Rules & Guidelines

1. Rights & Responsibilities. The Avery's Weather Center Forum is privately owned, and access is a privilege, not a right. We are a family oriented site and our rules were drawn up accordingly. Users must adhere to the rules or our forum and abide by our standards of proper conduct.

2. Conduct. Avery's Weather Center is a FLAME free site. We do not allow personal attacks and/or personal insults. No obscenities, vulgarity, slanderous, hateful, threatening, or sexually-oriented posts allowed. Harassment of any kind will not be tolerated and is defined as "A course of conduct directed at a specific person that causes substantial emotional distress in such person and serves no legitimate purpose" or "words, gestures, and actions which tent to annoy, alarm and abuse (verbally) another person." PM's are subject to the same contact as the open board. Non-compliance of the rules will be met with restrictions on your account including suspension or a permanent ban. Show some RESPECT and think before you post.

3. Advertising/Links. Avery's Weather Center does not allow "out right" advertising of other sites without prior approval from the Admin Staff. We do not allow links to other forums or anything that contains pornography of any sort. Personal website are fine, but must be approved prior to posting. If your website has a message board it will not be allowed.

4. Politics. Political debate and discussion of politics is not allowed on Avery's Weather Center.

5. Inactive Accounts. Avery's Weather Center does from time to time delete accounts that haven't been activated. This is done to keep our user base at a manageable size and to give a true reading of the community size.

6. Topics/Forums. Topics posted must be in the realm of the forum that they are posted in. We will move threads that are not posted in the appropriate forum.

7. Third-Party Content. In an effort to prevent plagiarism, we require that any statistics, quotes, news articles, forecasts, and the like obtained from a third party to be posted on Avery's Weather Center Forum must be in the form of a brief quote that cites the original source and/or includes comments by the poster other than the quotation. If you are unsure then just post the link.

8. Content Disclaimer. Content posted in the Avery's Weather Center Forum does not necessarily reflect the views of Avery's Weather Center but rather the views of each individual poster making the post. Avery's Weather Center will attempt to remove any objectionable materials as quickly as possible but are not responsible for any contact that may be offensive to you. If you see a violation please let us know right away.

9. Polls. Polls may be posted without Staff (mod or admin) approval, but the abuse of polls is not tolerated. Use common sense when posting a poll and ensure that a poll is the best venue for your question before posting. Excessive or inappropriate polls will be removed.

10. False Information. Intentional posting of false information is not permitted at all. We know people do like to joke around but we have to many people visiting this forum other than the regulars to permit this activity. If you are going to joke about something or copy information from another location you must clearly say so in words. We take this a very serious offense and the penalties will be very serious as well.

11. If you have a question, issue or grievance related to the board itself or another member and it is not already answered in the Help forum you are to send a staff member a PM prior to posting it on the forums. Do not think posting it in the public forum for everyone to see will result in anything in your favor and could result in suspension. If you are sent a Warning from a staff member you must respond to that PM or the staff will assume you are ignoring the Warning and a suspension will result.

12. Avery's Weather Center does not allow personal attack and/or person insults of any kind directed to the National Weather Service, Storm Prediction Center, National Hurricane Center, its staff or any other professional weather organization for that matter. While one may disagree it is very important that we keep respecting the weather professionals and their opinions. We are expecting all members to act respectfully at all times.

13. Repeated warnings along could result in suspension or permanent banning from Avery's Weather Center. If your account is suspended  for any reason do not attempt to re-register under another nickname. If one does so it will be grounds for a permanent ban.

14. Trolling. A troll is often someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and post inflammatory, rude, repetitive or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy or antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion, including the personal attack of calling others trolls. Often, trolls assume multiple aliases. For many people, the characterizing feature of trolling is the perception of intent to disrupt a community in some way. Inflammatory, sarcastic, disruptive or humorous content is posted, meant to draw other users into engaging the troll in a fruitless confrontation. The greater the reaction from the community the more likely the user is to troll again, as the person develops beliefs that certain actions achieve his/her goal to cause chaos. This gives rise to the often repeated protocol in internet culture: "Do not feed the trolls."