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 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 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.

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/or Pages that Duplicate the LM Forum.
• Posting potentially libelous hearsay rumors about companies or people. If you 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. For example, if you have a social media page that promotes hate against any group or any kind of extremism, do not link to it here. If your page simply shares your music, feel free to link to it.
• 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.

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.