GGA Forums Posting Guidelines

The Georgia Geocachers Association steering committee desires to maintain a communication medium for the membership that is informative and helpful, and inclusive of a broad range of subject matter, thoughts and opinions. To this end, a web site, an e-mail distribution service, and a discussion forum have been established for GGA use.

On rare occasion, some discussion forums have experienced what might be termed disruptive behaviors such as flame wars, rants, personally disparaging comments, and the like. While we remain hopeful that we will not experience such things, the steering committee has decided to develop a set of guidelines to explain how we will behave going forward.

1. First and foremost, the GGA steering committee (SC) is NOT in the censorship business. However, the SC recognized that there might be need for administrative action in extreme cases.

2. Administrative action on postings shall be scrupulously avoided except in the most egregious cases of personal attacks, profanity, perceived attempts at exploitation, inducements to participate in illegal activity, blatantly commercial postings by non-members, and the like.

3. Before any action on a posting may be taken, the action must be approved by an affirmative vote of a majority of the steering committee members available to vote at the time an issue is raised. In no case shall action be approved before at least half of the steering committee has voted.

4. Upon an affirmative vote, a steering committee member shall:

a) Cause a forum for deleted posting content (Deleted Content Forum) to be created in the Private Forum area. This area is accessible to GGA members through the use of a password.

b) Copy the content of the problem posting to the deleted content forum. The screen name of the poster shall be included here as well.

c) Replace the text in the problem posting with a message indicating why it has been moved.

5. This method preserves the text of the poster, but places it in a location that members may choose to view or not to view

6. The poster could, if they so choose, edit the post to restate their idea or position without the offensive content.

7. In the unlikely event that an individual repeatedly posts content that requires administrative action, the poster may be banned.

8. In the case of a non-geocaching related commercial posting by a non-member, such a posting may be deleted with no further action.