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The Team Speed Kills Community Standards

You should have gotten a limited message when you signed up for the site, but here are a few more guidelines for commenting and posting here on Team Speed Kills.

Be polite to other members. No, that doesn't mean you can't disagree. It just means that you do so in a courteous manner. A person's ideas are fair game -- if someone posts something on the Internet, feel free to say what you want about their opinion. But a commenter or poster on this site is off limits. Friendly teasing, of course, is exempt, and you can poke fun at the coaches, players and personalities of the SEC and the wider world all you want, within the bounds of good taste. Everyone on this site, though, is the member of a community, and I'm not going to allow threads to devolve into personal attacks and name-calling. This one's pretty clear-cut. A low-grade attack will draw a warning the first time and a ban the second. Anything that crosses the lines of good taste will be an automatic ban, no questions asked.

Easy on the profanity. The site's posts are relatively clean, and I think that's generally a good guide to follow. Of course, this is largely a case-by-case basis. If your team gets screwed by a ref and you spontaneously cuss in a game thread, that's one thing. I'm not endorsing it, but I understand that it happens sometimes. If it bothers me enough, I'll delete it without punishment. (I will delete any f-bombs in a game thread.) Cussing in a non-game thread will be dealt with individually, though it would take someone really going off to draw a ban. There is one hard and fast rule here: The f-bomb in a non-game thread (when you should have time to think about things) is unacceptable. The first offense is a warning; the second, a three-day suspension; the third, a permanent ban. Of course, if this site is still around five years from now and your third f-bomb comes five years after your second, I'm probably not going to ban you, so there might be some very limited exceptions. But there's one way to avoid having to worry about things like that: Don't use the word.

Show a bit of tolerance. There are rare instances when I'll see a parody idea involving something from "the real world" and integrate it here. Otherwise, I try to leave the broader political and philosophical issues of our day somewhere else. Let's not forget that this is a sports blog, and as such should mostly be concerned with sports. People here are likely from a variety of racial, social, political and religious backgrounds, but we should all be brought together by a love of sports. Anyone who strays too far into this terroritory will draw a warning, suspension and ban for the first, second and third offenses, respectively. This will be ruled, as all the other guidelines, by common sense. "Obama supports a playoff," is fine. "Obama would support a playoff," is okay. "Obama supports a playoff because it's part of the Democratic Party's plans to shove socialism down our throats" -- without some indication that you're joking -- would draw a warning. Anything labeling Obama with a certain racial epithet would draw a ban. Also: Respecting others' religions means not using the name of religious figures as an exclamation. (This is something that's pretty personal for me, as I'm a Christian and like seeing Jesus' name used only to refer to Him.)

Year2 and I are the ultimate arbiter of these and other guidelines. I would hope readers would say we're not too dictatorial here. Or at least that we are benign despots. This is the one area where we have to have the final say. We will sometimes ask for the opinions of members or the victim of an attack, but will always reserve the right to make the final decision. In return, we promise to you to use these powers rarely, if at all.

Have fun. Despite these guidelines, this is a place to say what you want about the SEC or sports in general. I think these are minimal standards to keep the discourse fairly acceptable for all involved.

A FanPost gives the opinion of the fan who writes it and that fan only. That doesn't give the opinion more or less weight than any other opinion on this blog, but the post does not necessarily reflect the view of TSK's writers.

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