Madison County Chamber of Commerce Use Policy

Subscription to any forum hosted by the Madison County Chamber of Commerce (MCCC) constitutes acceptance of the terms of this Acceptable Use Policy.

1. Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE)

The use of the Madison County Chamber of Commerce forum server to distribute unsolicited commercial email is normally prohibited. The exception is where the message is entirely appropriate to a forum and, even then, only at the discretion of the forum owner. Check first unless you are certain that your email will be acceptable – UCE will do your cause more harm than good.

UCE is defined as any email seeking to sell a product or service and/or to promote a commercial organization sent to parties who have not indicated in advance their willingness to receive such email.

Subscription to any forum on the MCCC server indicates a willingness to receive occasional messages announcing new services of the MCCC – in other words, emails originating from the MCCC owners and administrators cannot be considered UCE.

Senders of UCE may be blocked from further access to the MCCC forum without notice or explanation.

2. Spamming

Spamming forums is absolutely prohibited with no exceptions.

Spamming is defined as sending substantially the same message to multiple forums (ie; cross posting) whether or not the message is sent to all forums at the same time or several forums over a period of time.

Senders of spam may be blocked from further access to the MCCC forum server without notice or explanation.

The Madison County Chamber of Commerce Message Board system is the proper method for sending information across multiple forums on the MCCC list server.

3. Unacceptable behavior

Any behavior on a forum hosted by the Madison County Chamber of Commerce which, in the opinion of the MCCC administrators, is unacceptable may result in the offender being blocked from further access to the MCCC forum server without notice or explanation or such other action as the administrators and/or list owner deem appropriate.

Unacceptable behaviour includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Sending email with an invalid From: or Reply-to: address.
Harrassing, threatening, embarrassing or causing distress, unwanted attention or discomfort to any person or entity.
Posting sexually explicit information or other content which is deemed by the Madison County Chamber of Commerce to be offensive.
Transmitting any unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, or hateful content or content which is racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable, or which infringes upon the rights of any third party, as determined by the Madison County Chamber of Commerce.
Impersonating any person, including but not limited to, an official of the Madison County Chamber of Commerce or an information provider, or communicating under a false name or a name that you are not entitled or authorised to use.
Intentionally or unintentionally violating any applicable national or international law, including but not limited to any regulations having the force of law.
Posting attachments (such as pictures or documents) to a forum except where the forum concerned specifically permits such attachments
Posting anything other than plain unformatted text emails (ie; HTML, rtf, etc.)
Genuine mistakes will be treated as such – nobody will be excluded from use of the facilities for a single transgression unless it is obvious, in the opinion of the forum owner or MCCC administrators, that it was intentional.

The final decision on what constitutes unacceptable behaviour is entirely at the discretion of the Madison County Chamber of Commerce administrators – there is no automatic right of access to the services provided by the MCCC.

4. Privacy

Forum subscribers will respect the privacy of fellow subscribers at all times.

Subscribers shall not reveal email addresses of other subscribers to a third party without their permission.

The contents of messages should be treated in the same way as a written letter. In other words, excercise normal standards of good behaviour if discussing the contents of messages with thrid parties.

Specifically, the quoting of message content and/or the forwarding of messages posted to forums on the MCCC on other Internet based forums is invariably a breach of Internet etiquette unless the prior permission of the author has been granted.

“Contents of messages” is defined as both the actual wording and the contextual meaning of a message – ie; re-wording a message in order to post it elsewhere is still a breach of this AUP.

Messages sent to any announcement forum on the MCCC forum server may be quoted on discussion forums within the MCCC for the purposes of further discussion about the subject concerned. Before quoting announcements elsewhere it is advisable to contact the originator of the message.

The Madison County Chamber of Commerce will not reveal forum subscribers email addresses to any third party – the only people who have access to subscribers email addresses and personal information are the list owner(s) and the MCCC administrators.

5. Security

Subscribers to MCCC mailing lists shall not reveal their web interface access password to any third party nor shall they give any third party any other information that may assist them in breaching the security of private mailing lists or the MCCC system.

6. Complaints procedure

Complaints will only be accepted from the injured party(s).

Complaints about abuse of the AUP should, in the first instance, be directed to the owner of the forum concerned as specified in the main index.

If no satisfactory resolution of the problem is forthcoming within an acceptable time scale, the matter should be reported to info@co.madison.ms.us including details of communications between the complainant and the forum owner.

Following a complaint, the forum owner and/or the MCCC adminsitrators will investigate the matter and decide if a breach has taken place and whether it was an honest mistake or a deliberate action.

If it is felt that the breach was an honest mistake, the perpetrator may, if appropriate, be contacted with an explanation of what they did wrong and advice on how to avoid it happening again. No further action will normally be taken unless the offence continues unchecked.

Where it is considered that the action leading to the breach was deliberate, the following steps will normally be taken:

1st offence:
The offender will be asked to formally indicate that they will abide by the AUP in future.

2nd offence (or failure to indicate future compliance with the AUP on a 1st offence): The offender will be suspended from access to MCCC facilities until they agree in writing to abide by the AUP in future

3rd offence:
The offender will be permanently denied access to the MCCC facilties.

Note that whilst the above procedure will normally be followed by the owner of the forum concerned, the owners of the MCCC reserve the right to suspend or exclude any person at any time without notice or explanation.