New Café User Guidelines
The New Café is a "virtual community." In any community, there are certain expectations of acceptable behavior among its members. The New Café is no exception. In order to ensure that participants feel comfortable here, we've established a few guidelines. Please abide by them when participating at the New Café.
Your Identity at the New Café
In the interests of open and honest conversation, we encourage you to register under your real name. In no event should you post messages under someone else's name. If New Café management suspects an account is being used by someone who is not the authorized account holder, the New Café may temporarily disable that account. In all such cases, the New Café will contact the member as soon as feasible.
You must have a working e-mail address to register and participate at the New Café. While New Café management has access to this e-mail address, you may choose not to have it accessible to other Café patrons. The New Café reserves the right to revoke access to patrons for posting with a false e-mail address.
Civility
The New Café does not screen postings before they appear in our forums. In order to ensure that the New Café remains a welcoming and civil space for our patrons, however, please refrain from posting messages containing gratuitous personal attacks against other New Café patrons. Such an expectation does not mean that patrons can not and do not disagree in a spirited, even heated manner, at times. Lively debate abounds in some conferences.
Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between disagreeing with an idea and attacking an individual. We ask all patrons to participate in a civil manner. We recognize that patrons have varied interpretations of civility and that the dynamic interaction of a diverse community of users will present subjective and challenging circumstances for New Café management and hosts. In this light, we ask for compliance with the specific requests made by our forum hosts.
Deliberate disruption will not be tolerated. We reserve the right to "hide" or delete posts of an abusive and disruptive nature and/or to revoke access to users who refuse to comply with requests by New Café management and hosts.
New Café participants have a reasonable expectation to not be bothered by others against their will. For this reason, a filtering tool is available at the New Café to filter the posts of specific users. You can utilize this tool at any time. In addition, please do not send e-mail to another patron if that patron has expressed a desire not to receive messages from you.
Forums and Hosts
The New Café is comprised of dozens of individual forums, and distinct and vibrant online communities emerge from conversations in these separate spaces. Over time, the hosts and users of each forum evolve and establish a particular flavor and cross-section of regular participants. You may find yourself more comfortable, more at home, in some forums than others. We encourage you to take the time to explore a number of different forums.
All forums at the New Café are tended by one or more hosts. These volunteer hosts may, in the community interest, "hide" or delete a posted comment. They can not edit it. New Café management does not impose explicit and precise rules on hosts governing such deletions. We believe the effort to do so would undermine the freedom of hosts to exercise creativity in managing their forums.
Hosts are not always present online, or aware of all the details of a particular conflict, and they cannot be held responsible for the content of comments that may appear in their forums.