Registration Terms

We are a friendly, worldwide community of Japanese train and modeller enthusiasts that like to share news and information on these subjects. JNS Forum is divided into categories and forums on modelling and prototypes. You are welcome to read posts without joining the forum, but to participate in the community you will need to join as a member. If you have any questions or concerns about the forum, please contact a staff member. The forum is all volunteer and has no advertising. We do a small donation drive once in a while to pay for the forum software license and our server costs, but those are all voluntary and infrequent.

Please come on in and participate and enjoy! We try to keep the rules to a minimum, but we need to have some basic rules that we request each member to hold on to.

Social Rules

1. Be polite and always be respectful of others on the forum. People will disagree at times, but please discuss in respectful and polite ways. Remember that your opinion is not more important than that of someone else, do some research yourself, and try to separate supposition from fact. Think carefully about whether your content will contribute to the community, and keep in mind that people might interpret things in different ways.
2. This is an international forum with members from all over the world, so remember that language and cultural differences will happen. Many members having English as a second language may cause some misunderstandings or misinterpretations as well. Even if English is not your native language, still do your best to write clear sentences with correct spelling and punctuation.

Topic Posting

1. Keep content primarily related to Japanese railway modelling and prototypes.
2. Do some research before posting to make sure the information is not already easily available on the internet.
3. Look on the forum whether your question has been asked before, or if the content you want to submit has already been shared.

4. Try to find an existing topic to post in, and do not create excessive amounts of new topics.

5. Edit a post instead of making a new one if you are just making a correction or adding something small.

6. Post topics to the correct forum category, and use compact whilst descriptive topic titles.

Post Formatting

1. Regular forum posts should be in the default font, text size and colour. Do use emoticons in moderation.
2. Quoting is not necessary if you are replying to the entire latest post. Feel free to quote if you are replying to a specific section of any post. Remember to only quote the part that is needed for reference; the shorter text and the fewer images the better. This to prevent cluttering of threads.
3. Keep down the embedding of photos, Tweets, YouTube videos, etcetera to just a couple per post. Try to be critical of your embeds, and prevent posting highly repetitive similar content.
4. Uploading personal images as an attachment is preferred above using external image hosting services. This because image hosting links often tend to stop working over time. Loading from external servers also slows down the forum severely.
5. When referring to copyrighted material, provide links to the original full web page the image or video is on. A URL directing to just an image file will not suffice. For text it is fine to copy a short excerpt into a post, as long as the reference link to the complete piece is given. This all in order to give credit to the author.

Prohibited Content

1. Do not share anyone their personal information, including your own, in any public area of the forum. Examples of this are telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, social media profiles, etcetera.
2. Discriminatory content of any kind is not allowed.
3. Stay away from political, religious and adult-oriented content. This is a public forum that we want to keep open for everyone, so please refrain from posting content touching on these subjects.
4. Do not post or embed images, videos, sections of web pages or other content that is not your own, as we cannot have other people their copyrighted materials on the forum. The only exception to this is media from websites that explicitly allow sharing, like for example YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, etc.
5. Spamming, SEO, and self-promoting is not allowed. This kind of content will be removed and the perpetrator banned.
6. AI and computer generated and/or edited content is not allowed on the forum. Content deemed to be AI will be removed and the member put on moderated status and warned. Any additional posting of AI content will be banned and all their content removed from the forum.

Commercial Activities

1. The Classifieds forum is open only to regular Members with at least 3 months of membership and a post count of at least 50 posts. Please read the rules in the Classifieds forum before posting. It is not allowed to offer items for sale or ask for wanted items in other areas of the forum.
2. Commercial businesses may post about their wares and services only to a single topic in the Suppliers category. Posting to other parts of the forum is allowed as long as their commercial offerings are not mentioned.

Moderation

If you find spam or notice any other problem with content on the forum, please use the Report post button in the top right of any post to report it to the staff. Do not attempt backseat moderation by replying to the questionable content, but instead let the staff handle it. Replies to questionable content are not appreciated, and will be deleted if deemed necessary.

Policing

If you violate our guidelines, a staff member will contact you. Those who ignore instructions will receive an official warning, followed by a temporary suspension in case of no improvement. Severe violations or repeat offences might result in a permanent ban from the community.

Copyright Disclaimer

JNS Forum does not assume any copyright on content posted by members on the forum. All copyrights are held by their respective owners.

Privacy Statement

Email addresses and IP addresses are visible to staff members. Cookies are used only to keep you identified for sign-in purposes. Personal data can be removed upon request. JNS Forum does not share any of your personal data with third parties.