Welcome to the Community

Welcome to the Covers Community!

The Covers community is a society, and as with any society in today’s world, there are basic rules that community members must follow. The Covers community is intended to be a place where members can engage with each other on a peaceful, friendly basis; by adhering to the rules and guidelines below, this is entirely possible!

Rules, Guidelines, and General Manifesto

The rules which govern the Covers community have been implemented to protect both the forum and its users. Please make yourself familiar with these rules – we expect every user to educate themselves and agree to these rules upon joining the Covers.com community. We take these rules & guidelines very seriously, and we hope that you will, too! Members of the Covers Team and Covers.com moderators are in the forums on a regular basis, and we will enforce these rules whenever necessary.

1) Any avatars, images, or URLs containing nudity, pornography, or sexually explicit attire (e.g., bikinis/lingerie) are NOT permitted in the forum and will be removed. All avatars will be reviewed by the Covers team – if they are deemed inappropriate, they will be removed. If users continue to upload avatars that violate these guidelines, the user will be banned. 

2) Spamming – via forum posts or blogs – will NOT be tolerated. If you spam, you will be banned! There is a zero tolerance policy on this issue. 

3) Touts – via forum posts or blogs – will NOT be tolerated and will result in users being banned! Our forum will not be used as a place to do your personal business. Phone numbers, home addresses, email addresses that are found in any forum other than Website Promotions, will be deleted. Touts involving twitter or Facebook redirects will also result in the user being banned. If you are promoting a service in any forum other than Website Promotions, your account may be suspended or banned at the discretion of our moderators. 

4) Covers.com users are only permitted to have ONE account. If you have been previously banned from our forum and return under a new alias, you will be banned immediately. 

5) Any racist, sexist, or homophobic content will be deleted and the user will face either a suspension, time in the penalty box, or a permanent ban, to be determined at the discretion of our moderators 

6) Obviously slanderous posts may have the thread topic censored, while the body of the post will remain untouched. We think this policy represents a nice compromise between freedom of speech rights and libelous mud-slinging. It is also meant to alleviate any legal implications that could arise from such posts. 

7) Any picks posted will be assumed to be meant for the various picks forums, and will be relocated there if not deleted. Any obvious site promotions will be assumed to be meant for the promotions area, and will be relocated there if not deleted. Any other off-topic threads will be relocated to the appropriate forum and/or deleted accordingly. 

8) Intentionally repetitive topics posted by the same user may be locked, deleted, or consolidated. 

9) Any threads in the forum which deteriorate to arguments between two or more users will be moved to the penalty box, or deleted at the discretion of our moderators. 

10) If you have nothing positive to offer our community and are only posting insults, attacks, and/or emoticons, you will be warned, suspended, and/or banned from the forum. Users who are suspended may continue to post in the Penalty Box for a period of time until the moderators decide to either ban the user or release them from the box. 

11) If it is determined that you are posting emoticons for the purpose of increasing your post total, the moderators have the option of reducing your post total and sending you to the Penalty Box for rehab.

Guidelines

For obvious reasons, this type of community is only enjoyable for our users as long as everyone plays fair. Therefore, we have come up with a few basic guidelines that we expect all of our users to agree to and respect. These guidelines are not rules, but we are counting on our community members to do a lot of self-policing to ensure that guidelines are being followed. Respecting these guidelines will keep the community vibrant, entertaining, and enjoyable! 

1) If you notice a member behaving in a way that is a direct violation of the rules and spirit of the community, please let us know via the Covers Help forum. If this member’s attitude is not violating the rules but is ruining your experience in the community, please consider ignoring them as opposed to engaging in an online battle. 

2) With regards to slanderous posts/blogs/comments: as mentioned above, we will be notifying users if we deem a post to be unsubstantiated and slanderous. Once a post has been deemed slanderous, it will either be deleted or moved to the Penalty Box forum. 

3) Try to be civil! We know that this can be difficult if someone is being rude and disruptive. However, we also know that nobody wants to read a page full of arguments, either. Please try to maintain a sense of dignity. Refusing to engage in rude or disruptive behavior also shows a lot of class. 

4) Keep this motto in mind before posting or commenting on another user’s posts: ‘freedom of speech may always be a right, but that doesn’t mean that YOU are always right’. 

5) If you have a good idea about ways to improve the community, let us know! We participated in the creation of this site, and we plan to add new features from time to time so feedback from our users is definitely welcome. 

6) As mentioned previously, uploaded images used for your community profile are NOT permitted to contain sexually inappropriate, racist, or violent content. This is non-negotiable, and all inappropriate images will be removed from your account. If you continue to post inappropriate images, your account may be locked and/or banned. 

7) Community users are not permitted to post active links in the forum. Users are still able to post links, but those links will have to be copied and pasted into browsers. This prevents inappropriate/explicit links from being promoted on the Covers community, and protects our users from clicking on such links.

Community Manifesto

First and foremost, we hereby promise to uphold a fun and interesting community! 

We promise to be consistent and fair in any disputes that arise within the community, and will try to keep any bans/suspensions/censorship to an acceptable minimum. 

We will not engage in any unfounded personal attacks on other people or websites. We cannot promise the same for other members, but if they do decide to engage in such behavior, we will take the appropriate actions. 

We will not employ "ghost" members to artificially inflate the appearance of the number of members in this community. 

We will not become involved in any popularity contests with competing communities. We cannot prevent competing communities from slamming us, but we will not engage in that type of behavior. In addition, we will not tolerate others using this community to slam competing sites. 

Please keep in mind that we are always watching what members post in our community. We reserve the right to suspend or ban any users that we feel are not complying with the rules & guidelines set out above. We don’t like to remove members from our community, but if you give us a reason to, please know that we will! 

Finally, and most importantly, we are doing this for fun – not profit. Although covers.com has advertising on the community pages, we are not given extra compensation for hosting the community. We want this to be a fun and entertaining source of information for our users; therefore, we are obliged to include the following paragraph in order to protect ourselves: 

"All of the information contained inside this community represents the personal thoughts and opinions of the individual members. Submissions to this community are not reflective of the thoughts and opinions of Covers.com, nor its employees. Covers.com and its employees do not endorse or represent any of the opinions within the community, and shall not be held responsible in any legal action resulting from any of the content contained within the community. Furthermore, Covers.com shall not be responsible for keeping a permanent record of the opinions expressed within the community, and we may delete or edit submissions to the community at our discretion if deemed necessary."