My Ten Commandments for the Monstrous forum

1. Thou Shalt Not Flame or Troll.
Even if you strongly hate the content of a post, and detest the individual to whom you're responding so strongly you dream of seeing werewolves playing tug-o-war with his internal organs, please exercise restraint and post without flames. (You are allowed, however, to make rude facial expressions and socially unacceptable hand gestures as you type out your post).

Your behaviour is judged not just here, but elsewhere. If you slander or libel this site or the site staff on another website, forum, or by other public means, your membership of the Monstrous forum may be terminated without notice.

2. Thou Shalt Not Spam or Engage in Posting Wars.
Post it once, and post it nice, and please don't ever post it twice.
Pick a forum, pick a message, and that's that. Don't post in every forum with the same message. If it's a general post, use one of our general forums. If it's specific to a subject… well.. you follow the drift.

It gives us a warm feeling in our tummies that you care about your post count and your forum ranking here at Monstrous. But if we see you posting meaningless tripe to edge up the count, or using the forum for a chitchat better suited to ICQ or AIM or a chat room room we'll ask you to stop. And reset your post counter to zero. Yeah, we're evil like that.

3. Thou Shalt Not Advertise.
We do not intend to serve as a linking service or a search engine to other sites. Links that wouldn't be allowed anywhere on the forums (including signatures, and location) would be to links to sites (commercial OR personal) that have:

a. Pornographic, racist or illegal materials
b. Profit sites (any get rich quick sites). This is sites that earn the poster a profit/commission or sites that give points for incoming links
c. Sites offering similar or the same content as Monstrous. It has taken many 'man' hours to compile the sites' content and as such our commitment to the promotion of that content is total. Neither do we allow visitors to use our forum membership as a means to build their own sites from, using our Private Messaging system to recruit writers and/or their content or membership drives for their own forums.
d.  Sites carrying ad-busting software

4. Thou Shalt Not Post Naughty Links or Graven Images.
This is beyond advertising. Do this, you earn a drop kick into the next timezone and an instant account deletion, without a second glance. We all know there are a ton of kids of varying ages and lots of different types of people who visit our site. Even if this wasn't the case, we just don't want porn and other yucky stuff on our boards. No images can be posted.  Sorry, you don't get to vote on this one. No way of telling if someone will post up a rude image, or pull from a slow server, causing the pages to load for everyone at the speed of a slug. Better, we think, to just bag the whole idea of images [that's why we have the Gallery!]. We graciously give you an Avatar, and that's the limit of your "visual self-expression," as the interior designers, say.

5. Thou Shalt Not Engage in Unnatural Bumping.
We have a "bump up" feature, where the post with the most recent addition goes to the top of the forum listing. If your post is good, it'll be responded to. If it's responded to, it'll undergo the process we call Natural Bumping. Natural Bumping = good. Unnatural bumping = bad. Unnatural Bumping is where someone posts, "I'm adding this to put this thread back at the top." Do it, we slap your hand. Do it often, you pull back a bloody stump.

6. Thou Shalt Not Spoof.
Don't make up an account name designed to resemble another poster. If an account is registered that could be confused (unintentionally) for a moderator or admin we reserve the right to offer the member the ability to change the name to something else.  We reserve the right to close the account if that offer isn't accepted.

7. Thou Shalt Not Puppeteer With Socks
If you're banned for some reason, don't keep coming back with "Fred," "Fred the Undead" and "Fred Yet Again." If you were banned, take it like a man… well, take it like a reasonable person, and accept your fate. We ban the person not the account so registering under a new nickname will result in that account being banned too. If you wish, you may appeal the account closure to the staff. Oh, and for goodness sake, don't make up additional accounts to respond to yourself. (People who talk to themselves used to be burned at the stake as witches; some still hold to that belief system here).

8. Thou Shalt Not Get Territorial.
If you post or submit something to our site or forums - be it an article, a news item or a suggestion - it becomes the property of Monstrous.com. That means if we leave it in the forum, post it to Monstropedia or whatever, it is still your work, but we have rights to it as well. If we allow it to be present on the site(s), or use it in any form, you agree that you have no financial claim against the site. We do not demand that items be exclusively ours, but once something it submitted to us for publication or posted in our forums, its removal is entirely at our discretion. This includes Gallery images.

9. Thou Shalt Accept the Admin's Decisions.
We [Monstrous.com and its admins and global moderators] reserve the right to ban [temporarily or permanently] or place on Probation [limit privileges] any member of Monstrous.com without warning. We reserve the right to edit, move or remove any post made on Monstrous.com without warning or explanation. We reserve the right to edit any portion of a member profile without warning. You will accept all this gladly and with open arms because we do it with love.

10. Thou Shalt Not Mention "Freedom of Speech."
Or we'll vomit, we promise you. This is a private forum, and you are our invited guests. The administrators have a tough job, trying to keep the forums clean and presentable while not willingly stifling open discussion. If a thread or post is locked or deleted, that was the necessary step to take in the judgment of the administrator. Please don't bandy irrelevant constitutional law and hope to plea the case for less "censorship." Don't start a vote, don't throw food, don't throw a hissy fit, don't light up torches and mob our central office. We don't censor, we exercise judgment and quality control on something in which we invest a lot of time and effort.  We only accept posts written in English.

Monstrous.com holds no responsibility for contents of posts made by members or off site websites linked to on these forums.  We are not liable for any damage or distress post contents cause to an individual or their property.  You read these forums and follow offsite links at your own risk.  Recommended age for these forums is 16.

Anything we didn't say above, we hereby say herein and henceforth. Verily. We reserve the right to amend these rules at our discretion without notification.  The onus is on the member to periodically check these rules for changes.