Posting Rules
1. Posts
(a) contributions must be civil and tasteful - your contributions must be polite and not made with the intention of making mischief. We will not tolerate disruptive, offensive or abusive behaviour;
(b) no unlawful or objectionable content – you must not post unlawful, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, profane, sexually oriented or explicit, racially offensive or otherwise objectionable material;
(c) no spamming or off topic material – you must not submit the same or very similar material many times;
(d) no advertising or promotion;
(e) no contributions in languages other than English;
(f) no impersonation;
(g) no inappropriate usernames i.e. vulgar or offensive; and
(h) no deliberate misuse of our email addresses.
2. Your account
(a) If you use multiple logins for the purpose of disrupting the Website or annoying other users you may have action taken against all of your accounts.
(b) All accounts must be registered with a valid personal email address that you access regularly so that moderation emails can be sent to you. Accounts with somebody else’s email address or with temporary email addresses may be closed without notice. We may require you to revalidate your account if we believe you are using an invalid email address.
(c) We reserve the right to close accounts if you are using proxy Internet Protocol addresses in order to attempt to hide the use of multiple accounts or to disrupt any of our services in any way.
3. Your safety
You are advised not to reveal any personal information about yourself or anyone else in any contribution you make to the Website.
4. Legal requirements
(a) You may not share or submit any defamatory or illegal material of any nature on the Website. This includes any text, photographs, graphics, video or audio.
(b) Contributing any material to the Website with the intention of committing or promoting an illegal act is strictly prohibited.
(c) You agree to share or submit only your own original work. You must not infringe our rights or those of third parties including copyright, trademark, trade secrets, privacy, publicity, personal or proprietary rights.
5. Age limits
Persons under the age of 18 are not permitted to use the Website.
6. Breach of these rules
(a) If you break any of these rules when contributing to the Website you will be sent an email informing you why your contribution has been edited or refused. The email will also contain a warning that continuing to break the rules may result in action being taken against your account/s.
(b) Action may include any content being posted by you being subject to checking before it is allowed to go onto the Website or a temporary or permanent suspension of your ability to participate on the Website or parts of it.
(c) If your contribution is offensive or inappropriate to the Website or you otherwise engage in disruptive behaviour on the Website and we consider your behaviour to be serious and/or repetitive, we may use whatever information that is available to us about you to stop any further such infringements and this may include informing relevant third parties about your actions.
(d) We reserve the right to delete or remove any contribution or take action against any account at any time for any reason.
In Plain English...
Please do not name names: you can say 'brown-haired female', 'older male' or 'the man I spoke to in customer services', but you cannot say 'John Brown', even if you know it is the name of the person who is the focus of your complaint. This protects identities but also ensures the concept of 'innocent until proven guilty'.
Pigged Off will not accept or allow abusive language or threatening behaviour and anything of this nature will not be passed by the moderator. If you have a complaint or a comment to make in response to a complaint, state the facts with details of any supporting evidence. Good manners cost nothing!
Do not lie: liars always get found out. Make sure you have a legitimate complaint that you would be quite happy to pass on to or discuss with the relevant authorities or take up with the company involved if you have not already done so. Remember, we want to change the way companies and people behave and can only do this if you are willing to cooperate and be truthful. This is not a site to get your own back by making something up.
