Community Guidelines

All rules are subjects to change by super-majority vote at a community meeting.  You must submit request for a vote a week in advance of the meeting.

As a global platform for creativity and self-expression, Peer Unschooling Network is deeply committed to supporting and protecting freedom of speech. At the same time, we draw lines around a few narrowly defined but deeply important categories of content and behavior that jeopardize our users, threaten our infrastructure, and damage our community.

What Peer Unschooling Network is for:

Peer Unschooling Network celebrates freedom. We want you to express yourself freely and use Peer Unschooling Network to reflect who you are, and what you love, think, and stand for.

What Peer Unschooling Network is not for:

• Malicious Speech. Don't encourage violence or hatred. Don’t make violent threats or statements that incite violence, including threatening or promoting terrorism. Especially don’t do so on the basis of things like race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, gender identity, age, veteran status, or sexual orientation. If you encounter negative speech that doesn’t rise to the level of violence or threats of violence, we encourage you to dismantle negative speech through argument rather than censorship. That said, if you encounter anything especially heinous, tell us about it.
• Harm to Minors. Be thoughtful when posting anything involving a minor. Don't post or solicit anything relating to minors that is sexually suggestive or violent. Don't bully minors, even if you are one. Being a teenager is complicated enough without the anxiety, sadness, and isolation caused by bullying.
• Promotion or Glorification of Self-Harm. Don't post content that actively promotes or glorifies self-harm. This includes content that urges or encourages others to: cut or injure themselves; embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders; or commit suicide rather than, e.g., seeking counseling or treatment, or joining together in supportive conversation with those suffering or recovering from depression or other conditions. Dialogue about these behaviors is incredibly important and online communities can be extraordinarily helpful to people struggling with these difficult conditions. We aim for Peer Unschooling Network to be a place that facilitates awareness, support, and recovery, and we will remove only those posts or blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification of self-harm.
• Gore, Mutilation, Bestiality, or Necrophilia. Don't post gore just to be shocking. Don't showcase the mutilation or torture of human beings, animals, or their remains. Dick.
• Uploading Sexually Explicit Video. You can embed anything in a Peer Unschooling Network post as long as it's lawful and follows our other guidelines, but please don't use Peer Unschooling Network to share sexually explicit video. We're not in the business of hosting adult-oriented videos.
• Non-Genuine Social Gesture Schemes. Don't participate in schemes to drive up non-genuine interest in your content. Don't make bulk or indiscriminate use of messaging features to, for example, drive traffic to your blog or website. If you want people to like you, just play it cool and be yourself.
• Deceptive or Fraudulent Links. Don't post deceptive or fraudulent links in your posts. This includes giving links misleading descriptions, putting the wrong “source” field in a post, setting misleading click-through links on images, or embedding links to interstitial or pop-up ads.
• Misattribution or Non-Attribution. Make sure you always give proper attribution and include full links back to original sources. It's less work and more fun, anyway. When sharing content, do not inject a link back to your blog just to steal attention from the original post (unless it is your original content).
• Username Abuse or Squatting. Peer Unschooling Network's usernames are meant for the use and enjoyment of all of our users. Don't squat, hoard, amass, accumulate, accrue, stockpile, rack up, buy, trade, sell, launder, invest in, ingest, get drunk on, cyber with, grope, or jealously guard Peer Unschooling Network usernames/URLs.
• Account Dormancy. Use Peer Unschooling Network! Use Peer Unschooling Network all the time! Or at the very least, use Peer Unschooling Network once a year. If you don’t, we may mark your account as dormant. Your content won't go anywhere—it'll be archived exactly as you left it—but your username will be released for someone else to use.
• Spam. Don't spam people. Don't make spammy posts, don't post spammy replies, don't send people spammy messages. Be a regular human. Don't put tags on your posts that will mislead or deceive searchers. For example, don't tag a photo of your cat with "doctor who" unless the name of your cat is actually Doctor Who, and don't overload your posts with #barely #relevant #tags. Of course, meaningful uses of tags are always fine (for example, ironic "punchline" tags that add meaning or context to a post). Don't put dubious code in your posts, like using JavaScript to cause redirects or inject unwanted ads in blogs. Don't use deceptive means to generate revenue or traffic, or create blogs with the primary purpose of affiliate marketing. Spam doesn't belong on Peer Unschooling Network .
• Mass Registration or Automation. Don't register accounts or post content automatically, systematically, or programmatically.
• Unauthorized Contests, Sweepstakes, or Giveaways. Please contact us if you are interested in running contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways.
• Copyright or Trademark Infringement. Respect the copyrights and trademarks of others. If you aren't allowed to use someone else's copyrighted or trademarked work (either by license or by legal exceptions and limitations such as fair use), don't post it.Intellectual property is a tricky issue, so now is as good a time as any to explain some aspects of the process we use for handling copyright and trademark complaints. We respond to notices of alleged copyright infringement as per our Terms of Service and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; please see our DMCA notification form to file a copyright claim online. Please note that we require a valid DMCA notice before removing content. Parties asserting a trademark infringement claim should identify the allegedly infringing work and the legal basis for their claim, and include the registration and/or application number(s) pertaining to their trademark. Each claim is reviewed by a trained member of our Trust and Safety team.If we remove material in response to a copyright or trademark claim, the user who posted the allegedly infringing material will be provided with information from the complainant's notice (like identification of the rightsholder and the allegedly infringed work) so they can determine the basis of the claim.We always want to make sure there is room in any copyright or trademark complaint for both parties to make their case. With regard to copyright claims, the posting user can file a DMCA counter-notification with us, as described in our Terms of Service. Counter-notifications that we determine to be valid will result in restoration of the content at issue following the required waiting period prescribed by the DMCA. With regard to trademark claims, the posting user can send us an appeal explaining their side of the situation, along with any relevant materials we should look at. A successful trademark appeal will also result in restoration of the content at issue.

