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Could I add raincoaster as an Author

  1. alexandriablog
    Member

    Under the WordPress.com TOS advertising restrictions, would I be allowed to add <b>raincoaster</b> as an Author?

    The reason I as is that previously I have had Authors whose own blogs promoted their various commercial interests, one social media marketing like raincoaster, the other real estate. I was extremely strict, perhaps in hindsight now overly so, about them making posts into my blog that directly promoted their personal expertise in their respective interests.

    I see now from the raincoaster example that each of them could easily have maintained their respective blogs on WordPress.com without being in violation of the WordPress.com TOS..

    What remains unclear to me is that, if they had blogs promoting commercial interests as raincoaster's does and they posted their own blog material - in its first person form perfectly WorPress.com acceptable - into my blog as my Authors, does my now third-party relationship to their self-promotion create the trigger that violates the WordPress.com TOS?

    I receive no compensation of any sort from any of my Authors.

    Again, does my third-party blog relationship create a violation that would not exist in direct first-party blog form?

    Thanks in advance.

    The blog I need help with is aleksandreia.wordpress.com.

  2. raincoaster
    Member

    Not without paying me, you couldn't.

    And I don't DO social media marketing: I do social media strategy and training. Perhaps I need to update my site!

    It sounds like you and your authors should be okay, but to be absolutely sure, contact staff and ask.

  3. teamoyeniyi
    Member

    I was waiting for this...........

  4. raincoaster
    Member

    You can count on me.

  5. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    I don't see anything wrong with that necessarily. As long as you aren't making money in exchange for advertising a product or service that is not yours (or the author's).

    As for directly adding raincoaster as an author without her consent, that's why we switched to an invitation system from the old direct add system. ;)

  6. raincoaster
    Member

    Make me an offer, though. Always open to offers as long as they have at least three zeros in them.

  7. thesacredpath
    Member

    $0.00?

  8. raincoaster
    Member

    To the LEFT of the decimal place. Jeez, do I hafta spell EVERYTHING out for you people?

  9. thesacredpath
    Member

    $000.00?

    I think that is quite generous. You got 5 instead of 3.

  10. raincoaster
    Member

    Sorry to lay this on you but...

    you sound like a typical US banker.

    http://www.vanityfair.com/archive/bailout

  11. tandava108
    Member

    $000.00?

    I think that is quite generous. You got 5 instead of 3.

    I'll double that offer ;-)

  12. thesacredpath
    Member

    Not quite. With US bankers, you would have had to pay them.

  13. thesacredpath
    Member

    And there you go raincoaster, we have a bidding war.

  14. raincoaster
    Member

    Awesome.

  15. teamoyeniyi
    Member

    I LOVE THIS!!!!!

  16. alexandriablog
    Member

    Thank you all, particularly macmanx:

    I don't see anything wrong with that necessarily. As long as you aren't making money in exchange for advertising a product or service that is not yours (or the author's).

    Humor aside, I do trust everyone understands I mentioned raincoaster only because she offered an unequivocal illustration of the type of Author I was referring to.

    To reiterate, then, just to be sure the definitive answer wasn't lost somewhere in the humor, again, my blog is a compendium of Authors of many opinions, many with blogs of their own. I receive no money from anyone, nor do any of them receive any money from me.

    The Author I had in question, though, is really quite similar to raincoaster, like raincoaster a paid social media strategist and trainer, who, on her own blog often posted teaser "tip" posts on how she could help clients with social media. Such posts, while completely informative in themselves, were also obviously designed to induce potential clients to hire her for more complex and complete solutions to their respective social media needs.

    As I am understanding macmanx now, were she to mirror such an informative post as I have just described above into my blog alongside all the other posts mirrored there - recipes, political screeds, reminiscences, whatever - no TOS advertising violation would exist because

    - on her own blog, like raincoaster, any commercial revenues my Author reaps are solely from her own first-person marketing efforts; and

    - though she may carry forward elements advertising her first-person commercial activity on her own blog into mine via posts she mirrors, still no TOS violation occurs because a) I am not profiting from her, and so b) neither of us is profiting from third-party commercial advertising activity

    If this exhausts the question and the answer remains that there is no TOS violation under the scenario described, I understand now, I thank you all for your responses, and I am done.

