The goal of the Imperfect Parent community is to allow for thinking parents to discuss or debate various topics openly and freely. We believe that everyone's opinion and thoughts, while not what all may consider to be "right", are most certainly valid and have a right to be expressed. In that regard, the Imperfect Parent managers and moderators are not here to police forums or watch your every move. We have not set up some dizzying array of rules of conduct that you must follow. We are not in the habit of deleting and editing posts on a whim, just because we kinda sorta didn't like what you said. This site is operating under the assumption that the people that come here are adults, and can behave appropriately.

Since some need the structure of rules, or need a civil reminder, our guidelines are this:

1) Pretend whomever you're addressing is in the room. A lot of the time, people use the anonymity of the web to personally attack and harass someone whose viewpoints don't agree with their own. The easiest way to avoid this is that before you post something perhaps malicious, ask yourself if you would have the guts to say the same thing if the person was right in front of you.

Generally, the members of our community do not tolerate this kind of hurtful behavior, and will either ignore you, or take it upon themselves to call you on it. If this does not curb the conduct, you can expect to be contacted by our community manager to try and work out a solution. If absolutely no agreement can be reached, you will be removed from the community. This is in only the most extreme cases, and will not be done without provocation. It's not an action we desire to take, so your best bet is to be civil, mature, and polite.

2) Vulgar language. The folks at the Imperfect Parent are rather thick skinned, so it would take some real effort to offend us. But not everyone is like that. If an expletive is absolutely necessary to make your point, go ahead, just refer back to rule #1. And for those of you who are a little sensitive in this regard, we do not edit for naughty words, so reader beware.

3) Advertising and Spam. It's sad that we have to even mention this, but there are those out there that have no regard for anything but their own personal gain. To those people, do not post on our boards any advertising, promotional materials, junkmail, "spam", chain letters, pyramid schemes, or any other form of solicitation. Keep in mind that while this site is free to the users, it is not free to maintain and produce the material here, and for you to take advantage of that, well, just really sucks. Any posts that we determine to meet the above criteria will be removed.

4) Promoting other web sites. Of course it is OK to mention, talk about, or link to another site that you think the community might be interested in. But to use our free site to promote another parenting site and to try and draw traffic away from here? That's simply not cool or polite. To us, this is advertising pure and simple, and will be treated the same as #3 above.

4) Respect copyrights. If you have not noticed yet, this site is filled with original writings about a multitude of parenting subjects, and many of our members are writers. Because of this, we don't take copyright infringement and plagarism very lightly. Do not post anything that you did not write without crediting the source. If you are using material in a debate and you found it online, by all means link to it. And please don't use anything anyone has written here and claim it as your own somewhere else. While we like our attorney and all, as a rule we generally like to talk to him as little as possible so try and help us out.

5) Your privacy. Keep in mind that this is the "world wide" web. Protect your password, and we would recommend not giving out your home address or phone number to anyone online. In regards to your email, you have full control on whether or not to display it by checking that option in your profile. (Edit this in the Members area, the default is "no"). If you do choose to give out this information, you alone are responsible for any correspondence that results because of it. We have set up a nifty way to send private messages through this board without the use of email, which we think is the best method. One last note on this: no one at the Imperfect Parent, not even an administrator, would have any reason to request your password. In fact, once your password is entered in our database, it is encrypted so that even we can't read it. If someone claims to be from our site and is requesting your password, it just ain't us.

6) Anything else? Oh, there's probably a myriad of things that could go wrong that we've missed, but let's just throw in a blanket statement and say that as long as you don't do anything that violates local, state, or federal law, or break any international treaties, we think you'll be OK.

Sorry we even have to go over these guidelines, but if you've spent any time at all in online forums, you know that there's always a couple of bad apples trying to ruin it for everybody, so this is for them. Everyone else relax, feel comfortable, and speak your mind knowing that the "forum police" are not monitoring your every word.

If you would have any questions, would like further clarification, or are have a concern regarding someone in serious violation of the guidelines, please contact our community manager.