Content Warning

• I'm not going to put language filters and such on the forum.  If you want to say fuck say fuck.  If you have a problem with people saying fuck, you may find the forum isn't to your liking.  You may find it fine; it's empty as of the time this is being written.  Either way, if you have a problem with people saying fuck, you have many choices.  Among the choices you have which will NOT end well for you are: hassling people about saying fuck or other things you don't like (slurs and hate speech are ENTIRELY a different question:  zero tolerance for that shit), expecting me to hassle people about saying fuck or other things you don't like, or expecting to force some higher authority to make people stop saying fuck here because you don't like it, will absolutely end in hearing "fuck" a whole lot of times, e.g. fuck you, get the fuck out, are you fucking kidding me, get a fucking job, and what the fuck world are you living in.
• That said, let's not be silly.  If every other word out of your mouth is blue, it might be time to consider shutting up for a while.
• This is NOT a First Amendment Rights Testing Center. There are things I can't have here because of the restrictions placed by payment processors.  There are things I won't have here because they're illegal or immoral.  There are things I won't have here because they're hurtful and pointless.  There are things I won't have here because they're dead bullshit and I'm not running a platform for people to kick dead horses for profit in the hopes that the lurkers will support them in e-mail.

  I respect the principles of free expression and the first amendment in the US and have a lifelong history of living and fighting for that principle, often to my great personal detriment. 

  This forum is not a democracy. It's a platform I'm providing for people who dig my work and work like it to hang out and talk about it without all the bullshit overhead of social media networks, and that includes the bullshit overhead of all the goddamned nazis and fascist and racists.

  I'm under exactly zero obligation to kowtow to some troll shithead's hallucinations about what their "rights" are or what's "fair" or how that proves I'm really the "real fascist."

  In a nutshell, this is my digital living room/back yard where hopefully over time a few thousand of my closest friends can chill and talk about things without a bunch of assholes trying to derail the conversation with hateful stupid bullshit.  I am "the manager," there's nobody else you can go to because you don't like how this forum is run. I'm always open to reasonable suggestions but there is no appeals court here, so please just don't be a dick and we'll be fine. 

The Good Stuff

• If you've had an account on this site in the past, either via prior membership systems or through Patreon.  Your account here is still active and you are already registered for the new forum (because it's actually the same one that was here before but members only, just rebuilt).  You don't need to register again.
• You should be able to register with existing social media and OAuth-type accounts like Facebook and Google; these options should be available on the registration form.
• As a general rule the only information we collect is what you give us.  Keep in mind that if you use another network to create your account here, that may include collecting very basic information like the e-mail address on that account or perhaps your user avatar. 
  • At the time of writing, we don't even know for sure we get e-mail addresses automatically through the social networks because that's a functionality we didn't implement previously.  With that in mind early registrants may find that some of these tools are not functioning properly in spite of appearing to do so from my end.  If you find this to be the case, please contact me via the network in question (my social links are at the top of this site) and let me know what's happening.  If it's a network you don't see me connected to or can't find me on, please use the contact form on this site. When we've had sufficient activity to be reasonably certain this notice is unnecessary, we'll remove it.
• You are not required to register just to comment on a post or page. With that said the new wpDiscuz post comment system offers several different login options with which you can use various social media pathways to log in here and create an account, or create a site account here independently of your social media accounts.  If you are already registered until an e-mail address you use in a comment form, the system will attempt to direct you to your existing profile to include information for the network you're trying to use.
• Even if you don't intend to participate in the forums, it is very much in your interests to register if you've been a financial supporter over the years.  As I continue this latest remodeling of my systems, probability that you will need to be logged in to access and administrate any sort of benefits or "perks" related to that contribution increases until eventually it'll be 100% that if you want anything that's available beyond my heartfelt thanks for a contribution at any level, you'll need an account on this site to access it or information about how to get it.

The Medium Stuff

• It's early days yet so please be patient with any glitches or what have you and feel free to contact JH via whatever means you've got to let us know.
• Privacy-wise we're keeping the forum locked down pretty tightly and not implementing most of the "social networking" type of stuff just yet because frankly while the vast, vast majority of people we meet are wonderful and appear to think of us in no particularly negative way, the exceptions tend to be really exceptionally broken and strange and aggressively malicious people and their dislike for me can range from intense to obsessive.  With that in mind, especially in early days when there are very few users so it's easier to get to "everybody" if you have information, things like viewing the membership roster, the internal DM system, the full-fledged user profile pages, and similar bits of chrome and fine tuning are currently not enabled and may or may not be in the future, but at no point will we make your information more publicly visible without full discussion prior to any such decision and full disclosure prior to implementation of whatever decision was made on any given point (e.g. making your social network links visible to all logged-in users).

The Dark Stuff

• DO NOT FUCK AROUND.  Trolling and harassing and being a pain in the ass is a TREMENDOUSLY bad idea. 

  This ain't Facebook, I have access to my server logs and visitor information if I need to.  (This information is collected routinely and automatically by every website you visit including this one).  You are NOT protected here by a social network platform hiding the information necessary to identify you sufficient for whatever criminal investigation or civil pursuit the situation requires.  If someone's hassling you in these forums, let me know, and I'll be happy to cooperate with any information requests related to criminal or civil cases, so long as they're accompanied by the appropriate legally compelling judicial orders or subpoenae.

• I don't have the majority of those tools turned on, nor do I care to.  The less information I collect about you, the less I can provide if someone comes asking with a warrant, and that's the way I like it.  I prefer to avoid collecting any information that's not necessary to run the site and let you have a login account; that way there's less risk in case of a breach.  That's why I only use payment systems that don't pass your financials through my servers in any way.

  That said I'm not going to have people harassed, either by my personal little army of weirdo trolls and stalkers or by any other flavor of asshole, for any reason, through my platform.  Not only am I not personally inclined to put up with it, I won't take the risk of being held liable for it.

  There won't be bigotry, hate, persecution, othering, and outgrouping here: those who cannot abide by that one simple rule will immediately become the exception to it, and you can whine until the heat death of the universe about the hypocrisy of it for all I give a damn.

• We like links but this ain't a link dump.  Share; don't spam.  More on this point in a later revision of this document.