    If it somehow does not, if any of the nuances I was trying to clarify somehow went astray in the humor, I would obviously be interested in further clarification if there is any to be had.

  17. raincoaster
    Member

    Why do I suddenly feel like I need a de-lousing?

  18. raincoaster
    Member

    I don't see how my situation is analogous to yours. I'm not a contributor to ANY group blogs whatsoever. If you wish to pull bloggers out of your ass, why me?

  19. raincoaster
    Member

    Oh, and "mirrored" posts are a whole other issue. Staff have requested that when blogs here "mirror" other blogs, that they be set to private or face suspension. That's a serious issue.

    If you're going to get people to contribute to your blog, get them to contribute original material.

  20. alexandriablog
    Member

    Oh, and "mirrored" posts are a whole other issue. Staff have requested that when blogs here "mirror" other blogs, that they be set to private or face suspension. That's a serious issue.

    If you're going to get people to contribute to your blog, get them to contribute original material.

    This seems counterintuitive to me, raincoaster. Every Blogger or Typepad post, even an existing WordPress.com post,one of my Authors reprints into my blog for our group readership becomes a fresh platform Matt can now place advertising on and reap revenue from which he would otherwise never have access to, at least not with respect to foreign hosts, not to mention the possibility that WordPress.com might entice any such poster to switch platforms to WordPress.com, thus enabling the potential purchase of premium blogging services as well.

    Are you sure you are understanding this situation correctly? You misunderstood above that you were analogous to my prior Author in the type of blogging you do, not to me.

    I never saw anything remotely referencing non-original content voluntarily supplied by the content's authors in the TOS, so I must respectfully defer to macmanx or others similarly empowered on this matter also.

  21. auxclass
    Member

    "Mirroring" entire Posts can get a blog suspended - WordPress.COM likes original content not cut and past from somewhere else - seen lots of "mirrored" things suspended.

    If you want to feature information from another blog, use an excerpt or just the first paragraph or your own words about why the whole article should be read with a link to the original article.

  22. alexandriablog
    Member

    To clarify once again, auxclass, mine is a multi-author blog, all the content save mine is the intellectual property of the respective Authors, and I myself do no mirroring of any content.

    There are two reasons I would respectfully still like to see a ruling from Staff citing a specific TOS provision prohibiting my Authors posting content they wholly own into my blog.

    First, after four years now and multiple Staff reviews of me and my blog, the issue has only now been initially raised as an addendum following raincoaster's belated comment "Why do I suddenly feel I need a de-lousing?", followed itself by an obvious misunderstanding, leaving the mirroring issue questionable in my mind from a standpoint both of intent and validity.

    Second, and more importantly it seems to me, such a policy if applied with any consistency at all would prevent any person from republishing any material they previously published on any other blog, including a previous WordPress.com blog, into a new WordPress.com blog. Again, this sounds to me wildly counterintuitive and counter to any WordPress.com business strategy otherwise desiring to build a content base upon which to place paid advertising and into which to attempt to sell paid premium services.

    This obviously doesn't mean that WordPress.com cannot do whatever they wish with any blog they wish for any stated reason they wish, only that doing so does not yet appear to me to be supported by any logic or any written policy I am so far aware of.

    So, again, I welcome a definitive Staff ruling, ideally rather than arbitrarily applied to my blog based on an existing written WordPress.com policy prohibiting bloggers from republishing their own material into a WordPress.com blog.

  23. tandava108
    Member

    @alexandriablog
    If you want to do so many unusual things you might be better of self-hosting. A lot of what is allowed on WordPress is common sense. A small blog with a little ovelap with others would be OK, but if at some point it started to look like a central advertising hub for people's services then you could find yourself suspended.

    Also you are responsible for the content that all your authors post. If a particular author broke your rules the blog could be disabled - though I'm sure the'd enable it again if you removed the content and moderated that author in future.

  24. alexandriablog
    Member

    @tandava108

    Thanks for your concern, and it has become obvious now that many things about my blog are being misunderstood, so let me clarify for any needing it.

