MysticWicks Online Pagan Community and Spiritual Sanctuary FAQ

Respect. Respect your fellow members and spiritual/religious paths and you will have no problems here. Otherwise, prepare to be banned.

Keep in mind that showing respect and respecting are different. We are not telling you that you have to respect the view, member or path. However, while posting on MW you will show respect or you will be removed from the site.

Now for the fine print, only… it’s not so fine… it’s the same size as all the rest:

• All messages express the views of the author (meaning the post’s author), and not the administrators and owners of Mystic Wicks nor will the administrators, owners or Mystic Wicks be held responsible for the content of any message or attachment.
• If you feel a message is in violation of our rules and/or policies then PLEASE REPORT THE POST using the report icon located in the postbit (the part of the post where the user name is located). Do not commit a violation in return: someone else’s mistakes are no excuse for your own behavior. This goes for posts made by administrators as well (after all, the admins are members of this community, too. If an Admin posts without the pink alert box the post is a member post, not an admin post.) Even if you feel someone may have already reported it… report it anyway. It isn’t tattling. With that said, members don’t need to be politically correct all the time. Rudeness is not against the Rule. Disrespect is. Posted material may offend you. If so, step back and wonder whether it was meant to hurt you specifically. Then you may want to report it. Otherwise, learn from it or toss it aside. Some examples of disrespect that we often see are name calling and pash bashing.
• The administrators of Mystic Wicks Online Pagan Community and Spiritual Sanctuary have the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread/post/signature/avatar/profile pic/attachment/etc for any reason. PERIOD! Why? Because I am sure some troll will come along eventually and find a way to skirt around the rules outlined above. It always happens. One thing that has made MW the great place that it is, is the absolute intolerance for trolls and trolling in any form.
• All posts are the property of the individuals who contributed them unless otherwise specified or deemed inappropriate by the rules and guidelines. User-specific data is the property of Mystic Wicks. Do not copy any information without approval from the site admins and/or the respective author of the previously mentioned information.
• User names and accounts are never deleted (unless a user account has been dormant for more than one year and has 0 posts) so don’t ask us to do so. This would totally disrupt the flow of threads.
• Members cannot have more than one user name. If you forget your log-in, contact an admin. If you want to change your user name, contact an admin – please do not create a second account. If we (admins) find out that a member is posting under two usernames we will merge those usernames after contacting the member in question and verifying that this is, indeed, the case. If you have registered twice and posted under several different accounts and want them merged then please contact an administrator. Occasionally a previously banned member will register a new account. When this happens the accounts will not be merged. the new account will be banned.
• We take copyrights very seriously here. To view our ‘Fair Use’ policy… click here. If you feel that posted information is in violation of our copyright policy please report the post. If you are the owner of the copyrighted material please use the Contact Us form. Include a link to the material and proof that the material belongs to you.
• If you have been banned and would like to come back to the forum please note our ‘appeals’ process. First, no one that has been banned will be considered for reinstatement until 3 months after their ban (some exceptions can be made depending on the nature of the ban… read on.) Please contact us (mol & gebs) if you would like your forum privileges reinstated. We don’t like banning ANYONE, so we always have open eyes and ears if someone really wants to be here. So, again, email us (mol & gebs) if you would like to be reinstated. An email discussion will begin. That is the first step. Click HERE to email gebs. After some discussion we may present this discussion to the rest of the admins for feedback. This is not a guarantee of reinstatement… but it is a start.
  
  When a member is reinstated they are on a “one strike” policy. This means that if the member violates our rules again we are free to ban the member again without warning. “One strike” bans will be reviewed by gebs prior to execution. One strike members that are banned are rarely considered for reinstatement but an email to gebs is always an option.

A word about Privacy: All information given in the sign-up form will remain private to the Mystic Wicks Community. No information will ever be given out or sold, except when required by law.

These rules are subject to change at any time. However, if the rules are changed the community will be notified via a new thread outlining the change and through a community-wide email.

Terms and Conditions

Welcome to MysticWicks.com. If you continue to browse and use this website you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the following terms and conditions of use, which together with our privacy policy govern MyaticWicks’ relationship with you in relation to this website and the content provided within.

The term “MysticWicks” or MW” or “us” or “we” refers to the owners of the website. The term “you” refers to the user or viewer of our website.

The use of this website is subject to the following terms of use:

• The content of the pages of this website is for your general information and use only. It is subject to change without notice. You are soley responsible for how you use the information provided here.

• Neither we nor any third parties provide any warranty or guarantee as to the accuracy, timeliness, performance, completeness or suitability of the information and materials found or offered on this website for any particular purpose. You acknowledge that such information and materials may contain inaccuracies or errors and we expressly exclude liability for any such inaccuracies or errors to the fullest extent permitted by law.

• Your use or knowledge of any information or materials on this website is entirely at your own risk, for which we shall not be liable. It shall be your own responsibility to ensure that any products, services or information available through this website meet your specific requirements.

• This website contains material which is owned by or licensed to us. This material includes, but is not limited to, the design, layout, look, appearance and graphics. Reproduction is prohibited other than in accordance with the copyright notice, which forms part of these terms and conditions.

