Friendly warning / reminder

[Zoom]

To all members:
10 Mar 2011

This is just a "friendly" reminder on certain rules & regulations that have not been adhered to as of late, and as such, the moderating team would like to bring the following "issues" to your attention, and request that members try and assist with the following:

Copyright material: (http://www.tropicalaquarium.co.za/showthread.php?4880-Copyright-Material)
If you post a picture that you have not personally taken, please put in a link to where you received it from. Besides being plagiarism, it is actually common decency to acknowledge your source.


Blacklisted species (http://www.tropicalaquarium.co.za/showthread.php?285-Forum-Rules)
With IMMEDIATE effect. Any selling or request for blacklisted species will result in a 2 week ban. A second contravention will result in a 1 month ban. And a 3rd contravention will result in a permanent ban.


Any species on the South African black list are not allowed to be discussed in the context of keeping them in aquaria. TASA will endeavour to keep an updated black list on the site for reference.

The moderators will obviously use their disgression when it comes to new members. We acknowledge that there is a serious lack of information out there with regards to the blacklist, and we will continue to be more lenient towards the newer member who may not have come across the blacklist yet.


For sale (http://www.tropicalaquarium.co.za/showthread.php?18-RULES-for-buying-and-selling):


If you are selling livestock, Photos indicating the species as accurately as possible MUST be added to threads. It is preferable that this be a photo of the actual livestock. Threads without Pictures of livestock for sale will be removed.

In order to help protect our members from fraud, sellers need to have been a member for 30 days and have made 20 posts before they can advertise items for sale. Members who "spam" their way to 20 posts in order to circumvent this restriction will have their posts deleted and their accounts suspended for a period of 7 days. Please note that it can take up to two hours for the software to recognise that you have achieved 20 posts.

You may not sell items on behalf of somebody else. This service is available to members of this site only. Threads advertising goods for friends will be deleted and accounts may, at the sole discretion of the admins, be suspended.

Bumping of threads may happen once (1) every three (3) days. Bumping more frequently may result in offenders accounts being warned.


And please do not forget:

By posting on this forum you are deemed to have agreed with and accepted the rules set out above.

Regards:

The Mod Team.

[Go-Big]

Thanks guys.

Sorry for my ignorance but what is this bump thing?

[shihr]

http://www.tropicalaquarium.co.za/showthread.php?6913-How-to-bump-a-thread

[Dirk Bellstedt]

Hi Zoom,

With regard to pictures and copy and pastes from other articles, I would like to expand on this a little.

If an article has copyright on it, you are not allowed to copy and paste anything from the article into a forum or into any other published work without the prior written permission of the author or of the publisher. For most of my scientific publications, I get asked by the publisher to sign away my copyright to the journal, in other words they are the only holders of the copyright and they decide and give permission or not.

What I also want to indicate is that there is an increasing number of journals that are following the so-called open access route, in other words you can download articles for free and you may cut and paste parts without permission from anyone as there is no copyright on this material. Then it is only good manners to quote from where you have received the picture, but you are not legally obliged to do so and you do not have to ask for permission to do so.

So, if persons want to copy and paste pictures, they must either state:

"Copied with written permission of the copyright holders"

or

"copied from open access publications".

We have recently had pics of Campoma Endler guppies that were pasted onto the forum which have copyright on them, but then they had been copied and pasted on another website which is where they had been obtained from. This all makes it very complicated, but what this means is that anyone that copies and pastes pictures, must be very careful before doing so. I get the feeling that the international press is getting more and more irritated about these practices and they would be looking for a nice little forum in some obscure developing country to make a good example of.

Moderators, have you checked your liability insurance lately?

Take care and kind regards,

Dirk

[Lizid]

With all dues respect Dirk The international press dont really care about small devloping countries reposting pics as they (WE) dont have money and it would look really bad if they international slaps a huge fine on a small developing country.

Thanks for the Warning Zoom...
You guys have a tough job on your hands so Good luck, and let me offer to you the Mods my services on any levels...

[ryanj252]

Shoo! TASA is getting serious with the banning nuh! The bumping of a thread will probably be the most difficult for me, as i like to update my tank and journal thread daily. Hopefully the mods can out some code in to temporarily block an author from bumping his thread for three days. I would definitely lose track after reading and replying on so many posts here.

And then just my 2c for Lizid - The International press do actually care about some one else stealing there work! I work in the advertising world, and we have received quite a number of bug complaints from huge companies for small copyright infringements. "If a poor guy steals your tank and you catch him, would you decide to NOT report him because he doesnt have any money and itd make you look bad?"

[Khalid]

The prof is right, as I have seen students get nailed for much less wrt plagiarism.
Lizid - I think the prof means publishers are looking for opportunities to make easy money from individuals,Firms, groups etc , irrespective of country.

