LinkedMusician Community Rules and Site Policies

Our Mission

LinkedMusicians is an independent platform dedicated to the craft of musicianship, songwriting, composing and music production. We believe that a high-value community is built on civil discourse, professional integrity, and total transparency.

1. Standards of Conduct

To maintain a focused and productive environment for all members, we enforce a strict Behavior-Based Moderation policy.

• Mutual Respect: This is a global community. We welcome all members regardless of race, ethnicity, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or income level. We do not tolerate bigotry, harassment, slurs, or the disparagement of any individual’s character or health.
• The Music-First Firewall: This is a professional resource, not a political forum. To keep the focus on music technology, we do not allow political campaigning, partisan debating, religious posts, or “culture war” arguments. If a post doesn’t serve the craft of music, it belongs elsewhere.
• Focus on Products, Not People: We are here to discuss products and ideas, not attack others. Using this platform to settle personal scores, air public grievances, or bring in outside drama is a violation of our standards. 
• No posting of referral or affiliate codes for members (LinkedMusicians uses affiliate links to help pay for the operation of the site, members don’t have this financial responsibility).
• Any form of piracy or illegal activity.
• Attacks on LM users on other platforms violate our policies will disqualify membership and result in a permanent ban.

2. The Independence Accord

In an industry often driven by undisclosed affiliations and “shill” culture, LinkedMusicians stands for the end-user.

• Full Disclosure: We believe in an “open book” approach. If the site owner or a moderator has a professional tie, a personal friendship, or a financial stake in a developer, we disclose it clearly we expect the same of our members.
• Integrity of Membership: To protect our community from coordinated smear campaigns and deceptive marketing, we reserve the right to refuse or revoke membership for individuals with a documented history of unethical industry practices, undisclosed conflicts of interest, or harassment of developers and members.
• The Right to Critique: We prioritize honest, member-driven feedback over “protected” status. All products are subject to the same standard: the raw experience of our community.
• Professional Disclosure: Developers and industry representatives are welcome but must identify their affiliation in their signature.

3. Industry Advocacy & Member Education

While we maintain a strictly professional and neutral public forum, we believe in a transparent marketplace.

• Inside Perspectives: Within our Insiders and Member-Only areas, we share documented “behind-the-scenes” insights regarding industry ethics, developer relations, and community protection.
• Purpose: This information is shared strictly for the purpose of member education and advocacy. We believe our members deserve to understand the ethical landscape of the tools they use and the platforms they frequent.

4. Specific Prohibited Actions

To ensure the safety and utility of this resource, the following behaviors are strictly prohibited and may result in an immediate ban:

• Weaponizing Personal History: Using a member’s past, health status, or private life to humiliate, discredit, or disparage them.
• Deceptive Representation: Posting “fan” reviews or critiques while being an undisclosed contractor, employee, or beneficiary of a competing developer.
• Coordinated Attacks: Organizing or participating in “dogpiling” or coordinated smear campaigns against developers, moderators, or fellow members.
• Bigotry and Slurs: The use of racial, ethnic, religious, or anti-LGBTQ+ slurs is a zero-tolerance violation.

5. Moderation Philosophy

Our moderation is objective and consistent. We do not police thoughts; we govern behavior to ensure the site remains a high-quality resource for everyone.

• Focus on Civility: Disagreements about gear and techniques are encouraged; personal attacks are not.
• Protecting the Resource: Users who engage in bad-faith arguments or disrupt the community with outside drama will be removed to preserve the site’s professional utility and positive atmosphere.

We aren’t here to be the “speech police.” We are here to ensure that when you log into LinkedMusicians, you are entering a workspace designed for creators, not a battlefield for drama. Let’s keep it about the music.

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.”