Introduction

We take the safety and integrity of the community very seriously and will take action for rule violations. When you violate the Terms and Conditions / rules, if the staff have clear and convincing evidence, you will be assessed a warning against your account that will also include punitive actions. This will arrive to you in the form of a Private Topic and email with the subject, "Terms and Conditions: Notice of Violation." And it will include information pertaining to what you did and what actions were taken. It may also include further steps you should take to prevent further issues and violations.

The purpose of warnings and punitive actions is to decrease the amount of harm your violations may cause (damage control) and to discourage you from repeating those actions again.

Note that warnings do not expire, but they can be appealed if you believe you did not violate the rules or that the violation does not justify the punitive actions taken.

Punitive Actions 

The actions taken for a violation will depend on the severity of the violation / how much impact was caused on the community as well as your Account Standing. The following are a list of actions that may be taken against you:

• Your Account Standing being decreased
• Bad karma being assessed on your profile
• Points being charged from you
• Your violating content being deleted
• You being denied access to the relevant forum, topic, or section of the website temporarily or permanently
• You being placed on probation for a period of time
• You being removed from certain usergroups or your rank being reduced
• Your member account being banned
• Your IP address being banned
• Your IP or e-mail address being reported to spam blacklists (for severe spamming)
• If you spam and your spam contains links, we may contact the staff / management of the sites you spammed to warn them that you are spamming their website
• You being reported to nudist communities to keep a watch out for you (for severe violations that directly go against the core values of nudism)
• The police being contacted if your violation was a criminal offense 

How Warnings Affect Account Deletion 

If your account has one or more formal warnings on it, then your username, e-mail address, and IP address will be blacklisted if you later delete your account. Blacklisting means that your username / email can no longer be used on any accounts on Midwest Nudists. And no one from your IP address can create / edit member accounts anymore. This is to help prevent a moderation loophole where a member could potentially delete their account and create a new one with a clean slate.

Do You Issue Warnings For Small Violations? 

Sometimes yes, if the staff have clear and convincing evidence. Often, warnings for small violations will contain very minor punitive action, if any at all. Staff may elect instead just to give you a nag message to follow the rules if they do not feel a warning is necessary. But the point is that action will be taken whether it's a small warning or a nag message. We believe any incident however small needs to be addressed so others do not end up conditioning themselves that their wrongful action is tolerable (which often leads to them doing more severe things whether they intended to or not).

Be aware that, while we do understand this may give the impression of us being overly censoring / moderating, we are far from that. In fact, by having the many tools we do have at our disposal for addressing bad behavior, we can avoid having to ban people when it really isn't necessary to do so. Furthermore, every warning can be discussed and appealed. So if you disagree, so long as you are civil about it, the staff will have an open mind and consider your points (this does not mean they will agree with them but that they will listen to you).

Automatic Actions for Spamming or Hacking

This site has automatic spam prevention features. When these features detect spam, they will take action (either requiring approval for submitted content, blocking the attempt to submit content, or banning the IP address entirely). Additionally, this site features automatic security features that will ban IP addresses if they try to hack the site or brute force login. These automatic actions are not associated with the warnings system. Therefore, they do not come with a warning. But you will see a message from our website when these features intercept your requests.

If you trigger an automatic system, it is important that you do not repeat your action again, even if it is a bug / error. Doing so could get you auto-banned. Instead, let us know in a Support Ticket or [email protected] if there is an issue.

Your Warnings History

You can view the list of (formal) warnings that have been assessed against your account by going to your profile and clicking the "Account Standing" tab at the top.