Community Rules

TrawlerForum.com Community Guidelines

There is no charge for joining this Forum! This is a community of individuals who share a common interest in boating. Please think before you post and keep your comments limited to the topic at hand and above all be nice. If you come across any violations to these guidelines or have any problems navigating the site, do not hesitate to let us know through the Report Post function or the Contact Us link (bottom of the page); we'll be happy to address your concerns.

Be Courteous!

We aim to ensure that the forum is an enjoyable place that you want to visit time and time again. Our philosophy is that we want TrawlerForum to be an online reflection of the boating community. Treat each other with respect just as you would on the water.

• Our rules extend to all sections of the website including private messaging.
• Personal attacks on others will not be tolerated. Challenge others' points of view and opinions, but do so respectfully and thoughtfully. Excessive sarcasm, belligerence, insults, profanity, anger, offensive comments about race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and national origin, are not acceptable.
• Do not post libelous remarks or directly misleading information.
• Stay on topic by keeping discussions relevant and on track.
• Participants may not post or bump threads to pad post counts. Bumping is posting useless information, posting one-liners or any other action to deliberately keep a thread hot.
• Do not post the same discussion more than once or in more than one forum.
• Posts containing rude, explicit, obscene or vulgar language or abbreviations, images or links to websites with adult content/images or punctuation marks designed to "trick" our obscenity filter may be removed.
• Be mindful of yourself and others. This forum is not a democracy; it is privately owned and we make the rules. If rules are violated we retain the right at our discretion to remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or remove members. Any abuse toward our staff may/will result in immediate suspension of your account.
• Public discussion about moderation or moderator decisions is not allowed. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned. Do not repost deleted material.
• Do not use posts to promote your blog, your YouTube channel, surveys or contests.
• NO SPAM! Our user base is not a resource to be "mined" by individuals, groups, or businesses, for profit or not for profit. Commercial posting and fundraising solicitations are not permitted except by PRIOR arrangement with Social Knowledge LLC. Participants may not post affiliate links or links to direct others to any pages at their own commercial website or website in which they have an interest. Exception to this may be found in Signature Standards, Marine-Related Commercial Posting, Sponsoring Vendors and Commercial Members (see below).
• Trolling and cyberstalking are NOT allowed and are grounds for account restriction or banishment. Trolling on this board includes posting controversial and often irrelevant or off-topic messages with the intention of (or anticipated result of) baiting other users into an emotional response or to generally disrupt normal, harmonious on-topic discussion, especially when a pattern of such posting is apparent.
• General discussions, statements, images and links that are political in nature or that reference general government policies, weaponry, gun rights and religion are not allowed in ANY areas of the forum. Discussions about current or pending legislation or regulations, weapons and religion that directly pertain to Boating are acceptable but will be closed or removed if they wander off topic or become disruptive.
• We take the "be nice" rule VERY seriously!

Posting Standards

• Forum members should use the standard fonts available on the forum. The use of bold, large or colored fonts should be used sparingly. Posts containing inappropriate formatting will be removed or modified at our discretion; e.g. all caps or excessive color.
• E-mail and web address are not appropriate forum user names. Usernames are not intended to perpetuate business recognition and members may not use a business name, in whole or part. Usernames may not contain common business identifiers such as LLC, Inc, LTD, or URLs; in whole or in part.
• Posts should be well formatted. Use paragraphs, punctuation, and capital letters appropriately. Excessive use of Netspeak/LOLspeak (internet slang) and texting shortcuts (b4, str8, etc) is not permitted. Posts with violations may be edited or deleted without notification.
• The language of this forum is English. If you are not a native English speaker, do your best. We are glad to have you as a member and will be supportive and polite.
• Do not post protected or copyrighted material. Information copyrighted or owned by any individual or entity other than the member should not be posted on the discussion forums without the consent of the owner. If such an event occurs, the individual posting the information shall be held solely responsible. You cannot legally post entire articles or news in the forum without permission from the copyright holder. Even if you attribute the article correctly its still copyright infringement. Under Fair Use provisions you can legally post a small abstract of an article - or perhaps the opening paragraph. In either case please post a link to source.The exception to this rule is press releases; they are meant for distribution and can be copied and posted in their entirety. If you are not sure if you can copy something then always err on the side of caution and simply post a link to the material.

Signature Standards

Signatures must be setup in your profile rather than manually added to your messages. They will appear at the bottom of every post you make.

• Signatures must be kept to a maximum of four lines (including blank lines) and contain no more than two links (non-commercial).
• Signature may not include email addresses, links to competing websites, prompts to contact or a sales pitch.
• Signatures must follow our forums posting standards and only one line may be bold.

Our classifieds system is offered as a benefit of membership. We expect ads placed to be related to the topic of this forum; i.e. marine-related. Please see the complete Guidelines for posting to Classifieds (link).