[Lizid]

ryanj252, I am also in advertising and I agree the local press do care, but the internationals as I was speaking about would not sue TASA for Millions of $$$ for posting a couple pics, is what I am saying. Loaclly differant story...

At worst the internationals would contact the site owners and ask them to please remove the pics.
If i am wrong then I appoligize and I guess I would have to pull every single picture and poster of of my movie review site.

[Zoom]

Shoo! TASA is getting serious with the banning nuh! The bumping of a thread will probably be the most difficult for me, as i like to update my tank and journal thread daily. Hopefully the mods can out some code in to temporarily block an author from bumping his thread for three days. I would definitely lose track after reading and replying on so many posts here.

ryanj252 We are referring to bumping of FOR SALE items. Meaning if you just type "bump" or "still for sale" or "anyone?" etc. Updating your tank thread is not considered a bump. :P

[TomK]

The bumping of a thread will probably be the most difficult for me, as i like to update my tank and journal thread daily.


There is a difference between bumping and updating a thread. Bumping is when you do not add anything meaningful to the thread. Trust the mods. They will not be unreasonable.

[ryanj252]

Ha ha! start citing then :)

[shihr]

oops.. zoom explained it

[ryanj252]

Updating your tank thread is not considered a bump. :P

Oh!! that makes sense, and is skelm also for the people that do it!

[fishcrazy]

So what you guys mean is that the sponsors of this site will have to put up picts of all the fish that they have to offer or intend on offering...(Good luck to you guys finding picts that aint copyrighted)
But to the mods I understand the info and also (if the members don't get it)the protection
And so if I have stuff for sale I can only update my offer 3 times(bump thrice) even if it aint sold???or do I put up a new thread

[shihr]

dude, i think these rules are for members only.. i dont think they apply to the sponsors as they are an entity the we should be able to trust..

[shihr]

also, you can bump more than 3 times just not more than once every 3 days.. i think u read wrong

[Singularity]

I`ve never noticed this problem that there is excessive bumping going on... seems like another mountain out of a mole hill...

[ernstb]

Hi Guys,

One thing I want to mention on the BL issue...

The BL contains all the scientific names for the fish. I think there might also be a problem where a beginner does not know the scientific name and does not really google to get it and then check against the BL with the correct name.

would it be perhaps possible to somehow add like "common name" to certain species on the BL? That way the user can search for the common name and see if that is also black listed.

Regards,
Ernst

[Vez]

thats sound like a good plan!

[Dirk Bellstedt]

Hi Lizid,

I do not take offence to the comments that you made, but you mention them perhaps from a business perspective, and I am looking at it from a university or academic perspective.

The image that was posted without copyright permission that I referred to was from a journal called Zootaxa which is published by a relatively small publisher. Here at Stellenbosch University have now repeatedly been informed about copyright issues and our university pays a lot of money for electronic access to journals and does not get hard copies any more. I am also given precise conditions on my own scientific articles about copyright and distribution of pdfs. As a result I would not underestimate the situation. A small publisher may just want to make a point but taking a small forum to the cleaners, it is the principle that counts and not the amount that they stand to benefit.

As a result I think that the forum should be careful about this and that persons should not paste text or images from copyrighted sources.

Kind regards,

Dirk

[Zoom]

dude, i think these rules are for members only.. i dont think they apply to the sponsors as they are an entity the we should be able to trust..
Sponsors are suppose to supply pics too... but often they don't because they are still waiting for stock to arrive.


also, you can bump more than 3 times just not more than once every 3 days.. i think u read wrong
You can bump as many times as you want... just be curteous and don't bump it every hour of every day


Hi Guys,

One thing I want to mention on the BL issue...

The BL contains all the scientific names for the fish. I think there might also be a problem where a beginner does not know the scientific name and does not really google to get it and then check against the BL with the correct name.

would it be perhaps possible to somehow add like "common name" to certain species on the BL? That way the user can search for the common name and see if that is also black listed.

Regards,
Ernst

Our BL does contain common names. Problem is sometimes the common name refers to a number of specific species.

[f-fish]

As a side note - TASA makes a claim to the content "All content Copyright © 2008-2011 TropicalAquarium.co.za" footer of the forum. So yes having other copyright content is a possible problem.

Maybe look at http://creativecommons.org/ for guidelines for what you put on the web.

But here is the interesting one ... if I decide that all my posts are CC-BY (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ) and I use that in the signature in each of my posts, does that supersede TASA's rights to the content - probably not.

Then again - I probably have never said anything that would be worth assigning copyright to.

My take on picture - if you did not make it or take it, do not post it. If it is yours add a tag of some sorts.

Later Ferdie

[TroyFish]

Bumping of threads may happen once (1) every three (3) days. Bumping more frequently may result in offenders accounts being warned.

Think this must be changed then?