Joining Dueling Modems

• Rates & Billings
• Accessing DM
• DM & the Old Genie
• Policies

Rates & Billings

The basic subscription rate for Dueling Modems is $6.95/month or $69.50/year. Each month's subscription fee will be applied towards usage in the following month.

As an incentive, DM offers the first month free of charge. Accordingly, for subscribers who sign up during October, your first billing date will be somewhere around November 20, and will cover December's usage. Subscribers who join in November will see their first bills near the end of December, and so on.

Are you a professional writer?
DM now offers a free account to any active member of the following organizations:

• Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA)
• Horror Writers Association (HWA)
• Romance Writers of America (RWA)
• Writers Guild of America (WGA)
• The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI)

Accessing DM

Access to DM will be via Internet protocols only. DM will not provide direct dial-up access. DM's bulletin board-style Discussion Groups can be accessed using either a web browser or an NNTP newsreader that supports user authentication (more information on the Discussion Groups).

DM & the Old Genie

As stated above, many of our content providers also ran areas on old Genie. We all fully intended to continue supporting those areas as long as Genie itself remained in operation and wanted our participation. Clearly, though, the Internet is the "wave of the future" for online services. There will be things that we want to do, that we can only do here on the net.

Please understand: we did not leave old Genie, it was shut down. While we didn't wish to go into competition with ourselves, we wanted to be able to guarantee our communities that there will always be a home, somewhere online. Additionally, we wanted to be able to take advantage of the possibilities of being on the net. In an ideal world, we would have used the two service locations to complement each other; however, as many of us know, that was not to be.

We deeply and sincerely hoped that the old Genie would have been updated and allowed to prosper and continue to grow, so as to provide as much online versatility as possible for members of the Genie communities. That said, the old Genie still lives on here as long as the communities want it to.

DM General Policies

Full details of DM's policies can be found in the Terms and Conditions Agreement. In general...

From an Internet perspective, please consider DM's Discussion Groups to be moderated newsgroups. As such, we will try to maintain whatever degree of sanity and safety the community itself decides is appropriate. So, we will be doing a nominal amount of "topic copping."

However, we're very much aware that this is not the old Genie, and that we're bound only by our own opinions and respect for the community proper. So, the policing here will be very limited in nature. Specifically:

Content and usage will be restricted in the following manners:

General - Dueling Modems is a closed, commercial online environment. As such, there are no First Amendment guarantees extended to the membership. Notwithstanding that, however, DM supports complete freedom of expression as much as is possible in such an environment.

DM acknowledges that online communities establish their own language and behavior standards. Forum sysops will monitor their Forums and establish guidelines acceptable to the overall community they administer. DM management will support whatever guidelines the sysops establish for their areas, providing it is clearly understood that such guidelines apply only to that area.

Profanity - Sysops will establish guidelines appropriate for their specific areas. DM management, however, will impose no language restrictions of any kind on the service, based purely on profanity.

Flames - Subscribers shall be required to maintain a civil atmosphere in all areas where they can post. As noted, each sysop will establish guidelines for acceptable behavior for their Forums. DM Management recommends that customers be encouraged to not flame each other (or the service). It should be remembered, however, that this service is closer to the "Internet model" than the "Online Service" model, and so a greater permitted latitude in personal expression may be in order.

Pornography - DM will not make pornographic materials available from any area of the service. In this case, DM defines "pornography" as graphic images depicting human sexual genitalia (not including breasts) and text files depicting sexual activity not otherwise protected by 1st Amendment privilege (specifically, "erotica" is protected and will be acceptable). DM management will be the final arbiter of any specific case, and reserves the right to redefine "pornography" at any time, upon notice to the sysops and subscribers of DM.

Buttinsky Sysops - We're going to do our absolute best to avoid this label. Please let us know if we're too much in the way, and if we seem to be having a "chilling effect" on discussions.

Spamming - The whole point of moderating the Discussion Groups is to try to keep a semblance of order to things. Since we're dealing with a cross-threaded environment here, cross-posting between threads is inevitable. And may well prove to have interesting effects on the way this community operates here. But we'd really rather not see the same post land in every thread and every group. Obviously, certain announcements needs to be propagated as widely as possible, but please pick your spots and feel free to ask for our advice before launching one. And, be prepared for the community backlash, if people think you were out of line.

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