• All trademarks reproduced in this website, which are not the property of, or licensed to the operator, are acknowledged on the website.

• Unauthorised use of this website may give to a claim for damages and/or be a criminal offence.

• MysticWicks may also include links to other websites. These links are provided for your convenience to provide further information. They do not signify that we endorse the website(s). We have no responsibility for the content of the linked website(s).

• You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without MW’s prior written consent.

• Your use of this website and any dispute arising out of such use of the website is subject to the laws of the United States of America.

• By creating an account and agreeing to the Terms and Conditions you are agreeing to read and abide by the rules of MysticWicks.com. Any member may be removed for any reason at any time by the owners of this site.
  

The Admin Team consists first and foremost with the Site Owners, GEBS and Mol. The running of the site and its maintenance as well as major decisions are in their hands.

Admins have a wide range of duties. Some take on supervisory roles for projects and groups (such as Forum Guides). Some manage things such as the MW Library, MW Magazine or Circle of Teaching. One task common to the Team is moderating. Admins are the people that read reports, settle disputes, hand out infractions and if necessary bannings. If you have a problem with a member, the Admins are the people to talk to. If you have a question about the site, the Admins are the people to talk to. Admins are here to help, no question is trivial.

Forum Guides: Who they are, what they do (and don’t do) and how they’re chosen.

Forum Guides (FG for short) are members on the MysticWicks Community that work with Admins and members to keep the Community active, interesting and fun. Forum Guides are shown by the purple coloring on their names. They are staff members, but are not Admins and they do not moderate members.

Forum Guides keep the forum(s) they guide active and interesting. They may post weekly threads about a topic, trivia threads, hold contests or work on special projects, like a FAQ or resource thread. They also deal with thread moves, stick and unstick threads and other tasks to keep MW running smoothly and efficiently.

A Forum Guide is a member that was chosen by the Admins, but ultimately picked by their peers. When needed we hold nominations for Forum Guides in forums that require new people or replacements. Members nominate a member they think would be best for the job. People can also volunteer themselves as well. Once the nominations are over, the Admin team will look over the names and decide which person would be the best choice for the job. In order to be considered for Forum Guide one must be a member, active and not in trouble (bannings, infractions, etc) or at odds with the Admin staff. We also like the Forum Guide to be familiar and knowledgeable about the forum they’re Guiding.

We require one thing for a name change and that is welcoming 20 newbies in Introductions.

These welcomes cannot be cut and paste (ie: “Hi, good to meet you” times 20). They don’t have to be essays either. Make them relevant and personal, is all.

These welcomes have to be recent (as in within the week of your request). Past welcomes don’t count. It doesn’t matter that you may have welcomed 50 people in the last month or two. There is no storing up welcomes for later.

Once you are done with your welcomes contact an Admin with your desired name. If the name is taken, we’ll let you know and find other possible variants that are free or you can try another name. Once a name is decided on and is available, it’s yours!

We do allow minor changes to be done without the welcomes. Such changes include: misspellings, adding or removing a space or capitalizing or uncapitalizing a letter.

How do I delete my account? Many times we get members asking how they can delete their account and the answer is, you can’t. As a rule we do not delete established accounts. One reason being the deletion of an account can mess up the continuity of threads, posts and other aspects of MW. For members that wish to leave and not return, one option is to ask for a ban. For members wanting to sever their membership, the banning of an account will block viewing, log-in and activity on MW. If a member wishes to have their account banned, they should PM an Admin. Because the account isn’t banned for disciplinary reasons, if there is a wish to return to MW at a later date, you can. Merely contact us via the Contact Us form and explain your situation. Please do not make a new account to get around the ban. You previous account can be un-banned and you can resume normal, member activities. If you wish to be banned, please delete or edit any information or posts you no longer wish to be public as you will not have the ability to do so later.

All right. This is probably the most important part of the Basic’s. It’s called etiquette. Have you ever heard of manners? Well, you need them in real life and on boards like this. Here is the deal. No personal flaming and baiting is allowed here. Discussions can get heated, but there is never a need for being mean to another person. Period. For example:

You are a moron. wrong

Don’t do that. Rule of thumb: discuss issues, not each other.

Another thing to keep in mind is copyrights. We respect other websites and authors on this board. That means that you cannot copy something from someone else’s site or books and post them here. You may post excerpts and links. The best thing to do is to read through our Community Rules and view our Fair Use Policy on copyrights.

Lastly, we are a family forum. Yah, yah…I hear the groans out there but this is the way it is. Keep the language to a PG level and absolutely no links to pornography, etc are allowed on this board. Even if it is YOUR site. No porn! (For adult-only conversations a separate subscription site is available, called After Dark.) No other illegal stuff either. When in doubt, contact an administrator.

And that is that. Go forth ye and post. Click on everything and learn. Have fun!

I registered, but my account wasn’t approved — help!

Did you register, but your account wasn’t approved? If you’re wondering why and what can be done about it, this is the section for you.

