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Forum Posting Guidelines

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4 years 6 months ago - 4 years 5 months ago #209902 by Gryphon
This Forum is provided by the HCVCA to the wider public and is moderated with the intent to provide a site of high quality that people enjoy visiting, bringing together a wealth of knowledge and experience in a friendly manner. These guidelines are put together to keep things on course and try not to stray too far from the primary interest in historic commercial vehicles and their preservation, to reduce the impact of the volunteers in their moderation efforts and to protect the interests of the HCVCA.

By far the majority of the subjects and posts made are within the guidelines and shouldn't particularly change the way or what most people post however by revising and re-publishing these guidelines we hope that everyone takes a moment to make sure their posts are relevant to the interests and aims of the forum. One measure of whether content is appropriate for the Forum is whether it is something that would be shown or discussed in a public manner at a HCVCA monthly meeting or outing and would be of interest and relevance to the audience.

If you have any questions or need clarification on any of these points you may send an email to forum@hcvc.com.au and we can answer your question and perhaps alter these guidelines to make things clearer.


Moderation
The best form of moderation is self-moderation.
The Moderators want to enjoy their time on the forum like everyone else, not spending their time moving posts around, splitting posts that have become off-topic or having to send emails to people to explain why their obviously inappropriate text or images is being removed.
We hope people will do the right thing and play nice and not create unnecessary work for the moderators as it can become frustrating and the temptation to just hit the delete button can be high at times.

Public Forum
This Forum is a public forum and content should be of G or PG rated nature to reflect the public audience of the forum. At all times it must be remembered that the forum contents are a reflection of the values and standards of the HCVCA and your participation is at the invitation of the club.

Not Allowed
Not allowed are images or text of an overly political, sexual, religious or discriminatory in nature nor is the espousing of individuals' ideological positions, conspiracy theories, misinformation, trolling, flaming and generally antagonistic posting in any thread that takes away the enjoyment of the Forum from other members.
We aren't making a judgement on peoples beliefs or opinions, simply is the content of a post or image appropriate for the Forum, not in breach of any laws that may put the HCVCA at risk or is it causing anxiety amongst the other participants.

Use of Forum images and text on other sites.
If you use images or text from the Forum or www.hcvc.com.au on other websites we ask that include a link back to the page where you got the image or text from. If the image is not yours and particularly if it is original content posted by a member of the Forum, please make a reasonable effort to ask their permission to use it elsewhere.

Original Content & Quality
Any Forum with a reputation for quality is one made up of original content and to that end we want to encourage people to share more of their own images and stories and discourage the easy option of taking images and text from other sites. Quality over quantity.
Consider watermarking your images, which is the process of putting your name or identifying mark on the image itself as seen on the Peter Ramsey collection for example.

Paid or Copyright content
The copying of text and images from sites where content is behind a paywall, ie. money is exchanged to view content, is not allowed nor is any other obviously copyrighted material and any new or existing content will be removed. With a focus on content theft being taken from mainstream media sites and governments with potential new laws aimed at the bigger thieves, the expected use of automated processes to find stolen content could catch this Forum and the HCVCA in its net and it is not a position which wish to find ourselves.

External Content and attribution
If you find something you think would be of interest and relevant for this forum elsewhere we ask you to consider the ownership and effort of the person or business that has created that content and share it appropriately as we would expect others who wish to share your content in other websites.
At a minimum any image or text should include a link back to the page where it has been taken from to encourage others to visit that site and this will reward the site owner with improved ranking in search engines like Google. Don't copy all the images or the whole text taking away the reason for someone to visit the other site, instead use a quote or describe in a sentence or two as to why someone might like to follow the link you provide.
Attribution of content is preferred if it is reasonably easy to obtain. A good example of this is in this thread, www.hcvc.com.au/forum/OldTruck/13388-sle...950?start=740#209712 , where Dimas, makes the effort to acknowledge the person who has taken the image.

Relevance
The primary purpose of the forum is to facilitate discussion and exchange information related to historic commercial vehicles, their restoration and use and while by virtue we expand our content to any machinery or equipment with historic commercial origins is welcome.
A general category is provided to enable forum members to engage in occasional "off topic" discussions however they should remain within in the spirit of the forum and kept to a small percentage of our overall content. Off -topic and general content maybe culled at times for any number of reasons as seen fit, performance, space, relevance, age, etc.

Stay on Topic
Try and stay on topic for existing threads and if a posts prompts you to think of something else consider creating a new topic and be sure the category you are posting in is the right one for the subject matter. Quite a number of times we have split out off-topic posts that started with "Not really related but here goes..." or move posts that are quite obviously not in the right category.
Other posts like 'Manure Happens' & 'Caption This' seem to have blended into the same thing and even become dumping grounds for any sort of accident. Or "How Short can you go" which was about short cabins is attracting short anything images and posts now.

Subject Headings
Take a moment to consider how useful is the Subject heading of your new post and try to include useful key words, like make of vehicle.
A simple 'Wanted' is not going to get you much of a response compared to 'Wanted: rear thingyme for a 1967 Acme'

Search Engine rankings and Links
This Forum enjoys a high ranking in the search engine results and that comes from a high level of participation and quality original content. This high ranking comes also from links to and from other website with similarly relevant content and in turn rewards these other sites with a better reputation. Links to low quality or unrelated sites can dimmish the high rankings that we enjoy and should be avoided and can expect to be removed.
Search engine such as Google penalise websites, via the search results rankings, that copy content from other sites and that is why we encourage people to provide original content and not take text and images from other sites.

Signatures
Signature links and images should be of relevance to historic vehicles and personal in nature such as your own website of interesting historic truck related content. Business or work related links and images are only allowed to be included by current members or sponsors of the HCVCA.
Last edit: 4 years 5 months ago by Gryphon.
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4 years 5 months ago #210224 by Sarge
Replied by Sarge on topic Forum Posting Guidelines
I trust we can all get on the same standards here forward.

Sarge B)
ACCO Owner, Atkinson dreamer.
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