1. Staff can do anything to anyone for any reason (or no reason). If you take issue with a decision, you must do so privately with the staff member who issued the decision or with an administrator of the site.
2. One account per person per lifetime.
3. Follow proper private BitTorrent practices. Torrent files you download from this site are unique to you and should not be shared with others. Torrent files from this site should not be modified by adding additional trackers or enabling DHT or PEX under any circumstances.
4. Buying invites is not allowed. If staff discover you have purchased an invite, you will be banned for life. You will be given amnesty if you approach us before you are caught and reveal who your seller was. Waiting until after you are caught will get you nothing.
5. Accessing the site from any IP address is permitted, but your account will be linked with other accounts that have accessed the site from the same IP as you. As such, it is recommended that you don't use public networks, proxies, or VPNs to access the site.
6. Attempting to find a bug in the site code is allowed and sometimes even rewarded. Follow proper disclosure procedures by contacting staff about the issue well before disclosing it publicly. Do not misuse any bugs you may discover. Do not attempt to portray abuse as a bug in the hopes of a reward.
7. Don't reveal the criteria for hidden badges or events.

• Please use the vanity.house tag for sequences that you or your lab produced. This helps us promote the DIYbio community's original contributions.
• Tags should be comma-separated, and you should use a period to separate words inside a tag, e.g., gram.negative.
• There is a list of official tags the torrent upload page')?>. Please use these tags instead of "unofficial" tags, e.g., use the official fungi tag instead of an unofficial mushrooms tag.
• Avoid using multiple synonymous tags. Using both cyanobacteria and bacteria is redundant and stupid — just use the official bacteria.
• Don't add useless tags that are already covered by other metadata. If a torrent is in the DNA category, please don't tag it dna.
• Only tag information related to the group itself — not the individual release. Tags such as apollo.100, hiseq.2500, etc., are strictly forbidden. Remember that these tags will be used for other releases in the same group.
• Certain tags are strongly encouraged for appropriate uploads: archaea, bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, plasmids. People search for these kinds of things specifically, so tagging them properly will get you more snatches.
• All uploads require a minimum of 5 tags. Please don't add unrelated tags just to meet the 5 tag requirement. If you can't think of 5 tags for your content, study it again until you can.
• You should be able to build up a list of tags using only the official tags the torrent upload page')?>. If you doubt whether or not a tag is acceptable, please omit it for now and send a staff PM to request a new official tag or an approved alias.

• Let's treat the biology boards like how the Shroomery used to be: each thread a set of resourceful diverse wisdom worth using permalinks to. It's okay if the boards are slow, that's why there are only a few of them.
• Please discuss site news in the corresponding Announcements thread instead of making a new General thread. Discussing science-related news in General is highly encouraged, but discussing political news is much less so. Thank you.
• No advertising, referrals, affiliate links, cryptocurrency pumps, or calls to action that involve using a financial instrument. You're banned on the spot. The exceptions: cryptocurrencies that derive their value from work performed on distributed science computation networks, e.g., Curecoin, FoldingCoin, and Gridcoin.
• Feel free to post announcements for your own projects, even and especially if they're commercial ones, in the General board. Limit all discussion of trading biomaterials, including bulk giveaways, to the Marketplace forum available to Power Users.
• Please be modest when talking about your uploads. It's unnecessary to announce your uploads because Gazelle logs everything (at least one this is encrypted). If someone asks for help on his project and your upload fits the bill, go write a post!
• Use descriptive and specific subject lines. This helps others decide whether your particular words of "wisdom" relate to a topic they care about.
• Don't post comments that don't add anything to the discussion, such as "I agree" or "haha." Bottle the trained dopamine response to social media because comment reactions are an unlikely feature.
• Please refrain from quoting excessively. When quoting someone, use only the necessary parts of the quote. Avoid quoting more than 3 levels deep.
• Don't post potentially malicious links without sufficient warning, or post pictures > 2 MiB. Please only speak English as stated in the Upload rules.

BioTorrents.de's Slack channels are just are another quiet hangout you can stack your app with so you look cool at conferences.

Please use #general for the usual chit-chat, #development for questions about the Gazelle software, and #disabled to get help recovering your account.

Don't send mass alerts with @channel, @everyone, or @here. It's obnoxious and you should handle anything genuinely important on the boards.

Flooding is irritating and you'll get kicked for it. This includes "now playing" scripts, large amounts of irrelevant text such as lorem ipsum, and unfunny non sequiturs.

Impersonating other members — particularly staff members — will not go unpunished. Please remember that the Slack channels are publicly accessible.

Please use the threaded conversation in Slack and avoid replying to threads with new messages or crossposting replies to the main channel.

Announce and bot channels are in development, as standard IRC instead of Slack for obvious reasons. Any IRC bots you have must authenticate with your own username and IRC key, and set the +B usermode on themselves.