Apparenlty, some care is required. Or we might make the error that brought trouble to Mike. One of Mike's messages that I posted was for a URL directed to Railway Age (either directly or via U-Tuve), and this is against the Forum rules, since Railway Age is considered a competitor. Traims is making an exception in this case only, because it was basically a Christmas message, and I thank them for this exception.
I intend to be careful in the future.
Railway Age and Progressive Railroading provide Kalmbach most of the information that they post in the News Wire. Pot meet Kettle!
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
daveklepperApparenlty, some care is required. Or we might make the error that brought trouble to Mike
I'm just pleased that I finally got my "edit" privileges back.
I've posted links, including a thread title, to Railway Age articles. I read both. They both may publish magazines dealing with flanged wheels running on rails, but to say they are competing for the same aududience is a stretch. A very big stretch. (The ads from railroad suppliers notwithstanding.)
Jeff
jeffhergertI've posted links, including a thread title, to Railway Age articles. I read both. They both may publish magazines dealing with flanged wheels running on rails, but to say they are competing for the same aududience is a stretch. A very big stretch. (The ads from railroad suppliers notwithstanding.) Jeff
Railway Age and Modern Railroads market themselves to rail industry decision makers. Trains markets itself to the railfans comments about paint colors and steam engines. Very different markets - both are shrinking.
1. For Trains or any Kalmbach magazine to Allow You to post an artical from a non-Kalmbch magazine is a violation of Federal Copyrite Laws and subjects Kalmbach to possible law suits.
2. The fault in the particular case is mine. Mike assums that we read what he sends before we post any of it. My impatiance overcame common sense when the Yeshiva's server would not allow the URL connection.
3. Editing the information into our own words shoiuld always be possible, and then recognizing the source of the information is simiple courtesy and honesty.
daveklepper Apparenlty, some care is required. Or we might make the error that brought trouble to Mike. One of Mike's messages that I posted was for a URL directed to Railway Age (either directly or via U-Tuve), and this is against the Forum rules, since Railway Age is considered a competitor. Traims is making an exception in this case only, because it was basically a Christmas message, and I thank them for this exception. I intend to be careful in the future.
Monster.com has the same policy on it's forums and the penalty is account suspension for breaking it. So I am not surprised Kalmbach has the same policy.
BaltACDRailway Age and Modern Railroads market themselves to rail industry decision makers. Trains markets itself to the railfans comments about paint colors and steam engines. Very different markets - both are shrinking.
Different subject matter because your referring to the hard copy publication not necessarily the electronic content....which can be two seperate markets.
Here is how Monster.com explained it to me as I was a former Moderator for them on one of their websites. Plus I supported Superpages.com for about eight years on top of that experience.
When you post a URL, it is like building an off ramp from the Trains Magazine website to whatever else your URL is pointing too. Why does Trains care about this? Well first their advertising rates are based on how long they keep each person engaged on the Trains dot com website and how deeply into the webpages folks read as far as content. It's the big reason why you see the likes of Brian Schmidt reposting Newswire stories in the forums here. He is overtly attempting to increase your length of time on the trains dot com website and boost the stats they use to assess advertising rates (or he could be doing it completely altruistically to make your lives easier......you choose). Monster.com engaged in the same practice on some of their discussion forums until they could pay for an upgrade of their discussion forum software that would automatically prohibit URL posting.
It is very visible in the website owner stats when a URL is posted as you see traffic going to a specific page of the discussion forums then traffic completely disappearing. The timer for how long you have been on the website or dwell time resets back to zero once you return back from the link. So it is frustrating to the website owner, hence they make the forums rule.
URL posting also represents a security issue in that URLs can be spoofed or redirect to a virus infected website somewhere and your account can drag the virus back to Trains.com or back to your PC as a download. So that is another hazzard.
I would venture to guess the Trains discussion forums software is old though based on the limitations it has. Do not be surprised if at some point in the future if they upgrade it and suddenly you lose a lot of functionality beyond just posting comments only.......that day came and went for Monster.com. They lost a lot of discussion forum participants in the process but they did not care because 90% of the people that visited the discussion forums on Monster dot com just read other peoples comments and never contributed or posted. Also, over time the older discussion forum participants that were PO'd were slowly replaced by new ones, so the change was a wash among the website participants. Most visitors are just here to read the content on the site and take advantage of others contributions. Which is why I snicker when I read a drama queen post about how they are leaving and never to return again. Trains management really could care less because active posters only represent about 10% of the website hits if they are even that lucky......small percentage statistically. Over time the old posters are replaced by new contributors / posters anyway.
Website hits, how long you spend on a website and what specific pages you visit all go towards computing online advertising rates. Additionally, when trains sells and advertisement online it is usually done via a ad distribution network vs a direct sale from Trains sales and marketing. Meaning some or most of the ads you see on Trains.com are managed by a distribution company that also advertises the same ads on like websites elsewhere (such as Railway Age or Modern Railways). The advertisers pay per website or they pay for a grouping of websites AND they get the stats back on how many hits the ads recieved from each website or how many "views" they got........so in some cases they can cherry pick where their ads appear online.
Thats roughly how the internet game is played.
OK: I realize now that my "sin" was not posting the URLS or, in this case, posting hard copy, but rather crediting the Trains website for the info in sending the info to a friend who sent it to someone else, who subscribes to Age and apparently "blew the whistle" on me. Lesson learned.
The only thing I can find in the forum rules on the subject is:
- Don’t post links without an accompanying explanation. If you’re sending someone to YouTube or a news story, let them know why. A link, by itself, will likely be deleted.
I don't see how this forbids posting URLs (as long as you preface it). What am I missing?
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