All new members upon completing their registration are put into a moderation queue where an Admin goes through and searches for anything that stands out, especially with your username, IP and email address. What we’re looking for are hits on various spam databases and indications that someone isn’t a person, but a bot. During this time you cannot post or participate in the forum. If your account isn’t approved there are many reasons for this, some, but not all being:

* You belong to a country where 99.9% of all new registrants are spammers. These countries being: India, Pakistan, Russian, Ukraine, China, Philippines, and Vietnam just to name a few. Because everyone (except for the very rare few), these counties crank out spammers continually, sometimes upwards of 40 a day. Because of this, to be cautious, accounts from these countries may be refused. Legitimate accounts may be confused and banned, though this happens rarely.

* Your IP/email came up on a spam watch list. We check IPs against many spammer watch-lists. If your IP/email is listed you will not be approved.

* Upon searching Google, you seemed to have registered for countless forums, but fail to participate or post on them. This give the indication of a bot or spammer.

* Your IP/email matches a previously banned account. Trying to evade a ban will not get you through. Duplicate accounts are also against the rules.

* You posted as your homepage, a link to a product/spam site, etc.

* Another reason could be human error. Sometimes mistakes happen.

There’s are a few possible reasons for why you failed the review. There are others.

What can be done about it?

First and foremost, don’t keep trying to register. That’ll only give the Admins who review the accounts a negative impression.

What you should do is email us using the form Contact Us and explain your situation. Most of the time, members that do this show that they aren’t in fact what they were thought to be and have their accounts unbanned. It’s not a guarantee, though. Just keep that in mind. Certain things can’t and won’t be overlooked, but for simple things like an IP or email mix-up it’s worth the try!

When we are communicating over a forum like this, we’re communicating via reading and writing.

We all skim through posts, it’s time consuming to read them all carefully when we’re not sure we are interested in it’s content. But when we are skimming through text and see words that makes us jump and assume things it is important to go back and re-read, compare the text to the assumptions we’ve made and see if it really said what we thought it did.

We all come from different parts of the world, different cultural backgrounds, different beliefs or non-beliefs and we all use different terminologies. If we don’t take the time to carefully read what we want to respond to it may lead to some very awkward situations, or even arguments.

Actually reading what we are responding to is essential for sustaining an open communication. What we assume someone mean might not be what they actually wrote. And if we take that extra time to re-read a post in order to verify our assumptions we might have saved ourselves a lot of problems. When people start to assume and claim someone wrote something they didn’t it can, sometimes, become a really infected discussion from then on.

Read the post carefully and compare what was actually written to what our initial assumptions were. If they do not match, we can be fairly sure our assumption about the posts content was faulty.

If we are unsure as to what the poster meant, we should, ideally, ask them to clarify.

Title and post content:

In order to make it easier on our fellow members to navigate the topics on this board we might also want to make posts under more relevant titles. If we’re posting a question about the relationship between the Goddess Isis and the God Osiris a non-informative title would be “Question..” and a more informative title would be “Isis and Osiris relationship”.

Not only will we attract the attention of people interested in Isis and Osiris, but we will also have offered the courtesy of giving people who are completely uninterested in Isis and Osiris the possibility of not wasting their time.

Keeping an initial post short and concise is also a good way to grab the attention of readers and create a good environment for conversation and communication. Nobody wants to read a wall of text that is barely relevant to the question at hand before getting to the point. It makes people more likely to respond to our post in a relevant matter if we stick to the relevant points.

Keeping things short and relevant can benefit not only to our post, but the people who read it. While it might be tempting to post a long background story as to why we came to the question, sometimes these monologues can be better suited for a blog and not a discussion forum, or maybe in a subsequent post in the topic, allowing us to keep the first post clutter free and to the point.

Communication over the internet most often is all about reading and writing. If we take care to make sure we comprehend what is being said before we respond in writing it can streamline discussions and decrease the possibility of the discussion turning sour.

Read, comprehend, respond is a better chain of events than skimming through, assume, react and respond.

If your signature is too big you will be asked to tone it down by an admin. Too big? We mean too many images or BIG images. Text that is a mile long. Use some common sense. Be respectful of folks that don’t have the fastest connections in the world. 🙂 Images in your signature must follow our PG requirement. Any images that do not follow this guideline will be removed. References to banned users in signatures is not allowed.

Spam is not allowed.

How the administrators know whether something is spam or not, is tricky indeed. It depends primarily on the member’s behaviour in other posts, and on information they supply about themselves. If they don’t have any other posts, it depends on the nature of their one post. There’s a couple of obvious vending sites that are used regularly by spammers.

Of course there’s always some questionable posts, where it’s difficult to decide. In those cases the staff contacts the member and decide on basis of their reaction.

As far as promotion of one’s products and services is concerned: a member is allowed to sport links to vending web site(s) in their signatures: that isn’t considered spam. We also have a barter forum. Use of this isn’t considered spam (there are exceptions). And shops and other organisations can buy advertisement space, either directly from mol or through Google.

If someone starts sending you advertisements in private messages or visitor messages, and you think it’s spam, please send a copy of that message to any administrator.