Members please note- disallowed links.

[Keith Outten]

Matt,

Below is a picture of the north entrance to our new 127,000 square foot Student Union. This is what has been consuming all my shop time since April 2004. All 75 of the exterior brick arches on this building are true roman style arches, there is no steel support structure for the arches.

Many more pictures of the inside of the building and all the beautifull woodwork will follow very soon.

Back on topic! Dave's point about not posting links to Ebay was a decision that our Members made because they didn't want to see people registering here just to post links to their Ebay auctions. The advertising influence of auction sites is very strong and would soon spill over into our Forums. I know that some will disagree with this policy but remember we are a Woodworking Community not a shopping mall.

[Matt Meiser]

Matt,

Below is a picture of the north entrance to our new 127,000 square foot Student Union. This is what has been consuming all my shop time since April 2004. All 75 of the exterior brick arches on this building are true roman style arches, there is no steel support structure for the arches.

Many more pictures of the inside of the building and all the beautifull woodwork will follow very soon.

What a dump!

Just kidding! That is a beautiful building.

[Phil Clark]

I'm relatively new here and just read this thread. I recently posted the item numbers for 2 ebay completed sales because of the unique items and amazing high prices. The intention was to have others share in the experience of a recent happening, nothing more. I'm still not clear if I violated the policy and would appreciate clarification because I often see out-of-the-ordinary tools sold on ebay that are interesting to collectors. I might also add that there is a way on ebay to view past sales but only for ebay members.

[Lee DeRaud]

Not trying to ruffle anyone's feathers, but...

It's been nine months since this thread was active and the TOS still doesn't mention auctions in general or EBay in particular.

And we've had thousands of new members join since then. I'm guessing that a rather low percentage of them view the neander forum and/or have seen this thread.

[Dave Anderson NH]

Hi Lee,

As you might have noticed from threads on the Support Forum, Keith and Aaron have been pretty busy lately. Getting the new server to take over the SMC load has been a bear with all of the reconfigurations, software upgrades, and associated hassles that always come when new software and hardware are installed. After saying that, you do have a point. The broader problem is that which we all face, we have regular jobs, family obligations, and of course it's nice to have some time to spend in the shop or just viewing and posting to SMC.

About all I can say is that a major rewrite and clarification of the TOS is still in the cards, but we can't promise when.

[David Sizemore]

Hi All...

Just signed up and found this thread. Noticed it has been over a year since a post on the topic, and the TOS is still dated 2003. I have no interest in posting 'auction' links (or any other links, for that matter), but, honestly, how long DOES it take to update the rules?

[John Shuk]

Alot longer than it takes for people who criticize to make a donation of $6.00 and become contributors

[Dave Anderson NH]

Hi David, The revisions of the TOS are partly finished, but many other projects and enhancements to the Creek took priority. Since the original thread was posted our membership has grown by over 200% and new server capacity was purchased, configured, and installed to prevent slowdowns to service. There were also many new forums set up, a major configure and install of the latest Vbulletin board software, and a host of additional prohects doen behind the scenes that aren't at all apparent to either new or older members.

The TOS are being both updated and significantly clarified to remove confursion as to what is and what is not allowed. Patience and forbearance please.

[Mike Cogswell]

<snip>The TOS are being both updated and significantly clarified to remove confusion as to what is and what is not allowed. Patience and forbearance please.

This was written almost five years ago. Since then, in 2011, the TOS was updated. Yet it is still silent on the issue of eBay links. While it is crystal clear that no links to other forums, or any links for commercial purposes, are allowed there is still no reference to eBay in the TOS.

Since I am a relatively new member, I'm just trying to understand the current policy. Is there a blanket prohibition against ANY eBay links or are links that are directly related to a discussion permitted?

[Dave Anderson NH]

Hi Mike,

Links to eBay for any purpose are prohibited. We would like to allow them if they directly answer a question in a post, but unfortunately the shills these days have become more sophisticated and will initiate threads just to be able to insert a link and drive traffic to a particular item to generate bidding and a sale. I don't think most folks on SMC are aware of how much is deleted by the moderator staff that is solely designed to promote websites, products, or auctions. The latest wrinkle is reviving years old threads and then inserting a link to a product or website that might or might not be related to the topic at hand. Mostly when the IP address is checked out we find the offenders originate in Pakistan, the Phillipines, China, Taiwan, India, or somewhere else in Asia.

[Mike Cogswell]

Hi Dave

Thanks for the reply. I understand the policy. I hope you understand why I was confused, since the last message in this thread before I resurrected it was in 2008 and the TOS dated 2011 clearly does NOT have a blanket prohibition against eBay links.

I don't have any issue with the policy, but why not simply include the first eight words of your above reply in the TOS and be done with it once and for all?

Regards

[Keith Outten]

The prohibition involving Ebay links was requested by the Members of this Community when we started the Classifieds Forum....long after SawMill Creek was established. This is why you won't see any direct reference to this rule in our Terms Of Service (TOS).

From our Support Forum - Our Terms of Service clearly states that we allow you to provide a link if it adds to the discussion. This also means that you can't build a discussion around a link for the purpose of financial gain or promotion.

From our Classifieds Forum Rules thread - We do not allow links to ebay in any of our forums.

Revising our TOS is not as simple a matter as you would expect. The rules here were written in a very specific manner which allows our Staff the flexibility necessary to manage our Community without ten thousand individual rules. We have provided some clarification of the TOS in our Support Forum via a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) thread. There are also supplemental rules in various Forums that are Sticky Threads, these provide rules that are specific to each particular Forum.

Our Moderators have performed a comprehensive review of our TOS and have provided me with a list of proposed changes. I agree with almost every one of the suggested changes, the problem I have is that I don't want to have a comprehensive list of rules that make things more complicated than I feel they need to be. We all know that there is a large percentage of our Community who have never read our Terms Of Service, even though they agreed to abide by the rules when they registered. Imagine if everyone here was required to read fifty pages of very detailed rules, it would never happen. Honestly there isn't any way that I could memorize such a document much less expect over 70,000 people to read and comprehend such a thing.

After ten years of managing SawMill Creek I can tell you that the range of problems we have had to deal with has been mind boggling. The way our TOS is written provides us with the necessary flexibility to apply the rules, as fairly as possible while preserving the intent and our ability to interpret how the rules apply, to just about any situation.

We do need to complete the revision of our TOS at some point in time. The task has not been given a high priority by me simply because the existing rules have served us well for ten years and there are so many other things that needed to be done over the last few years. The strain of working a day job, running my own sign shop and being the Administrator here has taken its toll so I recently retired from Christopher Newport University. Now that I am down to just two full time jobs there will be a little more time to get things done but there will never be enough time or funds to implement all of the things that we would like to do here.

Remember that SawMill Creek is a subsidiary of Northwind Associates Inc. which is my sign business. Sign Business means I already have a full plate marketing, bidding, fabricating, installing and a host of other normal business activities. Now that I am self-employed again I have to step up the pace in my sign shop once again so I can pay the light bill and buy some food every week
.

[Jim Davis]

Mark, maybe you answered your own question: "Anything worth taking seriously is worth making fun of!"