Please understand this one thing:  YOUR TRAINING STARTS HERE! This is a professional forum for Border Patrol applicants.  Your use of syntax, grammar and spelling is an indicator to your fellow applicants and future co-workers (agents) of who you are.  Chat room language is prohibited. An occasional lol or j/k can be tolerated but u cant rite lik this and xpec 2 b taken seriously.

THE RULES:

1. Enjoy yourself. This is the biggie. The main rule. Many friendships have been established on this board. If you find you are not having fun here, or if you don't like the other people on the board, or don't want to play by the rules, you should probably not be here in the first place. 

2. This is not the place to air out any personal beefs you have with the Border Patrol, any sector, station, organization within, faction of, or group associated with the Border Patrol. Our primary goals are to help qualified applicants to get hired, and to provide a friendly environment in which agents, applicants, and those who SUPPORT them, can congregate and learn from one another. 

If you are looking for reasons to not join the Patrol, there are plenty of other websites that cover them at length, and many are linked from the links page. This is not the place for it. Posts that violate this rule will be deleted. Repeat offenders will be locked out.

3. You MUST have a valid email address connected to your screen name.

DO NOT EMAIL AGENTS unless you are specifically invited to do so. Their mailboxes get full of questions after postings and this will cause them to leave the board forever. Persons violating this rule will be locked out. You may request permission to email the agent in a forum post.  You never have to request permission to email me, but pul-leeeeeze, if it can be handled on the forum, try that first.  Try to remember that I am just a guy with a web site, not the all-knowing hiring guru.

4. We can not and will not entertain immigration-related questions, or non-HonorFirst business of any kind. 

5. DO NOT POST ADS, chain letters or anything else that is outside the scope of this board. There are no exceptions. First offense earns a lock out. This includes items of a religious or philosophical nature.  There are better places for those posts.  Imagine in your mind that you are posting to an OFFICIAL US Government forum, even though you know that this forum and the associated web pages are strictly unofficial.

6. Name calling (to anyone) or disrespect to agents (this includes back-talking) is one of the easiest ways to earn a lock out. Slams or flames of a personal nature, especially when accompanied by a person's name, will be summarily deleted without ceremony. Racial or sexist remarks are strictly forbidden. If any one individual becomes an annoyance, that person will be locked out. Accusatory language of any sort , directed at any person or entity, will be deleted as well.

7. We are not the grammar or spelling police. However, you should be aware that your future team mates read this forum, and you should strive to use proper punctuation, spelling and grammar. Please do NOT USE ALL CAPS LIKE THIS. It is considered "SHOUTING" and is also difficult to read. A good rule of thumb is to type once, read twice and then post. The Delphi board has a PREVIEW button and I highly encourage its use. If you notice that someone is using poor spelling, etc., ignore it. Let me handle it. It makes the world a happier place. 

8. Do not request "tips" or "information" regarding the written exam or oral boards. The reason for this is obvious. All the information you need is on the pages of the forum and HonorFirst.com. If you observe someone violating this rule, please refer them to this page and rule. Better yet, copy their post or email and send it to me.

9. Profanity is the quickest way to get locked out. We have a profanity filter working, but there are ways to subvert it. DON'T.  Kids of applicants and agents also read this board. Using lame approximations of profane language to circumvent the word filter that are thinly disguised (the word @$$ being the prime offender) will cause your entire post to be deleted.  I don't have time to play with them.  Use profanity, post is gone, that simple. If you wish to use a profane or prohibited word, just type it and let the word filter do its job.

10. There are too many rules here. Just use good common sense and treat people like you would like to be treated, or better yet, how you would like them to treat your baby sister. 

11. The assistant managers on the message board devote their personal energy and time into making this a good place to spend YOUR time. Please respect what they do and do not give them any grief over decisions that they make. Their authority to edit and delete posts, gag or lock out members is delegated from me. If you have a problem with the assistant managers, bring it to me, not them.  Likewise, the agents who frequent the forum to dispense advice come here of their own free will.  Some are a little more brash than you might like.  This forum is similar to what you will find in real life. If you have a problem with an agent, let me handle it. IMPORTANT: If you disrespect an agent in this forum, you are gone.

12. Being locked out is forever. No amount of begging or whining will get you back in. If you attempt to establish another ID for Delphi, it will soon be apparent, and you'll get tired of making new ID's before we get tired of locking violators out. Delphi has promised their support in preventing abuses. 

13. Do not, under any circumstances, solicit the phone number for Mary, The EOD Goddess, or Jill, the Junior EOD Goddess or Twin Cities Ray (TCRay), the EOD studmuffin.. There is a very good reason for this. The only time you need to hear their voices is when they call you to tell you they are making a job offer. To bother them at any other time prevents them from working on giving the people in line ahead of you their job offers, thus delaying your own. If and when they give you the phone number, it is for your one time use. Mary has specifically requested that her number be kept a deep, dark secret.  Anyone passing her number around is gone.

14. Refer to Rule #1!!!