Terms of Use for the Message Boards
These terms of use are in addition to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for the Website. By accessing the Message Boards, and other interactive areas of this site, you agree to abide by these rules of engagement.
If you have problems with a member or a post, you have two options. You can click the Thumbs Down or you can click the Report Post button found at the bottom of every post. The report option gives you an opportunity to give a reason for your issue with the post or member. We will try to review and handle these matters as quickly as possible.
As a user of the message board, you agree that you will not post or send to another community member (by personal delivery, mail, email or otherwise) any of the following:
- Material that is intended to harass, belittle, humiliate, defame, abuses, or threatens others, including but not limited to, threats of instituting litigation against another member.
- Statements that are personal attacks.
- Posting of sexual content, sexual avatars and signatures, obscenities, and cussing.
- Statements that are bigoted, hateful, or racially offensive.
- Material that advocates illegal activity or discusses illegal activities with the intent to commit them.
- Unauthorized copyrighted material.
- Personal information of another user (name, address, phone number, picture, etc.) without their express permission, and/or who may wish to remain anonymous.
You are granted a limited nonexclusive license to use the information for your personal and noncommercial use. Otherwise, you may not copy, store in an electronic form, modify, print, transmit, sell, or transfer, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, frame in another web page, display, or in any way exploit any of the content, in whole or in part. Permission to reprint or electronically reproduce any materials is expressly prohibited without prior written consent from Farran Media. We reserve the right to hide, edit or delete any post on our message boards.
The following are the most frequent issues that require moderator intervention:
Personal Attacks:
Please pay careful attention to how you use your words when posting. The “Golden Rule” for the board is to respect others. Focus on the subject matter, not the person or a group of people. Posts that include baiting, harassment, personal attacks, or name calling are subject to moderator review and can be edited or deleted.
Self-Promotion:
When threads are “hijacked" into sales pitches, the original interesting discussion is lost. If a thread is started for the sole purpose to sell your product or service, then the message boards quickly become cluttered with “spam” threads. Therefore, we will remove these types of posts. The member will be notified immediately of the violation with an explanation.
If a member asks on the message board about a product or service you may contact them via private message, however it is a violation of the message board guidelines to send unsolicited personal messages to any of our members to promote your company or a product or service.
As a courtesy to all members, the signature area can be used for contact information and your company logo.
Conflicts of Interest:
Posting anything negative about a product or company that is a competitor to a product or company you have a financial interest in can be edited or deleted. If you have a financial interest in a company, product or service, make this clear in the body of your post or in the signature area when posting a message. If your post pertains to a competing product or service that you have a financial interest in, this also needs to be clear in the body of your post or in the signature area.
Quoting a Post That Has Been Edited or Deleted:
Your post has been edited or deleted because it quoted or replied to a prior post that had to be edited or deleted due to a rule infraction.
Multiple Posting:
Posting the same message in multiple forums is a form of spam. The administrator will select one to keep and delete the others.
Thread Hijacking:
Stay on topic. Don’t hijack a thread by changing the topic of the thread. Disruptive posts may be deleted. If you want to start a new conversation, then you should start a new thread.
Posting a Classified Ad:
Any content posted for selling your practice, equipment etc. or recruiting or looking for a job should be posted within our Classified Ad section and not within the message boards. The post will be deleted, and you will be notified and offered assistance with using our classified ad section.
CE Course Information:
We do allow posting of upcoming accredited continuing education. However, for the same reasons as listed above we have guidelines for our CE contributors.
- Any information about CE must ONLY be posted in the CE forum. Not in other forums. They will be deleted if posted elsewhere.
- The CE postings are for ADA and/or AGD accredited CE only. Anything else will be deleted. One may have links to non-accredited “CE” in one’s signature area.
- Only one CE thread per lecturer or group of lecturers that are associated with each other. Multiple threads will be deleted.
- CE threads may only have new posts added to it by the lecturer or anyone associated with the CE program, once a week. No daily “bumps”. However, if someone asks a question to the lecturer or anyone associated with the lecture in the CE thread, it may be answered even if they already posted on that thread earlier that week or even that day.
- Podcasts are not CE and should not be posted in the CE forum.
- Prices for anything posted in the title of the thread will have the thread deleted.
Excessive Vulgarity and Obscenity:
This post has been deleted due to excessive and unnecessary vulgarity and obscenity.
Additional Information and Tips:
- Members are only allowed one account. If individuals have multiple accounts, upon discovery the account that is used the least will be inactivated. Giving your login and password to someone else to use is strictly forbidden. Giving it to someone that is not a member or sharing it with another member could lead to banning of your account.
- Please post in the appropriate forum. Moderators will possibly move your thread or post to the proper forum.
- When you copy and paste news articles or things from other web sites please post the URL, this brings credibility to your post.
- Members are allowed to copy an x-ray or photo posted by another member IF copied within the same thread and used as a tool when contributing to the discussion. However, copying other members’ x-rays or photos from one thread into another thread is not allowed FOR ANY REASON without the permission of the member who originally posted them.
- Within the body of a post, one may use links for educational purposes such as to scientific articles, an educational blog, or product information that is being requested. Please do not use links to Facebook groups or other dental forums. Our Help Section gives instructions on how to embed non- promotional YouTube videos.