****Please note, some items of interest**** (Post: move, guidelines, rating)

[da jammer]

Some of you may not have noticed but the Administrator has disabled the "negative reputation" option here on the site. I have never issued one of these and frankly could not understand why anybody would but they are gone and in my opinion this action was long overdue. City Data's Terms of Service contains the guidelines for all that post in the forums and is really very easy to understand and abide by. Since this online community belongs to the members it would be helpful if you folks would report any posts you come across that are in conflict with the TOS and allow the moderating crew to deal with it rather than engage the person causing the ruckus. Simply click this symbol at the top right corner of the offending post, tell us what the issue is and we'll take it from there. This makes for a much smoother operating forum that everyone can enjoy and makes it easier for members to get the information they are looking for.

Copyright issues.

This has become a particularly troublesome issue all over the internet and this site certainly has it's share of problems. Directly from our TOS:

Copyrighted Material - Instead of copying-and-pasting articles, photos, or other material you find on the Internet, you should be posting links to those articles instead. Posting a snippet from the article and then the link is the appropriate way to post.

That's it in a nutshell. Keep in mind anything not created by you personally most likely is a copyrighted piece whether it be a picture, document, article, drawing or rendering. We have a photographer extraordinaire that posts pictures regularly here in the forums. Every one of those is automatically copyrighted and you must have express permission from him to download them or publish them anywhere else. That's how it works folks! I am certainly not big on out handing warnings and infractions but we really have to get a handle on this. I'm also not real big on having to delete and edit posts because of copyrighted material being posted so please, if the stuff isn't yours post a LINK to the pic, article, drawing or whatever instead of the actual piece to save us all some grief around here. For those that, for whatever reason, cannot understand and comply with the simple request to stop posting copyrighted material, I will have no choice but to remove you from this site. This is the last thing I want to do so pay close attention to any warnings you receive or posts that have been edited for improper content.

On a lighter note, the Administrator has been choosing active members from throughout the City-Data forums and rewarding them with $50 gift certificates to Overstock.com. If you have never been to the site go check it out because this place has everything under the sun available to satisfy just about everyone. Fifty bones just for being active in the forums ( within the TOS of course ) ain't nothing to sneeze at and in fact several folks from the TX forums have already become recipients of the Admin's generosity! Nothing like getting that DM from the big guy saying "You are a winner" when you log onto the site.

Thanks for taking a moment to review this information and if you have any questions or I can be of assistance please do not hesitate to send me a DM