Posting Guidelines

Requests to remove accounts and postings will not be honored by the moderator. Members can edit their own postings. Just click the edit link on your post after you login. (A comment or remark cannot be edited once someone replies to it.) Unregistered guests cannot edit their postings. Please think carefully about repercussions that your posting may have to you and others.

Besides, deleting accounts and postings would unfairly delete the writings, efforts and links of the members and guests of our community who may respond to a given posting. Remove one thread and all other threads are removed.

At the core, we are a business trade journal in which content is built by fellow citizen journalists. As a community of professionals, members strive for civility in discussions. Postings of the type below will be filtered out.

• Threats - Words with violent connotations like "extract blood", "kill", "shoot them", etc. are threatening and violent. Threats against an individual(s), oneself, a company or organization will be immediately removed. 
• Strong language - Strong swear words will cause the complete blog comment or forum remark to be unpublished
• Sexual content - Pornography and postings with graphic sexual descriptions
• Spam - Unrelated, nonsensical postings meant to advertise and disrupt threads will be removed. These typically are one line postings with links or unrelated words that are meant to disrupt the thought flow of a discussion thread. The poster will be labelled as a spammer and will be banned
• Badgering - Constantly posting throughout the site on non-related articles, columns, podcasts, weblinks, franchipedia entries and other areas on the same theme, is a type of spam and considered badgering of our members. Posters should stay in the forum area that address that subject.
• Ad hominem attacks - Strong personal accusations without any evidence against individuals are not appropriate. As much as we appreciate free speech, this is forum for discussions about franchising, not about personalities. Please do not use words such as Mr. or Ms. X is a crook, felon, drunk, drug addict, adulteress, etc. to describe an individual without the strongest of collaborating evidence, like links to legal documents showing he went to prison. This is not a gossip site about franchise leaders.

So as not to affect the postings of others, the editor will strive to remove the offending posts relatively quickly. Sometimes our automatic filters will immediately prevent offending posts from being published. The filters put the offending post into a queue until the editor can determine to publish the remark or not.

Posters of blog comments and forum remarks should endeavor to stay on topic of the blog or main forum description. For example, posting about the practice of franchisors "churning" stores in a news story about selecting uniforms in stores is really unrelated. As good posting etiquette, a poster should try to provide content and support to what a writer blogs. Or if one disagrees, point out what is incorrect about the article. The editor reserves the right to move blogs, comments and remarks to more appropriate venues.

If an issue is complex and the poster wants a public discussion, then the most appropriate venue is a forum posting. All members can create new forums. Guests can participate in existing forum discussions.

Our community culture does not support personal attacks and gossip. Be polite.

• Blue MauMau's Citizen Journalism Guidelines to posting news stories and blogs can be found here