Basic Guidelines

The following six categories of online conduct are unacceptable at BikeWithMe and constitute a violation of our Community Standards which may result in warning, suspension or loss of membership:

Harrassment ... Harassment occurs when a member insults, attacks, and denigrates another member at any time. We have zero tolerance for taking an argument about a any topic to a personal level. For instance, the use of terms such as "idiot, moron, stupid" and other derogatory terms constitutes harassment. The idea is to make this a pleasant environment to discuss cycling, not a schoolyard, or name-calling and rock-throwing festival. Repeated critical and sharply negative posts toward a site user can also constitute harassment.

Disruption ... Posts which intend to disrupt the topic of conversation or steer the topic away from the focus of cycling and related news. Disruption can include harassment, multiple user profiles, multiple posting of the same post and posting completely off topic messages. Please do your best when it comes to grammar, punctuation and spelling. Excessive use of "AOL'ese" and "hAx0r" talk can be very disruptive so please keep it to a minimum.

Vulgarity ... As a community with a diverse variety of members and readers, we ask that our members to post without using vulgarity. Vulgarity not only includes vulgar language and pictures but also sexist, racist, anti-religious and homophobic language which may offend other members. In addition, the "masking" of vulgarity by inserting * or another keystroke in place of one or more letters in a vulgar term is unacceptable in most cases.

Solicitation ... Refrain from using BikeWithMe to advertise your site, items for sale, commercial services or website. You may attach a short link to your site within your profile or signature.

Spamming ... Spam is also flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services.

Copyrighted Material ... You may post links to appropriate articles but posting articles from other sources in their entirety is a violation of our Guidelines. If you must repost quotes or sentences, please credit the source.

Please bear in mind that these are only guidelines; there is always a "grey area" and we understand that.