Our Community Guidelines
These guidelines apply to the Travelers Helpline, Graffiti Wall, travel blogs, and any other forum allowing comments by the public on ricksteves.com or other websites administered by Rick Steves' Europe.
While the best advice is to use common sense and be respectful of all Rick Steves Community members, these guidelines ensure our community remains fun, upbeat, and open to all travelers.
- Stay on topic. Make your contribution relevant to the original post.
- Travel questions are for the Travelers Helpline. You won't get answers posting elsewhere. All new topics in the Helpline should ask a question unless otherwise noted by ricksteves.com. Unsolicited topics are for our Graffiti Wall.
- Be polite. Comments that contain inappropriate language, harshly criticize, or disrespect others' opinions are not allowed. Constructive criticism of Rick's travel blog entries is encouraged.
- Report violations. Inform the webmaster so that appropriate action can be taken.
- Observe chat rules. Our forums are not chat rooms. Only two posts per blog entry. Avoid direct responses to others' comments as such behavior leads to bickering. Do not react openly to guideline violations. Someone else's violation is not an excuse for you to respond or react in a way that violates our guidelines. Stay on topic. Report violations.
- Do not feed the trolls. Do not be a troll. A "troll" is someone who posts messages intended to infuriate you and elicit a response. Trolls "feed" on such responses. Ignoring trolls is the only solution. Report abuse to the webmaster.
- Do not advertise or post fake reviews. Proposing transactions or promoting your website, blog, hotel, uncle's private tours in Istanbul, etc for financial gain or other marketing intent is prohibited.
- Do not help people break laws. Speaking of the existence of law breaking is OK. Sharing how to circumvent visa restrictions, scam hotels, or perform other illegal acts is prohibited.
- Do not impersonate or invade privacy. Impersonating members of the community, the Rick Steves staff, or anyone else will not be tolerated. Do not post private information about others.
- Reviews are revered. Businesses mentioned on ricksteves.com may not use our site to contact or respond to members/reviewers. Businesses should resolve issues through their own channels. Report genuine defamation to the webmaster.
Important Fine Print:
- Please return regularly to review our rules and guidelines for periodic updates.
- You are responsible for your own actions and content posted on ricksteves.com. Posting your email address and other personal contact information on our forums should be avoided.
- All rules and guidelines equally apply to our Private Message system. Private Messages are not private from the webmaster.
- At our discretion, we reserve the right to monitor all interactions between you and other community members.
- We reserve the right to discipline or ban any community member for violating the rules, guidelines, and/or spirit of our community.
- Banishment results in, but is not limited to, the closure of all accounts held by a user. Such users are not permitted to return to the Rick Steves Community under any circumstance.
- Content provided by members of our community reflect the opinions and experience of those members, not Rick Steves or his staff.
- Content posted at ricksteves.com becomes the property of Rick Steves Europe and may be edited, deleted, published or otherwise used by us. We do not check the accuracy of posted content and accept no responsibility for loss, injury, inconvenience, or bad pasta sustained by any person using the free advice received from Rick Steves Community members.
- Content found in the Rick Steves Community is not to be used for formal and/or professional research, commercial gain, or redistribution in any way without the permission of Rick Steves Europe and the Rick Steves Community member(s) involved.
- Where applicable, our Community Guidelines apply to outside websites administered by Rick Steves Europe such as Facebook and YouTube. Outside websites and certain ricksteves.com forums have additional rules that must be followed.
