Makes sense to put all the rules in one thread, so we don't have too many stickies up top at once.

Advertising, Soliciting, and SPAM

It is the wish of the members of the Keyboard Corner that people do not use it for advertising their products and services to us.

This includes manufacturers, retailers, people wanting to buy, trade, and/or sell gear, people wanting to showcase or sell their music, etc.

There are a few exceptions to this rule:

• 1. If you work for a music products manufacturer, and someone asks a question about your products or directly requests information from you or your company (for example, a post that begins "If anyone from Kormahaland is listening..."), your response is entirely welcome, as one mission of this forum is certainly to foster information exchange between manufacturers and users. However, please do not start topics about your company or products.
  
  • 2. During each major trade show, a member or myself may start a thread about new gear at that show. (NAMM, AES, Musikmesse, etc). Again, please leave it to a non-manufacturer to begin the topic, but you are encouraged to post summaries and links to new products introduced at the trade show on that thread only, please.
  
  A few guidelines for what a manfacturer response may contain: Feel free to cite all the design features and their attendant benefits that you want. "This is what we did, and this is why it makes our stuff great." No problem there. When it comes to negative statements about the competition, though, some care is needed to keep things fair. We don't mind statements about a general category of one's competition - for example, you might make a hardware VA synth and talk about why it's better than "workstations" or "soft synths" for a given purpose. But claims about a specific competitor that are either somewhat subjective (Example: "XYZ company's samples sound unrealistic and don't sit in a mix well") or hard for the average reader on these forums to verify as more than hearsay (Example: "I've had a lot of customers switch to my product after getting frustrated with XYZ") are to be avoided.
  
  • 3. If you are a regular contributing member of this forum, and have personal gear that you want to sell or trade, you are welcome to post about it, but the post title must clearly begin with the word "SPAM:" You can also post in the Garage Sale thread, which can be found here .
  
  • 4. If you are a regular contributing member of this forum, and you have music you would like to sell or otherwise call attention to, please do so on the Let's Hear It thread.

Members who have an established track record of contributing and conversing here will have more leeway than those who might register for the sole or main purpose of posting about their product or music.

We also ask that if you are posting in your capacity as employee of a manufacturer or other M.I. company, that your signature or the body of your post contain your real name, position, and company name. You do not need to do this if you happen to work for such a company and are posting as a private citizen.

Mr. Bryce and I are happiest when the online environment feels like a group of colleagues, not like something we have to police. However, we have no problem banning posters who repeatedly violate the above rules.

Thanks for your understanding and co-operation. This forum has been one where heavy-handed enforcement has rarely been necessary, and due to the character of its participants, we know it will continue to be that way.

On-line Citizenship

Jim Quinn has a concise version of rules that apply to all Musicplayer forums here.

To sum up policies we've explained in numerous threads over the years...

1. Please refrain from ad hominem attacks. This is when someone attacks another person's character, personality, politics, religion, sock mismatch, etc, instead of simply offering reasons against the truth of their claim. Simple example:

Premise: Martha Stewart is a notoriously demanding, ruthless person to work for, routinely reducing assistants to tears.
Conclusion: Of course she was guilty of stock trading fraud.

With ad hominem, it doesn't matter if the premise is possibly true: Martha's personality is not sufficient factual reason to conclude anything about her guilt or innocence.

2. Charlie Brown said it best: Three things its best not to discuss are politics, religion, and the Great Pumpkin. I don't want to be too restrictive, so please feel free to discuss the Great Pumpkin! Seriously, it may come up that people want to talk about a certain news event, and do so with their fellow keyboarders. If it turns into a Democrats vs Republicans (or any other "vs") thing, though, chief moderator Dave Bryce and I reserve the right to delete it. Things just get too uncivil too quickly.

3. Profanity. Please use common sense to keep this forum as work-friendly and kid-friendly as possible. Many corporate and school firewalls automatically block sites based on scanning for cuss words, and we all want to evangelize keyboard-playing to as many people as we can.

If you link to something that has explicit content but musical or informational value relative to what this forum is about, that's OK, but please preface your link with something like "WARNING: Not work-safe!" One parent perceiving that their kid learned the F-word "because of" this site is all it takes to start a big sh-, excuse me, doodie-storm.

Thanks for your understanding.

Discussing specific pricing/talking about specific retailers

We request that members not post about any specific retailer in regards to pricing of gear/great deals they got, etc.

Here's why: in the early days of the forum, music store sales guys would come on here trolling for sales...some of them would even stoop so low as to pretend to be just another end user who just wanted to share the news about this cool store they bought their gear at, or some wonderful salesguy that they thought all of us should know about...

Consequently, we try and keep info about specific pricing/retailers off the boards.

dB