Comment Policy: (hide)
Globegazette.com encourages readers to engage in civil conversation with their neighbors. Comments that are submitted go into a queue to be moderated, and if posted after midnight, may take several hours before they appear on the site. We will not edit or alter your comments, but we do reserve the right to delete or refuse to post comments that violate our code of conduct. No comment may contain:

• Potentially libelous statements; such as accusing somebody of a crime, defamation of character, or statements that can harm somebody's reputation.
• Obscene, explicit, or racist language.
• Personal attacks, insults, threats, harassment or inciting violence.
• Commercial product promotions.
• Referrals to other Web addresses.
• E-mail addresses

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globegazette.com Privacy Policy: (hide)
Welcome to the web sites of the Globe Gazette, a media company located in eastern Iowa. We believe in your right to know what information is collected during your visit to our web sites and how the information is used and safeguarded.

Information Gathered by Voluntary Submission
To make use of certain features on our websites (such as contests, story comments, personalized web pages and other interactive forums) visitors need to register and to provide certain information as part of the registration or participation process. (We may ask, for example, for your name, email address, sex, age, and zip code, and we might request information on your interest in sports, personal finance, the performing arts, and the like.)

The information you supply will help us to offer you more personalized features, to tailor our sites to your interests and make them more useful to you. The more you tell us about yourself, the more value we can offer you. Supplying such information is entirely voluntary. But if you don't supply the information we need, we may be unable to provide you with services we make available to other visitors to our sites. Of course, even if you want to remain completely anonymous, you're still free to take advantage of the wealth of content available on our sites without registration.

Information Automatically Gathered About All Visitors
We collect aggregate and user-specific information on what pages consumers access or visit. This information is used to generate reports that help the Globe Gazette assess the value of and interest in the various web sites. The information we collect is used by us to improve the content of our web page. We can build a better site if we know which pages our users are visiting and how often.

Our web servers automatically collect limited information about your computer's connection to the Internet, including your IP address but not the e-mail address, when you visit our sites. Your IP address does not identify you personally. We use this information to deliver our web pages to you upon request, to tailor our sites to the interests of our users, and to measure traffic within our sites.

To help make our sites more responsive to the needs of our visitors, we may utilize a standard feature of browser software, called a "cookie". The cookie doesn't actually identify the visitor, just the computer that a visitor uses to access our site. A cookie can't read data off your hard drive. Our advertisers or content partners may also assign their own cookies to your browser, a process that we cannot control. We use cookies to help us tailor our site to your needs, to deliver a better, more personalized service. It is a cookie, for example, that allows us to deliver your personalized stock quotes each time you visit a site.

Information Shared With Other Organizations
When we present information to our advertisers -- to help them understand our audience and confirm the value of advertising on our websites -- it is usually in the form of aggregated statistics on traffic to various pages within our sites. We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.

Special Attention to Children
Children should always get permission from their parents before sending any information about themselves (such as their names, email addresses, and phone numbers) over the Internet, to us or to anyone else. We do not specifically collect information about children. We encourage parents to review and share safety tips with their children participating in the online experience.

A final note:
The Globe Gazette is affiliated with other online companies, some of which feature our branding. This policy statement does not apply to those companies' web sites; please refer to these affiliated sites to obtain information on their privacy policies. If you can't find the privacy policy of any of these sites via a link from the site's homepage, you should contact the site directly for more information.

The Web is an evolving medium. If we need to change our privacy policy at some point in the future, we'll post the changes before they take effect. Of course, our use of information gathered while the current policy is in effect will always be consistent with the current policy, even if we change that policy later.

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Rules of the Road: (hide)
Blog administrators and moderators have the right to edit, delete, move or close any comment or forum at any time. The following rules and guidelines clarify our practices and provide an explanation of what content may lead to message deletion and/or user bans.

Play nice: Messages containing intentionally misleading information, defamatory content, threats, verbal abuse, harassment, obscenity or personal information about other individuals are not allowed. Comments should be brief and stick to either generally known facts or the facts contained in a news story. Keep a civil tone. Resist making personal attacks or indulging in name-calling. If your item doesn't get posted or is deleted, tone it down a bit and try again.

Keep your posts commercial-free: Advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes and solicitations are unacceptable.

Spam is not allowed: Spamming includes multiple disruptive, meaningless or repetitive messages, or messages posted solely for solicitation. Messages considered spam, trolling or flaming (as determined by the sole discretion of the moderator) can be deleted without warning or explanation.

User Accounts: Registered user names must follow the same rules as forum posts. Any user accounts considered objectionable or created for the purpose of spamming or promoting commercial interests may be deleted. Deliberate or continued abuse of user accounts will result in a ban of the user's IP address.

Signatures: All content posted in the user's signature field must follow the same rules as forum messages and user accounts.

Fair Use: Do not post entire articles into comments or forums. This is a potential violation of copyright laws. It's unnecessary and results in needlessly long posts. Instead, post a brief abstract of the material and a link to the complete source. If you are not sure how much of an article you can legally post, please simply post a link to the material.

Don't see a message you posted earlier? Administrators may move messages to more relevant forums. If you recently posted a message and cannot find it anywhere, the message may have been deleted because of objectionable content. Feel free to try again or contact the moderator for details.

What to do if your account has been banned: If you try to login and receive a message that you've been banned, do not immediately open another user account and continue the inappropriate behavior. Such action could result in a permanent ban. Instead, contact the administrator and find out what caused the sanction. We may or may not reinstate your privileges after such a contact.
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