  With regard to repeat copyright infringement, we use a three-strike system to evaluate the standing of a user's account, where, generally, each valid copyright infringement notice constitutes a strike, and three strikes results in the termination of a user's account. When a user submits a valid DMCA counter-notification, we remove the associated strike from their record.

  Whew. It's a complex process, but one we're proud of, and that we think strikes all the appropriate balances.

• Confusion or Impersonation. Don't do things that would cause confusion between you or your blog and a person or company, like registering a deliberately confusing username. Don't impersonate anyone. While you're free to ridicule, parody, or marvel at the alien beauty of Benedict Cumberbatch, you can't pretend to actually be Benedict Cumberbatch.
• Harassment. Don't engage in targeted abuse or harassment. If anyone is sending you unwanted messages or sharing your posts in an abusive way, we encourage you to be proactive and block the hell out of them. And if someone blocks you, don't attempt to circumvent the block feature or otherwise try to communicate with them. Just stop.
• Privacy Violations. Don't use Peer Unschooling Network to deceptively obtain personal information. Don't post content that violates anyone's privacy, especially personally identifying or confidential information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, or unlisted contact information. Absolutely do not post non-consensual pornography—that is, private photos or videos taken or posted without the subject's consent.
• Disruptions, Exploits, or Resource Abuse. Our servers, and the valiant engineers behind them, work hard for you. Don't attempt unauthorized use, disruption, or exploitation of PeerUnschooling.Net or our other products and services, or otherwise abuse Peer Unschooling Network's resources.
• Unlawful Uses or Content. Don't use Peer Unschooling Network to conduct illegal behavior, like fraud or phishing. That should be pretty obvious to you, a decent human being.

If we conclude that you are violating these guidelines, you may receive a notice via email. If you don't explain or correct your behavior, we may take action against your account. We do our best to ensure fair outcomes, but in all cases we reserve the right to suspend accounts, or remove content, without notice, for any reason, but particularly to protect our services, infrastructure, users, and community. We reserve the right to enforce, or not enforce, these guidelines in our sole discretion, and these guidelines don't create a duty or contractual obligation for us to act in any particular manner.

You can report violations of these guidelines to us directly.

We also reserve the right to amend these guidelines using the procedures set forth in our Terms of Service.

If you have questions or feedback, don't hesitate to let us knnow.

Thanks for reading all of this, by the way, welcome to Peer Unschooling Network.