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NIC Forums - Community Rules

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Thank you for choosing to participate in the Corrections Community. In an effort to make this a valuable and reliable source of information, the forums are moderated by professionals from the National Institute of Corrections.

Please respect the Community and fellow members by keeping discussions on topic and relevant.

The following content will be rejected by our moderators and continued abuse may result in temporary or permanent suspension of your account:

  • Marketing announcements, commercials, and advertisements;
  • Copyrighted material without a valid statement of the copyright holder's permission to transmit the material;
  • Requests for basic information about corrections (e.g., from students or other non-practitioners);
    If you need research assistance, please contact our helpdesk (https://nicic.gov/nic-helpdesk).
  • Messages intended for an individual member that do not provide information of value to other members;
  • Messages suggesting that members take action to promote a particular political position;
  • Personal observations about individuals;
  • Inflammatory remarks about others' viewpoints or actions or about the policies or actions of correctional agencies or other organizations;
  • Messages containing profane language, Personally Identifiable Information (P.I.I.), Law Enforcement restricted information, or SENSITIVE (or above) level information;
  • Messages without direct relevance to corrections issues;
  • or anything that could be considered "spam"

Moderators reserve the right to reject content that staff consider inappropriate. If content is deemed inappropriate by a Moderator, the content will be rejected and the member will be advised why the post is unacceptable. In some cases, content can be successfully resubmitted by the author after changes are made.

Note that if you post any Personally Identifiable Information about you or others in a forum, NIC cannot protect that information from dangerous actors on the internet. P.I.I. posts will be rejected and removed as soon as they are found. NIC is not liable for P.I.I. that is posted.

If a person continues to post inappropriate content despite specific guidance from a Moderator or if a member posts an excessive number of inappropriate items of any kind, the person's posting privileges may be suspended. This suspension will be effective pending review of the matter by the National Institute of Corrections. If it is determined that the user is in gross violation of the above terms, the person's posting privileges may be permanently revoked or the member may be removed from the forum and/or the website as a whole.

Please note that these guidelines also apply to user profiles and the information that they contain. Please ensure that the profile image you use is free of copyright and that any links you post in your profile do not lead to spam, marketing, or other websites that may violate the guidelines above. Should moderators give a user an opportunity to correct their own content, users may have up to 2 business days to make the change before the moderation will take place on their behalf by website administrators.