Community Guidelines

Introduction

At RPLS.com, we are a collective of land surveyors and land surveying students from around the world that are here to support one another, advance our profession, and improve our practice.

Our Community Guidelines apply to everyone on RPLS.om. We proactively enforce them using a mix of technology and human moderation before content gets reported to us. We also encourage our members to use the tools we provide to report any content they believe violates our Community Guidelines.

At RPLS.com, we take our Community Guidelines very seriously. We will remove any content – including video, audio, livestream, images, comments, and text – that violates our Community Guidelines. We will suspend or ban members and/or devices that are involved in severe or repeated violations; we may also consider information available on other platforms and offline in these decisions. 

We recognize that some content that would normally be removed per our Community Guidelines could be in the public interest. Therefore, we may allow exceptions under certain circumstances, such as educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic content, satirical content, content in fictional settings, counterspeech, and content in the public interest that is newsworthy or otherwise enables individual expression on topics of social importance.

We update our Community Guidelines from time to time, to adjust for new behaviors and risks, as part of our commitment to keeping RPLS.com a great place for all surveyors and surveyors-in-training to come together, interact and share ideas.  

Conduct and Expectations

Be Nice

This is a serious rule. If you cannot be nice and treat others with respect, there is no place for you here. Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Hateful Conduct

We have a zero tolerance policy for discrimination and hate speech, and we remove it from our platform.  We suspend or ban members that engage in hateful conduct violations or which are associated with hate speech outside the RPLS.com platform.

We define hateful conduct as content that attacks, threatens, incites violence against, or otherwise dehumanizes an individual or a group on the basis of the following attributes:

Minor Safety 

RPLS.com requires people using the service to be 18 years of age or older. We do not tolerate activities that perpetuate the abuse, harm, endangerment, or exploitation of minors. 

Illegal Activities

We work to ensure RPLS.com does not enable activities that violate laws or regulations. You may not use our services for any unlawful purpose. This includes selling, buying, or facilitating transactions in illegal goods or service, as well as certain types of regulated goods or services. 

Goods or services covered under this guideline include, but are not limited to:

Nudity

We do not allow nudity or sexually explicit content on our platform that depict or suggest sexual behavior.

Violence

Threats of violence against a person, group of people, animal, or place will not be tolerated. We do not allow content that is shocking, graphic, sadistic, or gruesome or that promotes, normalizes, or glorifies extreme violence or suffering on our platform. When there is a threat to public safety, we suspend or ban the member and, when warranted, we will report it to relevant legal authorities.

Harassment and/or Bullying

We believe that surveyors and surveying students deserve to feel supported and welcome without the fear of abuse, embarrassment, or shame. RPLS.com does not tolerate harassment or bullying of any kind to those on or off our platform.  

DO NOT POST THE FOLLOWING CONTENT:

Misinformation 

At RPLS.com, we encourage members to only share information that is accurate, factual, and evidence-based because trust is the foundation of our community.  Content that is false, inaccurate, or misleading is strictly prohibited.  We remove content that involves spam or fake engagement, impersonation, misleading information that causes harm, or that violate any intellectual property rights.

While we encourage our community to have respectful conversations about subjects that matter to them, we do not permit misinformation that causes harm to individuals, our community, or the larger public regardless of intent.

Spam and Impersonation

You may not impersonate a person, group, or entity to mislead or confuse others.  Accounts that violate this policy may be removed or suspended.

Privacy

Protected Information

We do not allow content that includes PPI (Protected Personal Information) or PII (Personal Identifiable Information) or PI (Patient Identifiers) that permits the identity of an individual to whom the information applies by either direct or indirect means. 

Some PPI/PII examples include: 

Intellectual Property

Do not post content that violates someone else’s copyrights, trademarks, intellectual property, or proprietary information that does not belong to you. 

Confidential Information 

Do not post content that is protected and confidential from another person, organization, or entity. 

Platform

Platform Security

Our policies prohibit any activities that undermine the security and reliability of our service.  This includes attempts to hack, harm, slow down, or otherwise adversely affect our website, app, platform, or other services.  

Customer Service

We welcome your feedback and encourage members to reach out to us via appropriate Social Groups, Discussion Forums, email, or support request form with concerns, suggestions, ideas, and other customer service related inquiries.  Our community is dedicated to improving the lives and professional careers of our members. We have developed several customer service channels for you to communicate with us.  Please use these channels so that we may better serve you.

Promotion & Advertising

We do not allow the sale, advertisement, or promotion of any services, products, endorsements, or other item(s), with or without monetary value, on the RPLS.com platform without an appropriate Vendor Membership plan established.  Violating content may be removed.  We reserve the right to ban or suspend members that attempt to use our platform for the free promotion of products or services.

Intended Use

The RPLS.com platform was developed with the specific purpose to build a better surveying profession.  We are a community of surveyors and surveying students who are here to come together, interact, and share ideas.  We grow through positive interactions and constructive conversations.  Use of our platform for any other purpose is strictly prohibited.  We reserve the right to ban or suspend members that use our platform for any other purpose.

A word about censorship and freedom of speech

The US Bill of Rights allows citizens the right to free speech in a public forum without limitations imposed by the State. (“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.”) This forum is not a “public forum”; it is a private forum that is open to the public. As a general rule, however, we uphold the ideals of the Constitution and do not condone the censorship of ideas. We allow relatively free and open discussion about just about anything. However, we do adhere to a simple tenet of respect. There is no place here for personal attacks, trolling, racism, sexism or other forms of discrimination. Debate, fault, discuss the action and don’t abuse other members of the site. When in doubt, please remember this golden rule of message forum etiquette: It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it.

Thank You For Building A Supportive Community

Thank you for being a part of the RPLS.com community and working with us to maintain a great space for all members. If you come across content that you believe violates our Community Guidelines, please let us know by reporting the specific content so we can review and take appropriate action.