Quick reminder on posting rules / etiquette

[roddy]

I just want to highlight a few items from the terms & conditions, as a fair bit of admin time has been taken up lately reminding people and editing / moving posts.

1) Post in the right place, with the right title.

You can see the full forums listing easily - please place posts in the most specific forum possible. A post about finding a school in Beijing does not go under 'General Study Advice' as there's a specific Beijing forum; 'how to pronounce XXX' doesn't go under 'Speaking and Listening' as there's a pronunciation forum. Etc.

A decent title is essential if you want to get the right people looking in and answering, and when the topic is indexed in Google and other search engines it will appear as the title of the snippet. If you take a look at this search you can see how - if these had been titled 'I need help' or 'where should I study?' they may well not appear, and if they did they'd get less traffic. This is where new members come from - circa 80% of daily traffic comes from search engines.

2) Stay on-topic.

Address the content of the original post. If the discussion is drifiting off in other directions, please consider starting a new topic, sending a PM, etc. One poster's passing reference to Beijing being hotter than Paris should not result in a discussion about the weather in France. Off-topic but still within the Chinese / China theme of the site is more acceptable, but a new topic is still prefered.

3) Post primarily in English.

Outside of the Chinese corner, posts need to be accessible to those who cannot read Chinese. Obviously Chinese is needed in examples, etc, but this is an English-language site ABOUT Chinese, not a Chinese-language site.

4) Images.

Something I should have dealt with earlier is the practice of using images from other sites - ie here. This is poor Internet eqiuette as it uses other peoples bandwidth and it leaves you open to pranks such as this. Either just use a text link to the image or its page, or if there aren't copyright concerns attach the image to your post. If you have the image on your own server, fine, but be wary of filehosting services that will remove the image after a period of time.

Comments on the above are welcome, but with the exception of the last point all of these have been in place for years. Don't expect too many changes

[skylee]

I don't understand. If using this function -> to show a photo on another website is poor Internet etiquette, what is not? Should I download the photos somehow and then put them on photobuckets etc before linking them? Would that be good internet etiquette?

Actually I suggest you remove the image function.

[imron]

The reason it is poor etiquette is because every time that picture is viewed, it costs the person hosting it bandwidth costs. So if you are using a picture hosted on someone's server you are costing them money. If that site hasn't given permission for its images to be embedded in other sites then they will be unhappy that they are paying for your traffic. It's completely different from quoting a few sentences of text, because that is hosted on the forums' own server.

The button can be useful to show graphics hosted on chinese-forums (e.g. when someone asks how to quote, you can show a picture of the button. People might also link to pictures hosted on their own servers or servers that allowing linking to images, such as photobucket and others.

[skylee]

I still don't understand (as if all the viewing/downloading 1st episodes for free doesn't cost anyone anything). But it doesn't matter.