Those underlined words and thier popups

[capt lar]

I feel your pain CaptainJeff.

I love the message telling me to post. Point being - post something even if you have nothing to add ! I actually did so last week. Really lame. Failure to post frequently forces the Forum to point out your sin and urge you to reform. You now have different treatment for different members based on quantity of posts. Anyone see a problem ?

I noticed today that, even after signing in, I had a tall banner across the top letting me know that Bianca Ryan (who?) had a new CD available. If I buy the CD, do I get a higher ranking ? Can Bianca stop the ads ? Does Bianca sail ? I'm quite sure we were told that only useful ads related to boats would be displayed.

I have raised these issues before. This is no longer a "forum". It is a privately owned and controlled business. In 'hellosailors' reply, the "horse" is the Owner of the Forum. Not all HTML sites choose to show these links. This was a conscious decision based on making money and it is optional.

I do think 'hellosailor' is correct - if you don't like it - avoid the horse, and that is why I do not post on this site very often. Maybe the number of ads and other gimmicks are needed, but they change the flavor of the site to the point where, for me, we lost more than we gained. Life goes on.

[hellosailor]

Lar?
" In 'hellosailors' reply, the "horse" is the Owner of the Forum. " I said no such thing. I made a very clear and express analogy between the intrinsic properties *HTML* and those of a horse.
Go back and read it again if that's unclear to you.

I made--and make--no statement about the forum owners or their ideas of how to run a forum. HTML is, by definition, HYPERTEXT markup language. Folks who don't understand what it is and how it works, much less how it was designed to work, have at most a terribly limited right to complain about how it works.

And web forums, like any other publication in any medium, are run by their PUBLISHER, in this case the forum owners, not by the guests who happen to visit. That's the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules.

[capt lar]

I think it is clear that my post was stating my own opinion. I should have inserted "IMO", but I thought my writing was clear. If you actually believe that we

'have at most a terribly limited right to complain about how it works'

then Orwellian sounds close to correct as well. Fortunately, people speak up to challenge authority and push for changes. In my opinion, The "horse" is Andy, not Hyperlink. You suggest that there are no controls or choices available to owners. that is not correct. I am making a statement about the way the BB is now run. My post discussed much more than green highlights.
As to your comment about the Golden Rule...exactly right, but I remember when this was a real forum (a gathering place for public debate). There is also a different between visiting guests and registered members. As I pointed out, the reminders to post and reappearing links are directed at registered members who have not posted with a frequency deemed adequate by management. My point is simple - It stinks. It is a heavy handed technique not used by competing sites. It is offensive.

Gee - hope I did not speak out of turn. I though it was within my "rights".

[hellosailor]

Lar? "You suggest that there are no controls or choices available to owners."
You are making things up. Again, I never said or implied that. I'm saying that THEY are within their rights to do things this way.

If you think enabling hypercode in a hypertext language is "heavyhanded" and violates your rights...Please, whatever else you do, stop distorting what I say. THAT is indeed out of turn, and beyond your rights.

[Jim H]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

And web forums, like any other publication in any medium, are run by their PUBLISHER, in this case the forum owners, not by the guests who happen to visit. That's the Golden Rule: He who has the gold, rules.

The power of the presss belongs to he who owns the press...

Actually, I'm going to disagree a little with you here. Public forums exist because public users post to them. Some boards repost articles from publications (with permission), but primarily the give and take is provided by the users. They are the content producers.

What's always fascinating about this is copyright. The Rules for this forum talk alot about being nice to others, and not copying and pasting copyrighted materials into your posts, etc. What's not so clear is if we, the users, retain the copyright of what we post. Since the CF is "publishing us," does that mean that they have ownership or redistribution rights to the content we provide? Could the owners make and sell a book of the postings, without permission or payment to users who created them?

Myspace.com is pretty clear about its limited rights to modify and distribute user's content: http://www.myspace.com/Modules/Commo...onditions.aspx

It's relatively clear that the Myspace poster retains redistribution rights, and that the limited rights of Myspace are terminated when users remove material. On CF, for example, I don't believe users have the right to easily change or remove material. I know this is done to "preserve the coherence of the threads," but doesn't the content still belong to the user? Or have our rights been surrendered by posting here?

