[Admin Note] Rules Clarification on unsolicited educational studies, research tests, crowd-funding

[SuperSleeper]

Just wanted to post some clarification of our Rule #2 with regard to our policy on unsolicited "educational" studies, tests, research tests, crowd-funded type posts in the forums...


Generally Not Allowed:

Unsolicited requests for people to email, PM or post their information to anyone for purposes that seem to fit the following categories:

1. "Educational" or "scholarly" participatory research studies where there is no official website link to a proper fill-in form on a domain ending in ".edu" or that is not on an official page of a educational entity's official website. Requests that simply tell someone to "send an email" aren't allowed.

2. Crowd-funded promotions altogether, including "GoFundMe" and similar money-raising campaigns. If it's a legitimate charitable or commercial activity, they can get funding from anyone they wish, but not by spamming our members.

3. College students or college employees asking for folks to email them or give personal information to help them with a school project, thesis or pre-commercial product research of any type.

4.  Requests for our members to send an email or other personal information for any other project outside the scope of normal Apnea Board discussions.

Reason: we have no idea or no legitimate way to determine if these are scams, email-harvesting methods, or identity theft efforts or not. Anyone can set one of these up and take people's money, harvest their email address, personal information, etc.

This is a simple clarification of our forum rule against posting something that is "invasive of a person's privacy", or of a potential "scam sites" or just plain "spam". "Spam" is irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients (such as forum members).

Hope this clarifies the rules a bit more.