LinkedMusician Community Rules

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 the inherent bias of forums owned by developers or overly focused on revenue from developers and treating community members as product to be sold. Ensuring that we can deliver on our goal means some rules are necessary. The underlying principles are: be friendly, be helpful, be kind, be honest, don’t shill, avoid sniping — cheap shots at others — or snark. In short, our policy is the Golden Rule: treat others how you want to be treated. Everyone deserves to be treated with respect. To be clear, we invite civil debate. But always remember to be civil. We can disagree with others without being disrespectful. We value diversity and creativity, and invite intellectual curiosity.

Now here’s the formal version of LinkedMusicians’ community rules.

What’s Against the Rules (penalties are determined on a case-by-case basis):

• Spamming
• Trolling
• Bullying, Harassing. Gaslighting 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 users or subscribers of a product or service.
• Posting or Linking to Sites with Piracy, Pornography or are 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 pages that duplicate the LM forum.
• Posting potentially libelous hearsay rumors about companies. If you personally had a bad experience with a company, you can share it here, but do not attempt to post rumors here.

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.

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

• All Developers, Influencers, Employees and Contractors to Developers Must Clearly State This in Their Signature so the community can clearly understand their relationship.