Tennisopolis Community Guidelines

Social networking brings Tennis players, students, teaching pros, club directors, and industry insiders together to connect, learn, explore business opportunities and related topics. Feel free to share, support, coach, even gossip with other members in any of our many community areas.

If you're new to our community, please read these guidelines and tips for getting started and how to benefit from participating. A great place to start is building your online profile. Whether you’re a casual player, avid tennis fanatic or a business owner, announce to the world what you stand for and what you offer.

We want our community to be comfortable, thought provoking, helpful, safe, and easy to use. Tennisopolis is deeply committed to including a wide range of views in our forums, groups and blog postings. Our community policies are guided by the belief that free expression and open communication will help players, students, teachers, directors, vendors, and fans connect, find friendship, support, feedback, learning, and experience diverse opinions. In doing so, it is our hope that we can all become better people and better professionals.

We respect individual differences in philosophies, beliefs, opinions, and work styles, and expect our community members to do the same. Please note that users who violate these guidelines may be sent a warning and, if necessary, be banned from the network.

Your Rights and Responsibilities

Please bear in mind that all of the material you read in our community areas comes from other members. Because our community is very large, Tennisopolis doesn't monitor or verify all the information posted by our members. The comments, opinions, and statements posted on our bulletin boards, forums, groups and chats don't necessarily reflect the views of Tennisopolis. The information posted on our boards and blog postings, including advice and opinions, is the responsibility of those members who create the posts.

Please consult your business advisors or other qualified professionals before relying on information you find in the community areas. Tennisopolis is not responsible for the accuracy of posts and is not liable for any damage or loss that may result from your reliance on what other members have said.

All Tennisopolis communications, including blogs, group discussion and forum posts, are public and not private communications. Tennisopolis has the right to modify and publish (both on our site and in other media) any information you post in our community areas. Please note that the material you post may be indexed by search engines such as Yahoo and Google.

Community staff and volunteer hosts may use your membership e-mail to contact you regarding your messages in our community. You're responsible for keeping your e-mail address active and updated. Failure to keep your e-mail address updated may result in your being banned until we can confirm that you have a valid e-mail address associated with your Tennisopolis membership.

Keep your login information, including your password, private. Sharing of memberships or screen names is not allowed and may result in your being banned. Tennisopolis accepts no responsibility for use of your membership or computer by third parties, with or without your permission.

Post honestly and in good faith, with the intention to support, share, and inform. We don't welcome people who disrupt our community and create additional work for our hosts or staff. If we believe that you're posting with the intent to cause disruption or harm to your fellow members' community experience or enjoyment, specific content may be deleted and you may be banned.

Tennisopolis has the right to delete any post and ban any user, with or without notice, at any time and for any reason, including, without limitation, our judgment that the user has violated these community guidelines. Tennisopolis has no obligation to delete content that you find personally objectionable or offensive. By using the community areas you are agreeing to abide by our guidelines and to submit to their interpretation and enforcement by our staff.

We reserve the right to modify or change these guidelines without notice.

Privacy Guidelines

Never provide your password, telephone numbers, or home address to anyone online. Be very careful about responding to solicitations for interviews or research. Note, however, that Tennisopolis editors might invite you to respond to such solicitations from time to time.

Never divulge any private or personal information about another person online. That includes the person's real name or address, e-mail address, and any other personal information that the person has not asked you to make public. Don't forward or post private messages that someone has sent to you unless you have his or her permission. Only send e-mail to another Tennisopolis member if he or she has given you expressed permission. Please don't solicit other members' personal information.

The e-mail address you provide is for our use only, unless you provide it to other members. By accepting friendships on Tennisopolis, you take full responsibility for any e-mail you receive. Tennisopolis does not monitor such communications and will not intervene between members who use this function. The only way to keep from receiving undesirable e-mail is to remove the offending member from your friends list and not share your e-mail address.

Members of the Tennisopolis community sometimes organize matches, meet-ups, rallies, donations, gift exchanges, reunions, and other offline activities. Such arrangements are private and are not sponsored, vetted, or hosted by Tennisopolis. You participate at your own risk.

If you're looking for subjects to interview or participants for a study, please contact the Community Manager to ask for permission before querying the Tennisopolis community.

Profile Names

We are building a community for personal and business interaction, so we encourage you to use your real name (or business' name.) Adding a last name is up to you. If you choose to be anonymous, please choose a screen name that's in good taste. If you select one that we deem to be vulgar, obscene or that misrepresents you to others, we'll ask you to change your name. If you do not change your name within 3 calendar days we may ban you.

Anyone who tries to impersonate a Tennisopolis staff member, writer, expert, host, or other user — or who creates a screen name in order to hide his or her identity while violating our guidelines — will be banned immediately, permanently and without notice.

Profiles

Nothing contained in a member's profile may violate Tennisopolis' community guidelines in any way. Examples of violations include, but are not limited to links to inappropriate material, competitive advertising and foul language.

