Message Board Rules of Conduct

The message boards at Phantasy Tour are offered as an opportunity to discuss the music and related topics of your favorite bands, particularly as it applies to the fantasy games played here. In addition to abiding by the Terms and Conditions of the entire web site, we ask that you give special attention to the following message board rules of conduct when participating in the discussions.

Keep it clean
Please refrain from posting sexually explicit or derogatory comments. Please also refrain from linking to sites that host such content, including nude photos.

Keep it respectful
Please avoid personal attacks, name calling, slander, slurs, and profanity in your messages. You don't have to agree with everyone, but its asked that you respect everyone.

Keep it on topic
Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the band being discussed, the community that surrounds the band and general topics of interest to a majority of the members of the community.

Keep it legal
Please do not discuss or advocate illegal activities. We don't want to be associated with it and we're sure you don't want to be held liable for it, so please refrain.

Keep it real
Please do not use multiple user accounts to post on the boards. Choose an identity and stick with it. Any duplicate accounts discovered by the webmaster will be blocked from posting without notice.

Keep it to yourself
Feel free to refer other users to these rules of conduct should they appear to not understand them. However, beyond a single, polite recommendation that they visit this page, the best defense against those who ignore these rules is to simply ignore the author themselves. In other words, please do not feel the need to take it upon yourself to be the enforcer of these rules.

A Note About Third Party Solicitation
Phantasy Tour strictly prohibits the use of its message boards for third party solicitation. The message boards are a free service and they should not be exploited for the financial gain of one individual or group of individuals. This site has real costs of operation and is primarily supported by advertisers. It is unfair to paying advertisers if Phantasy Tour does not aggressively remove blatant attempts to advertise services or products on the message boards for free. If you are interested in advertising your products legitimately on Phantasy Tour, please click here.

We thank you for your cooperation

Message Board FAQs

Who moderates the message boards?

Phantasy Tour message boards are moderated by the webmaster and everyday users of the site that have demonstrated an understanding of our rules of conduct and a willingness to help us enforce those rules. Moderators are encouraged to remain anonymous if they so choose because we don't feel that their service to the site should negatively affect their experience in using the message boards. Instead, we prefer that all comments and concerns about moderation be directed to the webmaster by way of our contact form, a link to which is found on the bottom of every page. Addressing or ridiculing the moderators publicly on our forums is a futile endeavor and we ask that you refrain from doing so. It only adds unnecessary disruption to the message boards and as such, we reserve the right to remove these public inquiries as we see fit.

How can you moderate my posts? Isn’t that a violation of my freedom of speech?

Wikipedia defines freedom of speech as follows:

Freedom of speech is the right to freely say what one pleases, as well as the related right to hear what others have stated. Recently, it has been commonly understood as encompassing full freedom of expression, including the freedom to create and distribute movies, pictures, songs, dances, and all other forms of expressive communication.

Freedom of speech is often regarded as an integral concept in modern liberal democracies, where it is understood to outlaw government censorship. Thus states may still punish (but not prohibit) certain damaging types of expressions, notably sedition, defamation, publishing secrets regarding matters of state security, etc.

Tocqueville pointed out that people may be hesitant to speak freely not because of fear of government retribution but because of social pressures. When an individual announces an unpopular opinion, he or she may face the disdain of their community or even be subjected to violent reactions. While this type of suppression of speech is even more difficult to prevent than government suppression, there are questions about whether it truly falls within the ambit of freedom of speech, which is typically regarded as a civil liberty, or freedom from government action.

Phantasy Tour does not seek to stifle free speech. As much as possible, we allow and encourage unpopular opinions to be expressed and discussed. However, Phantasy Tour is also not obligated by the First Amendment to serve of the vehicle for your free speech. Therefore, if we feel that your expressions are detrimental to the site, detrimental to the cohesion of its community, or violate United States laws against slander and libel, we reserve the right to remove your those contributions. This is particularly true when it is the belief of this site's operators that the intentions of the author are to incite angry reactions (i.e. troll) rather than to truly present an unpopular opinion for legitimate discussion.

What is heavy traffic mode?

Heavy traffic mode is a state that the Phantasy Tour message boards are placed in during severe high traffic periods on Phantasy Tour. By simplifying the scripts and removing some functionality, we can improve response times and prevent server crashes or message board closure during our busiest times without significantly impacting your message board experience. While in heavy traffic mode, the board index is not broken into 20 pages of 20 threads each, rather it shows the most recent 100 threads all on one page. The index page is updated every 2 minutes, so you will see a delay in appearance of new threads and in the updating of the last post time and number of replies for existing threads. Heavy traffic mode also disables the ignore thread feature, meaning that previously ignored threads may reappear and newly ignored threads will not disappear until the message boards are returned to normal mode.

What is PT's policy on discussion of illicit drugs?

Using the Phantasy Tour forums to commit, conspire to commit or encourage the commission of any illegal act is strictly prohibited. The discussion of illegal drugs in and of itself is not illegal and drug use undeniably affects our scene and community. To remove all discussion of illegal drugs and/or drug use from live music discussion forums would be unrealistic and would deny discussion of a topic that is relevant to our community. Furthermore, it is our belief that discussion of such topics can be of value to the health and well-being of our members. That being said, we will seek to remove content concerning solicitation, distribution and manufacture of illicit drugs whenever possible. We appreciate your assistance in reporting such threads and posts. We encourage message board users to exercise discretion in drug-related discussions as it would be unfortunate for anyone to incriminate themselves. Phantasy Tour Members who are uncomfortable with drug related content are asked to use the ignore features available to you in order to hide such threads.

What is PT's policy on sexually-charged discussion?

It has been our experience that sexually-charged discussions on Phantasy Tour can quickly turn chauvinistic and derogatory, making this forum less welcoming and enjoyable for some members. This is not the type of behavior that Phantasy Tour wants to promote here or anywhere else. Our attempts to let sexual topics run their course when they begin respectfully and maturely nearly always result the same offensive and childish outcome. In light of this, we remove such threads in a preemptive manner to prevent those outcomes. We explicitly reserve the right to choose which topics are appropriate for our forum and which threads and posts should be moderated. There are countless other destinations on the web dedicated to sexual and pornographic content - we ask that our users use these websites and not Phantasy Tour for such content.

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