LinkedMusician Community Rules and Site Policies

LinkedMusicians was created to be a friendly, helpful, knowledge-sharing community of musicians, singers, composers, producers, and audio engineers to share knowledge and encouragement free of the toxicity and inherent bias of forums owned by developers or overly focused on revenue from developers and treating community members as a product to be sold. We value diversity, creativity, and intellectual curiosity.

These rules help us to deliver on that mission. The underlying principles to our community are: be friendly, be helpful, be kind, share knowledge, don’t shill, don’t be deceptive, don’t engage in trolling, sniping—cheap shots at others — or snark. In short, our policy is based on the Golden Rule: treat others how you want to be treated. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. To be clear, we encourage civil debate. We encourage honest conversations. We want members to share both positive and negative experiences with the developers, manufacturers, retailers, and all companies they buy from. But we believe that all of this can happen in a spirit of mutual respect and civility. We can share positive and negative views and experiences and disagree with one another without being disrespectful.

What’s Against the Rules and Will Result in Penalties, Suspension, or Ban:

• All registration submissions are checked against a database of known spammers and hackers. Those found in the database are deleted.
• Accounts with burner email addresses or blacklisted for spam or hacking (these accounts will be subject to deletion without notice).
• Accounts with a fake first and last name (these accounts will be subject to deletion without notice).
• Usernames featuring obscenities, slurs, discriminatory names, mocking other members, or that infringe upon trademarks not owned by the registrant will be rejected or deleted.
• Avatars must not include registered trademarks not owned by the registrant.
• Spamming of any kind.
• Trolling of any kind.
• Bullying, Harassing. Gaslighting, Sh*tposting, or Defaming Others.
• Culture Wars / Any Comments Denigrating Groups of People Due to Factors Such as Race, National Origin, Ethnicity, Language, Income Class, Sexual Orientation, or Religious Views (min. Immediate account suspension).
• Political or Religious Remarks.
• Posting Referral or Affiliate Codes or Affiliate Marketing Links.
• Any Form of Software Piracy – this includes sharing discount codes intended for paid users or subscribers of a product or service that the company did not authorize for free distribution, sharing unauthorized links, sharing cracked versions of commercial software, or asking other members to share commercial software in violation with the developer’s terms and conditions.
• Posting or Linking to Sites with Piracy, Pornography or Content That Is Generally Considered Obscene.
• Shilling for a Developer or Any Company That Serves This Community (immediate ban).
• Puppet Accounts (immediate ban) – If you’re a developer or are compensated by a developer or other company that serves members of this community, please disclose it, ideally in your signature.
• Posting Links to Pages with Affiliate Marketing Links and/or Pages that Duplicate the LM Forum.
• Posting potentially libelous statements about companies or people. If you personally had a bad experience with a company, please feel free to share it, but do not post rumors or insinuations here.
• Posting false or misleading information.
• Linking to content promoting hate against any group due to race, religion, ethnic origin, disability, gender, or sexual orientation or engages any kind of extremism.
  That includes linking to your social media accounts if they include this kind of content.
• Sharing music that promotes hate against any group (e.g., racism, sexual orientation, nationalism, religious discrimination, etc.) or extremism. While religious and political comments are off-limits, you are free to share songs that cover religious and political topics as long as they do not promote hate, intolerance, extremism, or violence.
• Registering with or modifying your registration to include a fake or disposable email address.
• Posting personal sales in the Deals Forum. (We have a Buy and Sell Forum).  

What’s Discouraged and May Result in Penalties:

• Rude Behavior / Snark – If you want to be rude to people, this is the wrong place.
• Constant Negative Posting – If that’s your style, try to tone it down. Don’t be a one-trick pony. That gets old fast.
• Conspiracy Theory Posting – If you have a crazy theory about stuff like who killed Kennedy, that’s fine. But this is the wrong community to post that stuff.
• Having Vendettas Against Other Community Members – Life is short. Consider reaching out to people you’ve had past differences with and let them know that you’d like to try a fresh start. It can work wonders.
• Coded Political or Culture War Messages – Facebook, X and other social media is overflowing with people who want to battle over politics and culture wars. We’re not looking to join them. Take it there, not here. If we see it once, we’ll give a warning, and possibly a penalty. If we see a pattern, the member will receive a permanent ban. LinkedMusicians is a place to find common ground with others, not to engage in culture wars.
• Using LinkedMusicians to promote your presence or posts on another website in order to drive community members away from LinkedMusicians.