Insults, Libel and Threats

Insulting another community member is never acceptable, even in the liveliest of debates. Please note that in a debate, you can state that another member's point of view is wrong, misguided, or uninformed and still be within the guidelines. We take attacks and insults on debate threads very seriously. We reserve the right to end or delete any discussion if, in our sole judgment, it has wandered from being a healthy discussion into an exchange of attacks and insults.

Please note that we do not allow religious debates on Tennisopolis.

External Web Sites

It's fine to mention, link to, or discuss most other web sites, including your own, that may be of interest to our members, as long as the web sites you refer to are consistent with our guidelines. You may not promote a website that we feel is in direct competition with Tennisopolis. We do not allow linking to pornographic sites or gambling sites directly or indirectly.

Community Areas

To participate in our community areas (forums, groups, etc.) you agree to the following:

• Do use community areas to comment, share ideas, buy goods and services, and seek capital.
• Don't post any advertising, promotional materials, referrals, junk mail, spam, chain letters, pyramid schemes, or any other form of solicitation.
• Don't post anything obscene, vulgar, sexually explicit, illegal, harmful, insulting, threatening, abusive, harassing, humiliating, embarrassing, defamatory, libelous, untrue, invasive of someone else's privacy, or objectionable (in our sole discretion).
• Don't post with the intent to disrupt or disturb the community or to interfere with other members' use and enjoyment of our community.
• Don't attack character or damage the reputation of other members, name-call, insult, ridicule, harass, mock, or otherwise verbally assault other members of this community.
• Don't post anything hateful — including targeting race, class, gender, age, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, weight, or disability.
• Don't create a screen name to hide your identity while you are violating our guidelines.
• Don't post or link to inappropriate content. Inappropriate content is anything Tennisopolis deems obscene or vulgar, including graphic images or stories.
• Don't post anything you don't have the right to publish or violate any copyright or other proprietary rights in your posts. That includes excerpting published articles without the author or owner's permission.
• Don't transfer issues or posts from one forum, blog, or group to another with the intention of drawing negative attention to the issue.
• Don't use all capital letters in your chat or bulletin board postings unless you REALLY MEAN TO YELL!
• Don't post a message in more than one location.
• Don't flood. This includes repeatedly "bumping" a thread, disrupting an online chat event by entering the same phrase over and over again, or otherwise using up bandwidth for no reason.
• Don't "friend spam". This means that members are not allowed to randomly send friend requests to unreasonably large amounts of members that they have not met organically on the site. You may have as many friends as like, but do not "friend spam".
• Don't post on behalf of banned members. If you do this, you may be banned without notice or warning.
  

Spamming and Self-promotion

We understand the desire for members to use Tennisopolis as a way to promote themselves and their businesses. We want to encourage and foster this, but there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to do it. You may not directly advertise or promote yourself en masse to the membership via messaging (unless they are a friend or in a group and only if it's relevant to the group discussion), in any comment, in any blog or forum discussion, or any media.

Any advertising or mention of tennis sites offering similar features to Tennisopolis are not allowed. For example, it would be completely inappropriate to walk into a tennis club and hand out fliers to players about your club across the street.

The appropriate way to attract attention is to be a periodic contributor of valued content to the site. Brief plugs at the end of contributed content is generally acceptable. However, brief plugs at the end of a welcome message for a new member that is obviously self promoting is unacceptable. If you would like to advertise your company, products or services to the membership at large, please contact us about advertising on Tennisopolis.

A serious violation of the Tennisopolis community is poaching or directly soliciting Tennisopolis members using our internal messaging technology for competitive purposes. We are not against competitors or competition, present and future. However, using the Tennisopolis internal email messaging or platform to post a self promoting blog, discussion, or comment on any profile wall with the intent to advertise a competitive web site is in violation of our community guidelines and subject to immediate ban, and probable legal prosecution.

Copyright Violations

Please do not upload any copyrighted works including, but not limited to, photos, videos and text. We've noticed a large amount of very professional looking photos of pros lately. Please take these down if you did not take the photo or have specific permission to use the photo.

Violations of Community Guidelines

If you violate the Tennisopolis community guidelines, you may be contacted individually by community staff. Your actions may result in a warning, a suspension, or permanent banning from participation in our community. If you poach and solicit Tennisopolis members using our messaging, you will be prosecuted. We do not publicly discuss or announce warnings, suspensions or bannings.

Banning is done at the community staff's discretion and is the result of our sole determination of a member's demonstrated inability or disinclination to follow our guidelines. We reserve the right to ban any member at any time for any reason, with or without warning.

If a thread that contains a violation of these guidelines has information that's useful to the original poster or other members of the site, it may be edited or locked. However, if in our sole judgment a thread was created for the purpose of violating the guidelines, violates enough guidelines to be irredeemable, or contains no otherwise useful information, it may be removed.

Because of the size of our community, we can't monitor all posts on the site. If you see a message you believe violates our guidelines, please contact us.

Community Manager

Your community manager is Mark Baker. We're only an e-mail away. Please contact us (for example) regarding the following:

• Report any concern you have about our community
• Get help navigating the site or participating in our community
• Get clarification of these guidelines or any other aspect of our community
• Alert us to a violation of these guidelines
  

These guidelines are subject to change without notice.