Rules

Iron & Earth does not tolerate offensive, disrespectful or abusive comments about an individual or organization.

Here are some examples of unacceptable content:

• Racist, sexist or offensive language
• Hate speech
• Sexually explicit language
• Personal attacks and defamatory statements
• Breaking copyright rules (including copying and pasting content without crediting the source and/or author)
• Violating an individual's privacy (e.g. by providing personal information such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses)
• Commercial promotional content
• Anything illegal

You may only link out to relevant content.

You may not link out to an external site for the explicit purposes of marketing unless it is directly relevant to the conversation and you must make explicit your relationship to an organization or company when doing so.

For instance, the following would be unacceptable if it was the first and only post or comment on a page or stream:

"Hello. My name is Joe and I work for Sunny Solar Energy Company please check out our products at www.example.com"

If instead somebody else requested a list of quality solar power providers in the Greater Toronto Area, Joe may respond in this acceptable manner:

"My name is Joe, the CEO of Sunny Solar Energy Company. We've been providing solar panels in Waterloo / Kitchener for the last 8 years and are looking to expand to the GTA in the next few months. Would love to have a new client on board to help us break into that new market. You can find our contact info on our website at www.example.com"

Depending on how you login (through email or linked social media accounts) you may end up with multiple accounts. This usually stems from using different email addresses or names on linked social media accounts. Some people use fake names on social media accounts and may have different email addresses for personal and work use. 

In these situations we will do our best to merge your two accounts and the rule shall not apply.

If you are maliciously creating multiple accounts, either as a way to get around being banned, as a way to falsely drive up our supporters, etc. you will be in violation of this rule.

We realize that Canada is a multi-cultural and diverse nation. We won't flag you for speaking other languages, but please try to keep in mind that the majority of our users speak English, with the nearest minority speaking French. English will continue to be the primary operating language of Iron & Earth while we build our official capacity to handle feedback and content production in French. We realize this is something we need to work on as a Canadian organization and would love to have French speakers onboard, so if you are feeling it is lacking we'd love to have some help improving our outreach with the Francophone community.

If there is a demonstrated need within our paying membership to have language specific areas of the site beyond English and French we will gladly assess the feasibility and work with you to build up options for our membership to communicate in the languages of their choice. Until then, please try your best to keep the discussions in English and French.