Thursday, August 14, 2008

i'm such a rabblerouser.

i sometimes post on a forum called motheringdotcommune, a huge online community of mostly like-minded folk. i was part of a thread discussing the westjet fiasco described in my last post. i paraphrased the email i received from westjet then wrote 'for the whole text click my siggy'. my siggy beingwith a link to this blog.
here's the email that occurred between the moderator and myself following that benign (or so i thought) post.

Originally Posted by Cynthia Mosher
Hello,

It is my understanding that you were informed by a moderator that emails from others are not to be posted on our forum in discussions. This is an accurate description of our policy. Emails are not public domain material. You do not have a right to share an email with the reading public without the writer's permission.

I see that you have posted "eta: click my siggy to see their letter in its entirety." and placed the censored smilie as your signature and linked to the blog post containing the email.

I am issuing you a warning for this placement in your signature. Please do not circumvent the rules we have placed in our User Agreement through such smile use and linking. I appreciate the lactivism in getting this information out there to people and we would normally support you in your efforts. But the correct action would be to get permission to share the email and respect our request to do so, not post in a way that skirts around our request and use your signature to avoid doing so.

~Cynthia
so i replied: (it's disjoined, i wrote it while nursing the baby and listening to bush spout bullshit)

hello cynthia
the link is to my blog; i did not create my blog or that post in an effort to 'circumvent the rules'. it is my personal blog and my readers are interested in the westjet issue. the link has been in my siggy with that smilie since last fall. i don't see how referring people to my personal site is deserving of a warning; i did the same thing when someone asked me about raising rabbits this week and didn't receive a warning. it's not my intent to be a mdc outlaw and i feel that you're overstepping your bounds, telling what i can and can't blog about.
about thirty seconds later she replied:

You can blog about whatever you want. We don't set rules for your blog posts and I did not issue this warning due to your blog post. I issued it for the reasons I stated in my PM.

We do get to make decisions about posts and inappropriate use of signatures here at MDC. Since the clarification was made to the thread that we do not host posting of emails without permission we would expect you to respect this policy. It may be true that your signature linked to your blog since last fall but placing a censored smilie in your signature that links to your blog does indicate to readers that you are linking to material censored on our boards. And your telling members to click your sig to read the post does circumvent our desire to respect copyright law. We will not host posts or signature that do so. Please edit your signature to remove the link and smilie.

~Cynthia
so i guess i'll quit visiting that forum again.
mdc is like the united states, in my mind. the people (mostly) kick ass, the government scares me.

2 comments:

  1. Yeah, Josybear... I quit going there when I got repeated disciplinary PM's for posting on threads that my fellow unpopular women posted on after our thread was shut down. MDC was a good resource when my babe was young, but I can't stand the government there -- they are a bit too big for their britches and holier-than-thou.

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  2. Hmm that sounds out of line to me too. I've never been to that forum, and I don't think I'll be visiting any time soon. I'm sorry that you were placed in a position to want to leave. It seems like they are pushing their readers away, and thats pretty sad.

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