OptiBoard Discussion Forums FAQ

Here you can find answers to questions about how the board works. Use the links or search box below to find your way around.

OptiBoard Posting Guidelines

This site is administered and maintained by Steve Machol.

OptiBoard is designed to promote and encourage a free exchange of ideas and opportunities among eyecare professionals. This Board is here to serve PROFESSIONAL interests, and it is NOT acceptable to use it solely as a Marketing or Sales tool (except as noted below.). Blatant attempts to misuse this resource will be deleted.

This forum is for Eyecare Professionals. Consumers are not allowed to post on the Board, although they can read posts and search topics.

The views expressed on OptiBoard are the opinions of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of OptiBoard or its sponsers.

In order to post items and services for sale in this forum, you will need to first purchase one of the OptiBoard Subscriptions available in under Paid Subscriptions in your User CP. After this, you can post in the Optical Marketplace forum.

Please identify all potential conflicts of interest clearly. If you are commenting on an issue or product that you have a financial interest in, you must identify this relationship.

It is also alright to mention your product or service in response to another message. All I ask is that you do this without turning it into a major advertisement, and that you follow the previous point and identify your relationship to this product.

The exception to the above rule is that companies or individuals representing companies that sell directly to the consumer and that bypass in-person eyecare are not allowed to post on the Board.

If you wish to post a job offering or are looking for a position yourself, please use the Job Board forum.

Do not leave duplicate messages. Choose the appropriate forum for your message and only post it once. Duplicates copies can and will be removed by the Moderators.

Personal e-mail should be used for 1:1 sales pitches. Do not use OptiBoard for these activities.

When registering on the Board, please make sure to include your real email address (the one issued to you by your Internet provider.) I reserve the right to remove any messages which do not contain a valid email address - particularly when people use anonymous messages to attack other people or companies. Please note that I consider email from the "free" email services, i.e., yahoo.com, hotmail.com, email.com, etc., to be anonymous as well.

This is a public discussion forum. It is not acceptable to post messages which offer to give private information on companies and individuals via e-mail or phone. If you have something to say - say it here and in public. This way, the affected party has a fair chance of seeing and responding to the message. Also, limit yourself to the facts. Name-calling and innuendo are not appropriate uses of this forum.

Please do not use OptiBoard to conduct a personal vendetta against any company or individual. This will not be tolerated and these posts will be removed.

Please do not post copyrighted stories and materials on the Board. If there is a story you want to post about, the Fair Use Doctrine can be difficult to interpret but it would appear to allow a brief example or summary of the material followed by a link to the complete article.

Optiboard is a public discussion forum composed of eyecare professionals, although consumers and non-registered persons can read all public forums. Therefore it is inappropriate to publish wholesale prices, or other proprietary information which might compromise the relationship between professionals and consumers. If you have questions of this nature, or information to provide, please use the Private Message system to ask the question or to disseminate the information. Posts containing pricing information deemed inappropriate, will be removed.

We will not remove messages merely because someone disagrees with the content or the conclusion of the poster. We will respect individual's right to speak freely. However, we do reserve the right remove messages or links to pages that are outside of the nature of this board, i.e. messages not dealing with the eyecare industry (except for messages in the Just Conversation forum.) Furthermore, we reserve the right to remove any messages or links that contain profanity, insults, racist or sexist comments, sexual content, or any of the usual offensive language. In this regard, our decision is final.

Abuse of any of these guidelines may result in being banned from the Board.

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