Forum announcement: Sharing of third party articles.

Hi all. As a result of some recent positive dialogue with Car Advice id like to clarify the Forums broader position on copying and re-posting articles form other websites and publications.

Where an article is to be re-posted the protocol should be a link to the source crediting them and only a direct snippet of the article with it, maybe 1 or 2 images at most.

The intent is to of course support and encourage readers to go to those sites for the whole story.

Under no circumstances should the entire article be re-posted nor the text altered in any way at all.

The owner of Car advise has not only been incredibly reasonable about allowing us to use their property under those conditions but understanding of our intent and who we are as a Forum.

In the spirit of goodwill and fostering of productive relationships I must insist we observe these protocols.

I hope everyone understands this and i also want to thank Car Advice for their understanding and support of our community.

I know i not only speak for myself here but many others when i say they do an excellent job.

Good outcome and fair enough.

By posting articles with a link sourcing them, followed by discussion, as has been the practice on this forum, it actually increases their (Car Advice's) ranking in the Google algorithm and in turn traffic to their site. More traffic = more advertising dollars for them. Go Figure.

I think if we were plagiarizing and not awarding credit where due that would be fair cause for complaint.

Lucky I read this .

I have plenty of time to type out stories from the Telegraph every Friday night :)

Oopsies.

The issue is the article in its full length. They require people to go to that site to finish reading it and that is fair enough.

When posting an article make it link first then quote part of the article for discussion here.

There was a time when we did this more than not but the danger is getting stuff out of context and frustration at needing a further click to go to a website. Then we require people to feel strongly enough to come back here and say something.

This is the way it has to be.

Or we could just ignore this particular website and post links and articles from other sources.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by HSE2

The issue is the article in its full length. They require people to go to that site to finish reading it and that is fair enough.

When posting an article make it link first then quote part of the article for discussion here.

There was a time when we did this more than not but the danger is getting stuff out of context and frustration at needing a further click to go to a website. Then we require people to feel strongly enough to come back here and say something.

This is the way it has to be.

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speaking personally, if i'm home on the desktop, i don't mind clicking the links and going to the actual site to read the article. if i'm browsing on my phone, i don't normally bother going to 3rd party sites, or wait until i'm home. i just find browsing through multiple pages much easier on a desktop than mobile devices. thats why i liked full articles posted as it was all in the one place, but if that is how it has to then fine.

If people play by the rules, you'll find that most sites are reasonable.

it's easy to get carried away posting full length - I know I do sometimes
but on reflection, it's better to snip the highlights and let others come back
with more points for discussion.

It's also nice to credit the author at the top of the OP, that goes a long way towards building bridges.
If we want news outlets to respect our POVs, we must in kind respect them and play by the rules.

While its true car advice picked us up on this, what we have going forward is the standard by which we must conduct ourselves with all articles regardless of origin.

Personally I am surprised its taken this long for some one to catch up with what is common practice on the internet.

I personally realised we were over the line but its just that in 15 years I have not heard of a forum being picked up on it.

Yes it is as simple as a request to remove the offending article but that's not something we want here. We don't generally delete or close threads, we don't want that censorship or the work.

When I get time I will post up something in this thread as an example of what we can do.