Silicon Alley Insider is a community site, and you are invited (and encouraged!) to participate.  Please feel free to comment, post to our Community page, join our Community Twitter service, submit stories or pictures, and/or send us tips (learn more here). When posting, commenting, or twittering, please observe the following rules:

• Don't gratuitously insult other members of the community, especially anonymously. If you want to intelligently criticize a company, product, or person, great, but save drive-by-shootings for chat boards.
• Don't use obscene, offensive, hateful, or bigoted language or images.
• Don't pretend to be someone you're not (unless you're obvious about it--i.e., Fake Steve Jobs).
• Don't repost deleted content/links.
• Don't break laws, including securities and copyright laws.
• Don't encourage others to break laws.
• Don't post links or other content related to gambling, chain letters, pyramid schemes, et al.
• Don't post broken images/links.
• Don't post private/contact information.

In short, be professional. We don't moderate community comments, posts, or tweets, but if we see any that violates these rules, we may delete them. (In the case of Community Twitter, we may also boot you off the page). If you see comments, posts, or tweets that violate these rules, please let us know.

IMPORTANT: If you choose to post, comment, or tweet on Silicon Alley Insider, you agree that, if a third party claims that any material you have contributed to the Site is unlawful, you will bear the full burden of establishing that the material complies with all applicable laws.

Appropriate Content

All submissions, comments, and posts should be relevant for the New York digital business community.   We're more flexible w/r/t tweets, but if you don't think you'll ever say anything relevant to the community, we would ask that you not join the Community Twitter page.

Formal Posts should serve as short, stand-alone essays or commentary on relevant topics. If you want to become a formal Contributor, please send an email containing your first post to post@alleyinsider.com, and we'll send you a password.  Please note that you want to become a formal contributor.

Comments should be germane to the subject of the original post or to the resulting conversation.  If you want to start a new conversation, please send us a community post (see below).  If it's a really good post about a topic of broader news interest, we'll put it on the front page.

Community Twitter.  Say just about anything you want, as long as it's not offensive.  We strongly prefer that you Twitter using your own name and company, but if you can't, you can't.  We generally order Community Twitterers so the most frequent and relevant folks are near the top.  Eventually, the ordering will be automatic and community-driven, but for now it's manual.

Community Posts (on our "Community" page) can cover a wide range of topics.  To post to the community page, please send your post to post@alleyinsider.com.  Community Posts can be about almost anything relevant to the Silicon Alley community, such as:

• Questions.  (Web development, food, people, transportation, housing, Mets tickets, jobs, service-provider referrals, etc.)
• Job listings
• Job-seeking
• Event notices
• Announcements
• Interesting news or information
• Rumors, scuttlebutt, dirt
• Special offers for the New York digital community.

You may post to the Community page anonymously or with a by-line--your choice.  We will occasionally "promote" valuable or newsworthy posts to the Silicon Alley Insider front page or to "Job listings" or other Silicon Alley Insider pages.  We like to credit writers of front-page posts with a by-line, so feel free to tell us who you are.