What We Encourage and Helps the Community:

• Showing Respect and Kindness to Other Community Members
• Speaking Up and Reporting Bad Behavior When You See It
• Sharing Your Knowledge and Experience
• Sharing Honest Experiences — Positive and Negative — with Developers and Manufacturers, Their Support and the Products and Services They Make – Sharing positive experiences is the norm, it’s the best form of advertising a business can have. Sharing negative experiences and opinions is often discouraged, edited, or outright banned at numerous developer owned forums we use. LinkedMusicians firmly believes that regular paying customers — not influencers, fellow developers or forum owners — are the best, most unbiased, and, most likely, truthful source of knowledge on products and services. LinkedMusicians will serve to amplify their voices.

Developers and Influencers

Many forums are seeing developers, employees and contractors for developers and influencers pose as regular users of products and services and talk up products they’ve worked on, own, make royalties on, or are for businesses they have an undisclosed financial relationship with. We seek to ensure transparency of such affiliations and require that all such relationships are clearly disclosed. We have found that the simplest way to do this is to require these parties to disclose these relationships in their signature. This way, they can share their opinions, while the community is fully aware of their financial relationships with the companies, products, and services they are commenting about.

• All Developers, Influencers, Developer/Manufacturer Employees, and Developer/Manufacturer Contractors Must Clearly State This in Their Signature so the community can clearly understand their relationship.
• Influencers must clearly state the compensation they’ve received from a developer or manufacturer when they comment about developers, products, and services to ensure the community is aware of these relationships (e.g., free products and services in return for highlighting the products and services on their channel, blog, website, etc., sponsorship or advertising fee arrangements, monetary compensation with the companies they are discussing related to their “reviews” or any other paid work they’re doing for the company). This follows the US FTC regulations, which are less stringent than many other countries’ laws in this area.
• Developers and their employees and contractors and influencers, are NOT PERMITTED to bump posts.
• Links are limited to to no more one link per topic and no more than one topic posted per week per forum.
• Do not link to lists of best instruments or plugins on your site, a common SEO spam technique. We maintain our own best of lists you can recommend your favorites there and, at the same time, build up credibility in our community.

LinkedMusicians Anti-Scraping and Data Extraction Policy

Effective Date: January 1, 2025

To protect the integrity, privacy, and value of the LinkedMusicians platform, the following policy governs the use of automated technologies for accessing, extracting, or collecting data from our website and services:

1. Prohibition on Scraping and Automated Data Extraction

• No person, entity, or automated system may access, extract, harvest, or collect data from LinkedMusicians by means of web scraping, crawling, spidering, or any other automated or programmatic method, without the express prior written consent of LinkedMusicians.
  
• This prohibition applies to all forms of automated data extraction, including but not limited to:
  
  • Collecting user profiles, posts, comments, or any other content
    
  • Aggregating, indexing, or republishing any portion of the website or its data
    
  • Using bots, scripts, or automated tools to access or interact with the platform
    

2. Exceptions

• Public Search Engines: This policy does not apply to publicly available search engine spiders (such as Google, Bing, and other major search engines) and AI spiders that access the site for the sole purpose of indexing content for public search, provided they comply with our robots.txt file and other industry-standard protocols.
  
• Other Exceptions: Written permission may be granted by LinkedMusicians at its sole discretion. Any party seeking such permission must contact LinkedMusicians in advance and obtain explicit, written authorization before engaging in any automated data extraction activities.
  

3. Enforcement

• LinkedMusicians reserves the right to take any and all actions necessary to detect, prevent, and respond to unauthorized scraping or automated data extraction, including but not limited to:
  
  • Blocking access to the website or specific IP addresses
    
  • Pursuing legal remedies for violations of this policy
    
  • Reporting violations to relevant authorities
    

4. User Agreement

• By accessing or using LinkedMusicians, you agree to comply with this policy and all other applicable terms of service.
  

If you wish to request permission for data access or have questions about this policy, please contact us.

The “Hate Has No Home” sign, created by Chicago neighbors, promotes diversity and opposes bigotry and intolerance, following non-partisan guidelines. From the group: “This sign is a public declaration that hate speech and hateful actions against others will not be tolerated by the person or organization displaying the sign. In that, it is non-partisan. This sign is a statement that, while it is okay to disagree with others civilly regarding issues, it is not okay to intimidate or attack a person or group—verbally or physically—based on attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation. The colors of the sign—red, white, and blue—are the colors of the American flag, not any political party.”