The underlined words fall into this category as well, because our content is being altered with integrated advertisements. Have we granted limited or full rights for our content to be modified, and is it made clear to users that this modification is being done and for what reasons (as made clear in the Myspace disclosure).

This is a somewhat troubling issue, but I haven't found a clear statement about user's continuing rights to their content on CF yet.

Jim H

[hellosailor]

Jim-
"What's not so clear is if " There's a body of precedent on that. Generally, the poster still has the copyright to their own material. But like a set of letters, what you write also belongs to the recipient. And while you (or the recipient) may have the rights to reproduce your materials...the "publisher" often indeed holds the "compilation copyrights" to the entire conversation. The bits belong to many people, the whole belongs to the source of the whole--the publisher as well.
That last bit is the gray one, and many web sites have done the smart thing by clarifying it up front in their site rules. I do know one computer forum, which yes, predated the internet, where the forum operators wanted to publish a "best of" book and they took the time and courtesy to contact everyone who had made a post--and request explicit permission to do so. Anyone who said no, simply wasn't in the published compilation.
Since it was a low-budget *community* and things were different back then, everyone was happy.
Your mileage may vary. Back then, the concept of "What, someone wants to PRINT THIS??" was radical enough.<G>

[Jim H]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

The bits belong to many people, the whole belongs to the source of the whole--the publisher as well.
That last bit is the gray one, and many web sites have done the smart thing by clarifying it up front in their site rules.

I think you're right here. If you do a Google Search on the words "USE OF MATERIAL SUPPLIED BY YOU," you will find a stock paragraph in the user rules of many bulletin boards that states that they have full use rights of anything you post (text, pictures, files), including personal information, and they can use it for any purpose (including commercial purposes) or authorize others to use it. Forever, and for any new mediums that are created in the future.

Hmmm.

I'm reminded of a cruising book I enjoyed called "Sailing the Dream" by Dr. John F. McGrady. It was based on a detailed online blog of their sailing adventures, but then they rewrote it as a pretty good book. I went to their blog and found that it had mostly been disabled, since they wanted people to read the revised book and not the detailed blog it was based on.

However, if they had posted their blog entries on a "free" bulletin board, think of the problems if the statement above was in effect. Basically, someone else could have published and benefited from their book. Or, the board could have denied requests to remove the materials, meaning that the sales of their book could be harmed if the detailed blog, pictures, etc. remained online.

So, I'm not saying this would happen, but if the "USE OF MATERIAL SUPPLIED BY YOU" clause is in effect on a bulletin board then maybe we should think twice about what we share. As much as I may not like Myspace.com, their stated policy seems more respectful of the content of users... Interesting.

Thanks!

Jim H

[handoverfist]

Just posting to keep up with my posting quota to make the green underlined words to go away. I wish they would chage this, but whatever...

[Gator81]

Well, ask and ye shall receive, I suppose! I'd been wondering what the deal was with the green/underlined/hyperlinked words in posts. And now I know!

I suppose this knowledge, if mass-disseminated (is that really a word? phrase? ) will lead to the occasional "greenline" posting. That is, a post that says nothing but puts another quarter in the meter...

[S/V Elusive]

If you go to the bottom of page two, Andy tells you how to disable them.

Otherwise, once we got ya... you be hooked!!!! muahahahaaaa :evil::

[handoverfist]

The best way to disable them from ever popping up on not only this site but any is if you are using firefox as your web browser, install adblock which is a plugin with that block kontera.com, if you are not running firefox, which you should be since it is the best, but you can get the same results if you add kontera.com to your hosts file. By doing this, any site or forum that uses these stupid ads, you will not see them, they will not even load on the webpage.

The awesome thing about firefox with adblock, any banners you don't like, or flash crap, pop-ups or anything, you can disable any of that from loading. So pages load faster, and you don't have to see the crap. You just right click on the ad and select block image, and it pops up with the image url, I usually take it down to the main url so it doesn't just block that image, but any image that ad site might offer.