MartNet Support - MartNet Rules and Regulations (Common sense listing of rules governing use of all MartNet services)

MartNet Rules and Regulations
Common sense listing of rules governing use of all MartNet services

Account Eligibility | General Rules | IRC Rules | UseNet Rules | Usage Agreement

It's gotten to the point where we find it necessary to have a written set of rules. These rules are nothing new, they have been in effect all along, but we never had them written down. They are intended to protect us, our users, and the Net. We know they may sound harsh or unfriendly; that is an unfortunate side effect of formulating rules which provide any kind of real protection from the ever more ubiquitous Net Abuse. Many users never experience anything close to the circumstances outlined below, however, we need something in place for the rest of them.

We don't want to have a 20 page mess of legalese that nobody understands here. The following list contains rules which must be obeyed. Failure to abide by these rules may result in immediate termination of your account without refund. Creative attempts to circumvent our rules are similarly unacceptable. We've seen it all, it seems, and we are not amused by it. We're generally very reasonable friendly people - if you have a problem with these rules, let us know.

Please realize this:

You must accept individual responsibility for your account. We expect that you will adhere to reasonable security standards and not share your password, leave your password lying around in plain text, or otherwise compromise the security of your account. Our accounts are all single user only, and there are very few reasons anyone would need to give out his or her password. If you must share your password with a consultant, then you should change it back to a secure password as soon as the consultant is finished. Feel free to email support for help with changing your password. Understand that unless we have reason to believe your account was broken into by means completely out of your control, we have to hold you responsible for policy violations stemming from your account.

Also, please be sure to read the MartNet Usage Agreement.This is the legal document that you must agree to before you start using your MartNet account. It serves to protect both your rights and ours.

Conditions Concerning Account Eligibility:

Accounts are subject to validation by the system administrator root@martnet.com
Accounts must be paid in full for at least one time period before they are activated. Payments are due on the 25th of the month for the following month. Forms of payment include checks, money orders, cash or credit cards. We require verification on ALL credit card orders. Click Here for our verification guidelines.
All information requested in the "Sign Up" forms MUST be filled out entirely i.e. real name, phone number, address, etc. Intentionally furnishing false or misleading information is grounds for immediate termination of your account.
Account must be intended for education and / or recreational use and not for illegal purposes. Account operator hereon referred to as 'customer' agrees that no responsibility will be placed on MartNet Communications hereon referred to as 'MartNet' or any of it's employees for customer's illegal activities.

General Rules:

You may not:

Do anything illegal or anything that adversely affects MartNet's legal interests. We recognize that not all users are well versed in the vagaries of local, state, federal, and international law. While some infractions may be due to ignorance on the part of the user, ignorance is not an excuse for breaking the law. An accidental first offense may be cause for leniency on our part - this will be at the discretion of MartNet staff. A guide to legal resources on the Internet is located HERE. Please consult an attorney if you are unsure of the legal status of your activities.
Share your password with anyone or allow anyone else to use your personal use account except in your immediate presence, nor dial in more than once at a time on your personal account.
Tamper with other accounts, or commit unauthorized intrusion into any part of MartNet's system or use any of MartNet's machines, files or accounts to intrude without authorization into any other system (cracking, hacking, whatever the media calls it these days...).
Use MartNet services not included in your subscription or devise ways to circumvent security so you have access to services you haven't paid for (theft of services).
Use the system (willfully or negligently) in a manner that encumbers disk space, processors or other system resources so as to interfere with others' normal use of services on MartNet or on other systems (a "denial of services" attack).
Create or participate in chain letters or pyramid schemes, including the infamous Make Money Fast.
Harass users (on MartNet or elsewhere). Sending email or real-time messages to a user who has asked explicitly and unambiguously that you not do this is harassment. In some cases, a harassing user may be warned against engaging in similar behavior with other users as well. Publishing someone's real-world data (phone number, address, social security number, etc.) in a newsgroup or on the web, etc. in such a way as to cause the person trouble or to incite others to do so (even if you don't do it yourself) is also forbidden. (Establishing that the information you published is available, say, in a phone book somewhere does not constitute a defense of this kind of harassment.)
Abuse the services of a remote server, or violate a remote system's terms of service while connected to that service from your MartNet account.
Send unsolicited mass mailings or unsolicited subscriptions with a "negative option" for continuation. (The negative option is one where you invite people who do not wish to receive further mailings to reply to you.)
Run daemons, MUDs, BOTs, or other background processes without clearing it with the MartNet staff (we usually say yes, but like to make sure the programs do not compromise the security of our systems.)
Run programs such as "keepalive" or any other program intended to circumvent the idle-timeout.

Irc Policy

Abuse

Abuse is not tolerated and will result in immediate termination of customer's account.
Abuse includes but is not limited to clones, flooding, nuking and harassment or anything that violates the said customer's irc server's / motd.
All customers must read, follow, and understand /motd on their irc server.

Bots

The use of eggdrop and other forms of IRC bots is not permitted on any MartNet servers.

Clients

No abuse will be tolerated, grounds for account termination without refund.
Two clients per network (undernet, efnet, dalnet, newnet) are permitted, any excess in this will be killed on discretion of admin.

These rules are in place to make sure that everyone can enjoy IRC and their shell accounts. We reserve the right to terminate any account without warning (but will usually warn you first, anyway) if we feel you are in violation of these rules. If you have any questions, send them to support@martnet.com.

Usenet Rules:

The following rules pertain specifically to usenet postings.

You may NOT:

Spam the net with commercial or non-commercial postings.
Maliciously or wantonly flood newsgroups.
Post Usenet articles without either a valid From: or Reply-to: header, as per RFC 822.
Post binaries to a non-binary Usenet newsgroup.

Note: If you have a website on our webserver, or if you have a webserver of our own connected to our network, it is NOT acceptable to spam the 'net with ads for your URL. If we are informed of your so doing, we will inform the postmasters at the site of origin of the spam, assuming it's done from a remote site. If the problem continues, we may revoke your MartNet account or server hosting privileges because of it. We do not in any way condone spam of any kind, and we will not accept as customers users who abuse the Internet in this way.

>Also, we reserve the right to terminate your account without refund for other kinds of nontrivial misbehavior, although in our entire history we have never terminated an account for reasons other than those listed here. In all of these matters, decisions by MartNet staff are final..