• Place only one ad per item.
• Ads must include the price, location and description.
• When your item has sold or is no longer available please post to the Classifieds Ad thread to that effect.
• Ads may be removed by our staff at any time for any reason.
• Commercial listings (brokers sales, etc) are NOT allowed.

Commercial Parties (For-profit companies and Industry professionals)

The Trawler Forum neither discourages nor endorses any commercial entity and is not primarily intended for soliciting business by commercial entities (advertising). Any member with a marine-related product, service or company - whether for profit or not for profit may ask to become a Commercial Member. Commercial Member status may be granted to any member who has a commercial interest in the Marine Industry. There is no fee associated with a commercial membership but the designation is at the discretion of our Site Team and is intended for regularly participating Forum members. Commercial Members must adhere to all forum policies including the following which specifically pertain to Commercial Members:

• Soliciting Members: Commercial Members may not solicit our membership or advertise except as specifically allowed in these policies or by prior arrangement with Social Knowledge, LLC.
• Discussion of Competitors: Commercial Members are prohibited from making direct, emotionally-charged posts to, or about, competitors and may NOT post product comparisons.
• Product Discussion: Commercial Members may not use any section of the forum except the Commercial Posts Forum to discuss their product, service or company unless answering a direct question from another member and even then may not quote prices outside the Commercial Posts Forum. Links to commercial websites in which they have an interest are not permitted anywhere except as outlined in these guidelines. These links will be deleted without notice.
• Starting Threads about Products: Commercial Members are free to start threads about their company, product or service in the Commercial Posts Forum only and may not use other forums to direct members to the Commercial Posts Forum.
• Quoting Prices: Commercial Members may post prices in threads in the Commercial Posts Forum, only.
• Responding to Threads about Products: Commercial Members may respond to queries from members when their product is directly linked to the query, but may only post links to their own product in the commercial posts forum.
• Linking to Products: Commercial Members may not post links to their product in any section of the board except the commercial posts forum.
• Contact Information in Profile (bio): Commercial Members may not include their phone number or email address in any posts. However, CMs may post a link to their site and other contact details on their profile page.
• Avatars: Commercial Members may not use likenesses their product or logo in their avatar.
• Usernames: Usernames are not intended to perpetuate business recognition and so Commercial Members may not use their business name, in whole or part, as their username unless by special arrangement with the Trawler Forum. Usernames may not contain common business identifiers such as LLC, Inc, LTD, or URLs; in whole or in part.
• Signature Standards for CMs: Commercial Members may incorporate their business name into their signature and a single link to their webpage (Font size 2). No other advertising or contact information is allowed in CM signatures.

Dealer/Vendor and Customer Disputes

This forum is not intended to be a mechanism for people to solely vent frustrations about vendors or sales from private parties. Please settle your differences with the seller, manufacturer and dealer through other means but not through our community.

About the First Amendment, censorship and your "right to free speech"

We believe in public freedom of speech but that right does not infer that others have to publish your speech. TrawlerForum.com is privately owned and we require members to abide by our rules and by the decisions of our staff. If you post outside these guidelines your post may be edited or deleted - any law or constitutional right your country may have regarding freedom of speech does not apply to this site.

Site Management, Member Concerns & Account Closure

If we feel site rules are violated we may remove, edit or delete posts and if necessary ban or restrict account access. If a moderator deletes or edits one of your posts and you disagree with the action, contact the moderator concerned or any other member of our site team. Do not repost deleted material. This forum is largely self-policing, which means that moderators will respond and react to problems reported through the REPORT POST option, via the CONTACT FORM at the bottom of each page, or via PM. Do not hesitate to use these tools to report any problems regarding the forum.

Requests for changes to your account should be made by using the Contact Us link at the bottom of every forum page.

Participants may only have one account. Moderators may consolidate or delete multiple accounts.

We may remove accounts that have no posts. If the account has many posts, completely deleting the account can significantly disrupt thread continuity. In that event, we may (at our discretion) disable your account in some or all of the following ways: change the user name, remove signature content, subscriptions, avatar and identifying information or replace it with fictitious info. We may change account options to refuse contact and/or ban the account. Where communication features were used to share information with other individuals (e.g., sending a personal message to another Forum user) we generally cannot remove content. If someone quoted your post, the original user name will be shown as having been quoted (which we cannot purge).

Registering and participating at TrawlerForum.com constitutes agreement to abide by the Social Knowledge Terms of Service Agreement (Social Knowledge is the company that owns this forum). We reserve the right to modify these rules at any time without prior notice.

Someone has to interpret the above guidelines and how they apply to this forum. Ultimately it's up to our site team to make this decision. If you have any questions about these guidelines, please feel free to contact us.