    I initiated this post above because I was thinking of inviting back my prior Author Angelique who posted about half her time on social media and writing and about half on her horses and equestrian interests, the latter now also an interest of another Author of mine who is also a homeschooler. I wished to clarify the policy macmanx clarified for us above so that I could tell her what I knew, not merely what I imagined or supposed. In four years the only other Author whose postings would be relevant to the policy discussed above was a nationally syndicated real estate writer whose posts were quite germane during the aftermath of the real estate collapse.

    Otherwise all of the rest of my Authors have all been non-commercially all over the map, some with blogs, some not, from young to old, of every political and religious stripe and every profession, from physicians and lawyers to international stage hands and the unemployed.

    They all come together in one conversational "city" where their various perspectives are no longer Balkanized or stovepiped one from another, and in the process what comes to be distilled from their interaction is the common humanity of all of them.

    The WordPress.com TOS is prominently cited as the final arbiter of all content, and when on the rare occasion despite my monitoring I have been advised by Staff of a DMCA complaint lodged against a post it has been immediately removed.

    Again, I was seeking the definitive clarification I was seeking above as much to retroactively apologize to her for my having, merely on the basis of my own vague fears, unnecessarily critiqued and restricted her ability to post previously as I was to determine what I should definitively tell her if she were to accept an invitation to rejoin my blog. If, on the other hand, macmanx had decided differently, if it were the case that neither Angelique nor raincoaster could respectively post about social media strategy and their expertise in it, categorically eliminating such Authors from consideration would present no problem.

  25. macmanx
    Happiness Engineer

    It's perfectly fine if you have other authors on your blog posting new and original content.

    As already mentioned, duplicating content continuously is no good, and also seriously damages the search engine ranking of the original post and duplicate post.

  26. timethief
    Member

    Here's a reference link to Google's entry on duplicate content. Also note that the Panda update to the algorithm is in effect and it is designed to detect duplicate content. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/04/high-quality-sites-algorithm-goes.html

  27. justjennifer
    Member

    As for directly adding raincoaster as an author without her consent, that's why we switched to an invitation system from the old direct add system. ;)

    And I'm also glad to see the flip side of that equation; an author can also leave a multi-author blog without jumping through hoops as it appears as one of the options under the "Manage Blogs" page. Bravo!

  28. alexandriablog
    Member

    @macmanx,

    Thanks again for your definitive input on both of these issues.

    @timethief, et al. While I'm sure some of my Authors have some interest in SEO, none seem to be ruled by it as far as I can tell, and those who join my blog fairly obviously do so overwhelmingly for the direct interaction with other peer Authors, even others who may disagree with them, than for any other reason. By that same token, those bloggers whose overriding interest is the SEO maximization of their unique content pursue that overwhelmingly instead of the off-the-beaten-path extra-Googlish social experience my little blog offers, and so I am highly unlikely to ever have one as an Author.

  29. raincoaster
    Member

    Staff were very clear in this thread: original material is welcome. Duplicated material, no matter who wrote it, is not. It can put your blog at risk of suspension.

  30. timethief
    Member

    @alexandriablog
    Let's cut through all this extranoeus blah, blah, blah. There is most assuredly duplicate content on your blog. Here's just a single example:
    Angelique published this post Protect your Facebook account from hackers! on your blog and at the end of that post stated: Please post your questions and comments about this subject!
    [ Shortlink: ___ ] I removed the link because that's a duplicate content post that was published elsewhere.

    I also note you have a page for authors that states:

    Authors are expected to contribute a post of any sort, original or mirrored, within the first seven (7) days of being installed in Alexandria and thereafter to contribute a minimum of one post, of any sort, original or mirrored, every thirty (30) days; however, a mere link alone to external material without a reasonable amount of substantiating elaboration or commentary in Alexandria, while more than welcome as whatever content it may provide, in all fairness to your fellow Authors cannot be counted toward these minimums just mentioned.

    So let's please cut the guff and note what Staff ie macmanx has stated:
    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/could-i-add-raincoaster-as-an-author?replies=29#post-754049

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