Guidelines for the Lincoln Mark VIII Message Board:

Welcome to the Lincoln Mark VIII Message Board. We hope you enjoy your stay, make some new friends, and perhaps find out some details and fixes for what we think is the greatest modern American luxury coupe.

The Lincoln Mark VIII Message Board was set up to foster a friendly group of Lincoln owners in sharing their technical expertise and experiences, and to provide a place for social interaction between members of this select group of automotive enthusiasts. We need to keep this focus. People should come here to share some pointers, experiences, brag about races, ask some questions, etc.

We expect all users to treat this as a 'family friendly' site; pornography, crude language/behavior, etc., will not be tolerated, and may result in immediate suspension/ban.

This forum IS NOT designed for people to come in here and pick fights with each other. Nor is it designed to encourage totally non-automotive banter about issues that some might consider offensive in nature. Most web-access providers allow usage of e-mail through the ISP, so we expect truly personal qualms to be settled in private. We would ask those mature members of our group not to take sides or contribute to any flames occurring in the forums. Anyone posting private communications from others on the message board will be subject to a suspension or ban. Further, users are NOT permitted to use the Inbox function of the message board to send inappropriate messages to other users. If the moderators receive a complaint regarding this, the sender's account may be suspended or banned.

We must ask that EVERY member use his or her e-mail address and full name when registering on the board. If you do not ... your user name WILL be blocked from being able to make post! Registration is required on this board for posting, and it carries many other benefits, such as keeping track of what messages have been read, and giving other members the ability to contact you through the board. We will NEVER sell our membership's email addresses, although if you choose to protect your 'real' email address, you may use a 'free mail' account, such as Hotmail. Should your email account change, you MUST notify the administrator who will correct it for you. If an email address is found to be invalid, your account may be deleted or suspended until you update your account information with a working email account. Also, users have the ability to block others from seeing their email addresses, so you should have no concern that registering on the board will compromise your privacy.

Every registered user is encouraged to create a profile, so that other members can find out any information about you that you would like to share. Signatures are allowed, and should contain Year, Model (Base/LSC/CE/etc), and color (interior/exterior) combination. They are NOT to be a laundry list of modifications to your car. If you wish to include other vehicles in your signature, feel free, but they MUST adhere to the same standards. The entire signature should NOT exceed FOUR SINGLE SPACED lines of text, with no more than 60 characters per line. Scrolling/flashing/oversized text is NOT allowed in the signature. If you want to list any modifications to your vehicle, please use the profile, NOT the signature in every posting, for this. The moderators will delete any signatures on posts with a ‘grocery list’ of modifications. Signature graphics are allowed, but the combined file size must be less than 30 kilobytes total, and the combined total area of the graphics should not be more than 240 X 240 pixels or the area equivalent, and under no circumstances, should the total image be greater than 320 pixels in any dimension, so if multiple images are used, the combined total height or width must NOT exceed 320 pixels. Signature photos should be changed no more than ONCE every 30 days. Failure to follow these standards may result in editing or removal of posts or suspension of an account, preventing any further posts. If you need assistance getting your photos to an acceptable size, please contact one of the moderators. Avatar images may be changed as often as you wish, as long as they conform to a maximum of 48 X 48 pixels, and a maximum file size of 4 kilobytes.

We know there are many respectful message board users out there, so please be considerate when posting. Flames, insults, threats, mockery, personal bickering, whining, and foul language are most unwelcome, and will be dealt with accordingly, either by suspending the account, or in some cases, banning the user completely. We do not have time to deal with such immaturity. Messages that the moderators do not feel are appropriate will be deleted with no explanation. It is their duty to keep things on the message board peaceful, and there will be times that their intervention will help to keep the peace. Cross-posting the same thread or 'advertising' a post in other threads is frowned upon, and these cross-posts will be deleted with no notification. Continued cross-posting will result in a suspension or ban from the message board. “TTT”, or To The Top posts, which add no content and are made solely to bring a topic to the top of the topic list, are NOT appreciated, and may cause the entire thread, at the moderators’ discretion, to be deleted.

Posts of a technical nature are encouraged, but any claims for or against a product should be supported by FACTS. Guesses or conjecture should not be presented as fact, and if you do not have supporting evidence either supporting or disproving a product's claims, you MUST state so in CLEAR AND UNAMBIGUOUS terms. ("I think that...", "It is my opinion that", etc.) Please do not incite a flame war by bringing personal disagreements to the message board, it is to be an open forum that does not intimidate any user, new or old, for fear of being attacked on the message board for simply asking a question.

We urge the users of this forum to agree to the following: when a derogatory, slanderous, crude, or hateful message is posted, DO NOT RESPOND! Please allow the moderators to take care of the problem. If you find a post offensive to you, or that you feel might be offensive to someone else, please email the moderators, and we will take quick action to correct this. If users add responses that further incite a flame war, their account may be suspended or banned as well. This is not a matter of who started it first, we expect these disagreements to be handled by the moderators, not by bickering and attacks on each other.

No requests for information that is "pay-for-service" info. You may not, for example, ask someone to look up your VIN in Carfax®. To do so is a violation of that person's agreement with Carfax and we will not be a party to that violation.

Do not post messages regarding any online auctions, such as eBay, Yahoo, etc. This only serves to artificially inflate the prices. We firmly believe that auction sites should benefit those who are willing to spend the time searching for bargains, and advertising auctions on this message board defeats this goal. We will block you from posting if you do this, or may permanently ban you if you fail to comply with our warnings.

Advertisements by vendors and others are limited to the Advertising forums of the message board. Vendors and other advertisers are allowed make one response to a direct question asking for parts or modifications in any of the forums. The response should be brief and direct the person asking the question to the vendor's website or an ad in the Advertising forums. This does NOT mean an advertisement is posted as a response, a link to an advertisement posted in the Advertisement forum IS appropriate. The Vendor/Product Review forum is reserved for the customers and vendors only. A customer may start a thread, and ONLY the vendor in question may respond to the comment. All other messages will be deleted. Both the Advertising and Vendor/Product Review forums are MODERATED FORUMS. Messages are NOT posted immediately; each post is reviewed and approved by a moderator before becoming viewable by all. This process may take a few minutes, or a few days, depending on the content of the message, and the personal schedules of the moderators.

From time to time, the moderators of the board may ask users to refrain from posting certain content, URLs to other sites, or other content that they may not find appropriate. If this happens, please comply with their request. If you do not, your account will be suspended or deleted.

If any of the above rules of conduct are broken, the moderators may issue a single warning to the email address on record. If a warning email bounces due to an invalid email address, the account will be suspended or deleted. The moderators may suspend accounts, temporarily or permanently, at their discretion and their decisions are not open for discussion or debate.

If you have been banned or suspended and attempt to register again using some means to get around the ban/suspension, such as using another email address, you agree to a $250 dollar reinstatement fee, for each attempt made. You also agree that any disputes will be resolved in Georgia courts.

If you do not agree with these terms, please refrain from using our message board. Again, this forum is for people to learn and share experiences from an outstanding online community of Lincoln owners.

Additional disclaimers are available here:

http://www.markviii.org/disclaimers.htm

Thank you,

Lincoln Mark VIII Message Board Moderators