Terry
I know you are doing the best for the forum but I guess more than 50% of the images appearing have come from somewhere else without acknowledgement. If you look up a specific subject and click on "images" in Google search you will often find the same image on 10 or more different sites with its origin long lost.
A great deal of information from other sites and forums is only relevant for a few sentences or paragraphs and it is pretty optimistic expecting a link to the whole 2 or 200 page article to be ploughed through by casual readers. I have been writing short articles for various club magazines and quite a few reports for Government departments, businesses and other organisations for 50 years. I have seen many of my and other Truck Forum members posts from here on other sites including commercial ones. I have seen many articles I have written over the years appear in various magazines, newsletters and specific subject sites and forums - almost none acknowledged and, not a few times, actually titled "by John Smith"
Wikipedia, by far the world's largest go-to quick reference site , lives on lifted information with their best effort on contentious or "Factual" information being a small footnote with "Verification required", but they still put it in without that verification. If you put something on a public forum regardless if it is in a magazine, a report on paper or in one of the many electronic forms you wanted it to go public. Once you throw a stick into the stream you have lost control and it gets swept down river for everybody to see as it floats by and writing your name on it is no guarantee that anybody will read it or even try. Trying to control it is like film stars selling their souls to create publicity then complaining about the paparazzi when it does not suit them.
Only speaking for myself I only click on a link put up by a forum member if I am really interested but if they go to the trouble of extracting the relevant information either copy and paste or rewriting it in their own words - exactly the same immorality - it certainly gets read and generates responses from others so much more. I have noticed somebody just putting a link as their entire post content sometimes kills the discussion as it is often to the above-mentioned 200 page Government Regulation and not to the relevant sentences or paragraphs.
I really enjoy finding as much different stuff as possible on any and all subjects that might interest our membership to keep the pot boiling, particularly hunting out information that may expand an enquiry or solve a mystery. Much of it holds little or no interest to my specific situation and I am always learning from my ignorant search from the smarter forum blokes responses. More than once I have been rightly told I am talking crap but the beauty of that is it generates the right answer from our huge pool of experts. Without cut and paste I, and several others I suspect, could not be bothered spending time on rewriting or even precis stuff we have found.
I have nothing to do with Facebook or bulk emails where something someone has written or filmed goes "viral" to a million people in 24 hours. 999,999 of the people who copy it and pass it on have absolutely no idea where it came from and nobody gets the credit.
I think the horse has long bolted on any form of reproduction control for non-commercial purposes but if you want to stop copy and paste on this forum that is fine. You do a great job and deserve credit for making it as usable and friendly as it is.
Lang
