Spirits2Shine Guidelines

Updated: Sunday, August 07, 2005

S2S Member Overview

Spirits2Shine is a group of webmasters who are looking to be apart of a community and working towards a the big prize at the end. There are several prizes to be won at Spirits2Shine. Here are a few: Lifetime Friendships, Website building skills, more visitors to your site, Personalized Graphics, and your Domain Hosted for a year. To obtain these or others we do have a few rules to keep things running smoothly.

You agree to provide a S2S Approved banner link back to spirits2shine.us and your team or voting booth and a minimal participation level. You also agree to maintain your site content to meet our guidelines, for example you will not add improper graphics and/or sound and you will not link to sites with improper content. We reserve the right to remove any site from competition without prior notice.

Any member and/or participant here at Spirits2Shine found to be Spamming, or being abusive or argumentative to another 3rd party will instantly be disqualified and removed.

All members must be a minimum of 15 years old and have a website.

Required Banners & Links

You will need to have 2 banners or text links pointing to Spirits2Shine very visible and accessible from your main page at all times. The banners must be linked and working properly. One of the banners will be the Spirits2Shine Approved Banner & it is to be linked back to http://spirits2shine.us The second banner is one of the your teams vote buttons found on your teams pages & it will need to be linked to the votebooth you are in. Your team leader (TL) should have either a weekly roster page or a weekly roster email that will give you the vote URL to where you competing for that coming week. You should update you vote banners link weekly to help direct your sites voters. Please have these banners in a easy found place on your site preferably on your sites main page or vote page if linked on your main page.

Voting & Shouting

ALL members are required to self vote and shout at least 3 out of 4 days every week. You may only vote for your site or any other site at Spirits2Shine once per day. We recommend voting all four days. It's very nice to vote for your team mates as well! Please note that even if you are the only person in a voting booth, you will not advance to the next level unless you self vote and shout at least 3x a week. If you fail to do both of the required tasks during the week, you risk your site being placed "On Hold" and even Disqualified. The voting/shouting times are posted on the voting page, shout book and below. Ballot stuffing is not allowed (See Below). If you need an LOA for any reason, all you have to do is ask, k?! =O)

Sites not voting OR shouting(or both) 3 times during a week in the upper levels will NOT move up and be returned to team.

Current Voting an Shoutting Times

Monday thru Thursday
EST - 12:01 a.m. - 11:59 p.m.
CST - 11:01 p.m. - 10:59 p.m.
MST - 10:01 p.m. - 9:59. p.m.
PST - 9:01 p.m. - 8:59 p.m

Scoring is as follows for ALL S2S voting booths.

10 = Highest vote total
9 = Second Highest vote total
8 = Third Highest vote total
7 = Fourth Highest vote total
6 = All others with at least one vote
0 or NV = No votes

Sometimes these abbreviations are used at a vote booth

DBR = Dropped By Request
LOA = Leave Of Absence
HD = On Hold Contact Team Leader
DQ = Disqualified
H = Holiday
TL = Team Leader

"Ballot Stuffing" And IP Tracking Votes

Sometimes there are few new and/or exuberant fighters or even their supporters who may do what is called stuffing the vote box. Please make note that only one vote, per site/fighter, per IP# is allowed per day. All votes received with the same IP# for same fighter, known and treated as duplicate votes are discarded immediately. Therefore, you are wasting not only your time in doing this but also bandwidth in email processing.

This is strictly monitored and is applicable at all levels of competition and vote tally people abide by this rule.

IP#, email address = valid vote = COUNTED
Same IP#, different email address = duplicate vote = DISCARD

Duplicate votes will be discarded immediately and if it continues more than an occasional error, you will be warned and if it still continues you will then be removed. So please do not waist the time and energy it will not help you and YES it will hinder your status in competition.

Higher Level Arena's are reached through honest site support and you maintain your status with role model competition practices

Spirit Points

If you join in and participate in any activity weather it be voting, staff duties, or games you will be rewards with spirit points. Spirit points can be used towards many things. There is the Spirit Graphics Shoppe, Aurora's Spirit Special, and more coming soon. This will help you make banners, globes, gifts, signature tags in exchange for spirit points. You gain 15 spirit points for joining and placing your banners up. To see ways to make other points please visit this page… Points.

On Hold

If you are put "On Hold" twice in the same month you will be disqualified and removed from the team. You may rejoin if you like but you must agree to remain a participating member of your team If you are put on hold contact your team leader via email ASAP and talk with them so the problem can be fixed or agreements can be made. If you do not contact your team leader after one week we see that as you no long wish to compete and your site will be disqualified for the following week If for some reason you can not participate for a week, or more if needed, just email the team leader- or the owner of S2S- Aurora and we will put you on LOA. See Below. Please know we are here if you need ANYTHING. Just email us!

LOA

LOA's must be requested before the week begins and are allowed up to two weeks. Please include your sites name and URL and dates LOA is needed. It is helpful to a TL to know when you are returning. In addition I suggest contacting your TL the Saturday before you would like to return so there is no confusion. If a longer LOA is needed you will need to get special authorization and you will be returned to team level if more than two weeks are taken. There is no LOA's allowed in the Gold round.

Site Content

Spirits2Shine is and always will be a family safe place to visit. We work hard to check our competitor's sites to ensure each site is safe for the average 13 year old. Before signing up to compete please make sure your site meets our guidelines. Otherwise your site will be disapproved when we review it BEFORE your approval. Please note we also check pages you link to. Any page containing the following will be not approved or removed immediately.

Nudity or pornography
Profanity
Violent content
Sexual content
Illegal activities: Hacking, Warez, drugs, etc
Hate or flaming
Other content judged to be improper or offensive

Site must be in English OR be translatable to at least 75%.

We reserve the right to turn down any site that is a business (we prefer personal/fun sites) or if site has an area that requires logging in that the average visitor can not join/access.

Memberships in Competition(s)

You may enter as many sites into competition at S2S as you wish as long as ALL sites meet our guidelines. You may only have 1 active site on a team at one time. No one site may compete on more than 1 team at a time. You MAY compete in other competitions as long as you continue to meet our guidelines and keep required participation level.

Spamming ect.

You will NOT spam staff or other competitors. Flaming, arguing, general rudeness ect is not tolerated here. If you have trouble with someone please do NOT send ANY emails to your teams group email list about it instead please email your TL and/or Aurora directly for help. We do not need to involve those who do not need to be or want to be involved.

Remember we're all here to have fun.

We reserve the right to remove any site from competition, email groups, topsites, forum, ect without prior notice.

GuestBooks

A guest book is not required but makes it nice to leave a note that we stopped by. It also makes it easier for our spirit dusters to dust your guest book with a gift and sprinkle a few magic words wishing you well for the week to come. It is also good to have when vote exchanging so that there is no blind voting. If you do not have a guestbook please have your email visible on your site so others may email instead. We understand that guest book spamming is the new thing that adult sites are abusing and it is very difficult to keep this from happening. Therefore we ask that you check your guestbook often for adult sites leaving a message and delete their link.

Thank-you for abiding by our Rules & Guidelines

Please read this as well S2S Rules