1. Your use of any of NewsConfidential's Forums and message boards (specifically, the Forums entitled 'NewsConfidential', 'EarthConfidential', and 'Gotcha!') indicates your implicit agreement and acceptance of this Acceptable Use Policy, which is binding on all of your posts to the Forum, or Forums, of which you are a member or contributor.

2. This Acceptable Use Policy can be modified at any time, without notice, and your continued use of NewsConfidential's Forums indicates your continued acceptance of the modified terms. Specific forums may have additional Acceptable Use Policies. It is your responsibility to be familiar and aware of any such changes or additional policies.

3. You agree that:-

(a) You will not post any defamatory, abusive, obscene, profane, offensive, sexually oriented, threatening, harassing, racially offensive, or illegal language or material. We also request that you do not post links to sites that contain or permit access to such language or material.

(b) You will not knowingly or deliberately post any language or material that is false, misleading, or inaccurate.

(c) You will not impersonate any person or entity, forge headers or otherwise manipulate identifiers, in order to disguise the origin of any posting. You will not impersonate someone else, or otherwise use their nickname or 'handle' for posting messages. Nor will you post using someone else's e-mail address.

(d) You will respect other people's right to personal privacy and will not post any other person's identifying information (including their names, contact information, and any other relevant information) within the forum but your own, unless you have that person's express agreement.

(e) You will not use these forums to deliberately violate any laws, nor will you use them to plan illegal activities.

(f) You will not post any copyrighted material, nor will you link to any copyrighted material (with the exception of publicly available sites and pages that the legal owners of the copyright have created in order to make that material freely available to the general public), unless that copyright is owned by you or by these Forums.

(g) You will not post advertisements, chain letters, pyramid selling schemes, or solicitations, for any products or services for commercial gain without the prior approval of the Forum Moderator.

(h) You will not collect or store personal information about forum members for the purpose of sending them any such advertisements, chain letters, pyramid selling schemes, or solicitations, by other means, not limited to but including, email, chat and messaging programs. Nor will you utilize, or cause these forums to be utilized, for the automatic 'harvesting' and recovery of email addresses and other personal details for such purposes.

(i) You will not send, or cause to send, any chain letters or junk E-mail to other members of these forums.

(j) You will not post messages that are clearly outside of the stated topic or remit of any Forums, nor will you disrupt a forum by deliberately posting repeated irrelevant messages or copies of identical messages (the practice commonly known as "flooding").

(k) You will not use these Forums for the purposes of sharing or distributing malicious programs, viruses, worms, Trojan horses, licenses, registration information, software keys, "cracks," or other information designed or intended to do harm to, or allow unlawful access to, any computer hardware, software, networks, or any other systems.

(l) You will not attempt to access any protected sections of the site or Forums, nor make use of any Trojan Horses, back doors, hacks, cracks, bug exploits, etc. to bypass, modify or otherwise damage the features of the forum software.

4. We prefer forum users not to post anonymously, and encourage you to provide an email address for contact. However, if you wish to remain anonymous, you are allowed to use an alias instead of your real name (but not for any of the purposes described under paragraph 3. above).

5. We hope that these forums will provide you with an opportunity to share your thoughts, questions, information and opinions. As such, we encourage and welcome free and open debate. However the views expressed in the posts you will find in these forums belong solely to their respective authors and you agree that they do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsConfidential, its editor, associates, or staff.

6. You accept that the open and real-time nature of these forums makes it impossible for us to guarantee the validity of every post. As such, you agree that we are not responsible for any messages posted, nor are we responsible for the consequences of following any advice offered within forum posts.

7. If you find any posts in these Forums to be offensive or objectionable, contact the Forum Moderator via email through the address offered as a contact for the Forum in question. If we decide that removal of a post or sequence of posts is necessary, we agree that we will make reasonable efforts to do so in a timely manner.

8. Violation of any of these terms will mean the immediate cancellation of Forum membership and the removal of all offending posts. We reserve all rights in this respect.

9. This Acceptable Use Policy forms part of the terms and conditions governing access to and the use of this Website and/or its Services. Full details of these terms and conditions may be found here.

NewsConfidential Forums AUP v.1 04.04.02 amended 06.04.03