community members come from all walks of life and personal beliefs. We ask that you please keep your posts family friendly not only to avoid offending a fellow gardener, but also because we want to keep the focus of discussions on gardening in a respectful and easy going environment. As with all the points in our guideline, the goal is to encourage community.

Post Titles
When initiating a new thread, it's very important to create a descriptive title. Making your title vague is a sure way to create a discussion with unsatisfactory answers. Questions are answered better and by more people when you take a moment to create a thoughtful title. More about Post Titles here.

Play nice
We encourage all members to be mindful that online communication is different than discussions in person or on the phone. What may sound fine in person may appear harsh online. It's quite easy to offend someone without meaning to. So please be mindful of how a post may sound. It doesn't take much to sound harsher than you intended.

One way to lighten up a post is to make use of Emoticons, the little happy faces .

Discussions are Not Debates
Another way is to allow for differences of opinion. There's plenty of room for different opinions, and there is no need to "win" a discussion. On Helpful Gardener we encourage discussions, not debates. Discussions have no winners or losers, they are about the exchange of ideas, of which you are free to decide if it is the best or not for your situation.

Avatars
We encourage members to use avatars as a way to express who you are. However we discourage the use of animated avatars because they distract from the focus of the forum, which is the discussion.

About links to your own blog/site/articles
We discourage linking to one's own articles or websites from within a discussion. This is a policy created to discourage forum spam. It applies to everyone. No exceptions. However, members CAN link to their sites from their profile signature. See policy about signature links below.

Links in Signatures
If you are associated with a gardening business (landscaping, garden design, gardening supply, nursery, etc.) or a useful gardening blog or gardening related site and wish to place a link to it from your signature, that's fine as long as it's in English. Please do not post language inciting people to visit your site. A simple link will do. Links in signatures must be gardening related. Please PM me if you wish to have an exception made or have a question.

Useless posts that are pretexts for displaying promotional signatures will be removed. Signature links to sites created solely to earn affiliate commissions, work at home schemes, get rich schemes or created solely to display ads are not allowed. If your site does not have useful original content then don't link it.

No links to Squidoo Lenses.
No links to Ning sites.
No links to twitter profiles.
No links to sites that promote ebooks.
No signature links to other forums
No links to sites that link to article directories
No links to sites with zero original content
No links to blogs that aren't being updated
No links to one-page thin content landing pages
No links containing affiliate codes within them
No links to sites that are in a language other than English

Posting of Email Addresses
Posting email addresses in the forum is discouraged. The whole idea of a forum is to encourage discussion. Anything oppposite of that such as actively and expressly encouraging private discussions works against the spirit of community, which is what the Helpful Gardener is all about, community.

Promotional Posts
All promotional posts will be removed. Please do not rationalize that your site is useful and helpful- it's still promotional and is not allowed. If you have something useful and helpful to post, then post that with a link to your site within your signature line.

If you have any doubts or questions about this, please feel free to PM me. I am 200% more than happy to answer your question about this.

Please, no marketing surveys
We do not allow our members to be polled for marketing purposes. This also means we do not allow students to poll our members about a gadget/gizmo/machine they want to build, or about the tools that our members use.

No personal vendettas
We discourage attacks against specific companies as well as personal attacks against individuals. If you have a personal problem with a company or individual, please take it up with them. Our forum is not a place to mediate your personal or business issues.

Respect for laws
Please do not use our forum to encourage others to break laws or engage in other illegal activities.

Moderator Edits
Specific edits by moderators are considered a private matter between you and the moderators. If you have a question or comment about a specific edit made by a moderator, we encourage you to contact us directly by the Private Messaging system.

Comments about moderation are considered a private issue between you and the management of the board. If you have feedback about our moderation we encouarage you to communicate it by Private Message with any of our moderators.

We want to hear from you!
This is your community and we want to hear what we can do better. Any suggestions can be sent by Private Messaging (PM) to any of the moderators to open a discussion about that.