The Watermelon

Our moderation policy is that we do not want members to behave in such a way that we would need one. We expect you all to behave like adults and to sort your disagreements out amongst yourselves in a mature civilised manner.

We encourage all members to read our Debate Guidelines page to get an idea of what we consider "mature and respectful" discussion. If everyone generally follows the guidelines outlined there we shouldn't expect to have more than the occasional spat along the way.

Currently we have not assigned any moderators to the discussion forums and neither have we enabled the forum word-filtering facility. As the community evolves, we hope to establish an atmosphere of thoughtful discussion and mutual respect which would not require us to resort to either of these facilities in future.

Rules Of Engagement

Although it is impossible to write a comprehensive set of rules forbidding every type of anti-social behaviour, we have put together a list below that should cover most scenarios. It is not our intention to be discriminatory or cramp a members personal style, but it is most certainly our intention to maintain the quality, usability and enjoyability of this site for as many Watermelons as possible.

1. The fact that the rules do not forbid a certain type of post does not automatically make an uncivil post appropriate, nor does it imply that the administrators approve of disrespectful behaviour. In other words, we expect you to use your common sense about what constitutes appropriate netiquette.
2. You are not required to love, support, respect or agree with any other member, or their beliefs. You are, however, required to practice courtesy and be tolerant of the presence of those who are different from you or hold different ideas. If you don't like a member, we suggest you skip their posts and try your best to ignore them.
3. Do not start topics or post comments that are bigoted against (or grossly insensitive toward) any person or group of people based on their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, lack of religion, disability, geographical location; or are supportive of war, violence, injustice, intolerance, green-bashing or right-wing spin.
4. Do not hurl any kind of personal or political insult, or attack a member for their race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, lack of religion, disability, or geographical location. Do not tell someone, "shut up", "screw you", "fuck off", "in your face", or any other kind of "up yours" retort we would expect from a delinquent teenager.
5. Do not accuse a member of this site of being a commie, pinko, fascist, nazi, marxist, leninist, stalinist, or any other label which misrepresents our beliefs or implies that Watermelons are "loony". If you are not generally supportive of Watermelon Principles you had no business registering here.
6. Do not call another member of this forum a liar, and do not call another member's post a lie. You are, of course, permitted to point out when a post is untrue or factually incorrect, but you must be able to present evidence to support your claim and argue your point respectfully.
7. You cannot attack another member on the grounds that they attacked you first, or because that person "deserved it," or because you think someone is a disruptor. We consider it a personal attack to call a liar a liar, to call a moron a moron, or to call a jerk a jerk.
8. You are permitted to use the kind of profanity which is part of normal adult conversation, but name-calling is not permitted. It is OK to say words like "shit", or "fuck", or call an inanimate thing "stupid" - but it is not OK to call a person a shit, direct them to go fuck themselves, or tell them they are stupid.
9. You are permitted to post polite behavioural corrections to other members of the forum in direct response to specific instances of incivility, provided that your comments are narrowly focused on their current behaviour, and not to nitpick or repeatedly remind a member about their previous mistakes.
10. You are permitted to criticise public figures. However, if a public figure is a member of this community, then that person is protected by the rules of our community and you are not permitted to personally attack them here. Take your disagreement with them elsewhere.
11. You are permitted to discuss political or social issues relating to human sexuality in the appropriate sub-forum, provided that you exercise the appropriate level of maturity, sensitivity and discretion. Do not post immature comments about bodily functions or titter at objectified imagery of women.
12. Do not post graphic images of violence, gore, pain, degradation or human suffering. If you have a legitimate political purpose for posting external links to sites with graphic images, you may do so provided that you include a clear warning above the link in your post.
13. Do not post messages that give publicity to websites that have little purpose other than to smear, disrupt, or complain about Liberal Greens and Watermelon Principles. And do not quote or link to bigoted websites, or websites that republish content from bigoted websites.
14. Do not post duplicate topics or spam the forum, and do not hijack another members thread for the purpose of spamming. Do not restart any post of yours that was moved to The Little Blue Outhouse or locked and sent to The Compost Bin by a site administrator because it violated our rules.
15. Do not "stalk" another member from one discussion thread to another. Do not follow someone into another thread to try to continue a disagreement you had elsewhere. And especially do not abuse our mail or messaging system by trying to harass another member privately.
16. Do not talk negatively about an individual in a thread where they are not participating or post flame-bait to try and draw them into a thread where they are not participating. Do not post messages with the purpose of "calling out" another member or picking a fight with another member.
17. Do not misuse the thumbs-up/thumbs-down buttons in a members profile by repeatedly issuing smites to members you do not like, or applause to members whom you do like, in order to artificially manipulate their Karma statistics.
18. Do not misuse your profile signature or avatar image for the purposes for baiting, flaming, disrupting or displaying content that we have forbidden in any of our other rules.

Rule Enforcement

It is the policy of our administrators to remain as hands-off as possible and to leave members to moderate themselves, because all of you have a responsibility to participate in a respectful manner and be collectively responsible for cultivating the healthy atmosphere of this community.

However, in the extreme case that we are forced to step into the role of being the disciplinary parent, this is how we intend to enforce the rules:

1. If a member is seen to be behaving in a deliberately disruptive or disrespectful manner, then it is firstly the responsibility of other members to bring it to their attention and try to resolve it in a mature and respectful manner, either on the public forum or via private message.
2. If the member persists in their anti-social behaviour, you should bring it to the attention of the site administrators by sending them a private message or submitting a "Report Abuse" form. Do not taunt the offender by announcing publically that you are going to report them - just report them.
3. In most cases, an abuse report will result in a slap on the hand from an administrator and the moving of the disruptor's post to The Little Blue Outhouse. However, if the topic continues to descend into chaos it will be locked and dispatched from there to the Compost Bin.
4. If the offending member continues to behave disruptively and has had three or more of their posts moved to the Outhouse and/or three or more independent complaints against them, they will be issued with a formal warning from the Site Administrators and be placed on probation.
5. If the offending member still persists in their course of disruptive behaviour, our next step will be to suspend their posting privileges for a week, allowing them time to cool off and consider the negative impact they are having on our community. They will still be able to visit and read The Watermelon Forum, but will not be able to post on it.
6. Any further offences after that will result in incrementally longer periods of time-out: 2 weeks, 1 month, 2 months, 4 months, 8 months, and so forth. However, we would hope that by their second or third suspension they have realised that they do not like us enough to want to stay here and decide to leave on their own volition.
7. If a member under temporary suspension tries to re-register here under a new nickname, their original and their shadow accounts will both be permanently suspended. It is a fairly easy for administrators to identify multiple registrations from our site logs, so we strongly urge you to not even bother trying.

Banning Policy

We would like to be able to say that we have a firm "no banning" policy here, but unfortunately there is one violation we consider so serious that you would never be welcome at our community again - and that is the disclosure of another members private personal information or real-life identity, without their express consent to do so. Many people choose to use an anonymous internet handle because there might be real-life risk or consequences if their real name was known, and there is no amount of penance that can make up for the disclosure of something like that which, once exposed, cannot be taken back again.

The Golden Rule

And finally, let us remind you that when you registered with this community you had to agree to our terms and conditions. The very first condition on that list is that "you agree with, or are generally supportive of, all or most of our "Watermelon Principles". If everyone remembers that the "W" in Watermelon stands for "World peace and non-violent conflict resolution" then we shouldn't have any problems here.

Green on the outside and Liberal on the inside!