Star Trek Continues - Kickstarter Campaign
- Thread starter feek61
- Start date
As we do with all Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and other crowd funding announcements, TrekBBS members are reminded to please abide by our board's policies regarding soliciting:
"Do not attempt to solicit other BBS members: posting to sell or endorse a product or web site will not be permitted."
(Find all the rules over at our FAQ page.)
"Do not attempt to solicit other BBS members: posting to sell or endorse a product or web site will not be permitted."
(Find all the rules over at our FAQ page.)
He doesn't know. Heck, "endorse a product" is also "The new Star Trek film was great, go watch it in cinemas/buy the blu rays!". No difference to "Hey, that fanfilm is great, go support it!" whatsoever.
The answer is: the above post was indeed unacceptable and had to be edited.
I think what you are missing, Alec, is that the original post was unacceptable and was edited before you ever saw it. The hypertext link that was provided in the post that linked directly to Continues’ Kickstarter campaign page has been deleted from the post. TrekBBS readers will now have to do some hunting on their own if they want to contribute to this fan production’s crowdfunding campaign.
The instructions provided to the TrekBBS moderators might be of some value (although take them with a grain of salt):
"You are responsible for making sure that no posts made in your forum violate the TrekBBS Rules. You were chosen as a moderator because you are the epitome of a good poster: you have shown a strong interest in discussion here and know how to conduct yourself maturely....You can edit any post in your forum in the same manner as you'd edit one of your own. You should never delete posts or threads unless REALLY necessary: an edit is ALWAYS better than a delete."
So, rather than deleting the post in its entirety, the hypertext link contained in the post was simply removed.
It always has been a bit of a challenge figuring how to interpret the intent of the newest of our TrekBBS rules:
"Do not attempt to solicit other BBS members: posting to sell or endorse a product or web site will not be permitted."
No selling? Sure—we get that: members were posting “Buy my book!” or “Buy my artwork!” or “Buy my prop reproductions!” So the “no soliciting” rule was added to the official board rules to prevent people from simply hawking their products. But then along came crowdfunding—to which the Fan Productions board is particularly susceptible. Are Kickstarter campaign announcements such prohibited “solicitations?” How about “I’ve seen early visual effects from Axanar, and I’d like to endorse that production?” Is that endorsement prohibited?
So, as policemen who enforce the forum rules (rather than as legislators who create those rules), we do the best we can. Unless and until we get better instructions on the dichotomy between solicitations for crowdfunding campaigns and the instructions to us moderators that “an edit is ALWAYS better than a delete,” I think the “line that should not be crossed” that you are looking for is, at least for the time being, providing a direct hypertext link to a crowdfunding campaign.
But your input on how the “Do not attempt to solicit other BBS members: posting to sell or endorse a product or web site will not be permitted" rule should best be enforced by the moderation team is welcome over on the TrekBBS “Questions, Suggestions & Feedback” board. (That would also be the place to make any recommendation regarding the development of a crowdfunding-specific clarifying rule for the TrekBBS forum.)
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GSchnitzer , thanks for the clarification. Most of us have links in our signatures that could be viewed as solicitations. I get more than a few visitors at Star Trek Reviewed from my postings here... although not as many as I get from the search engines or Facebook. I have no idea if they are people checking their own listings to see if I have been accurate or would-be fan film viewers and audio drama listeners who want a more complete listing... I only know this is the place they were before they came over.
I think you're right, Maurice. The "here's a link to our crowdfunding campaign" posts will start to push out any other content.
People are always welcome to reach thousands of TrekBBS members and visitors and inform them about new crowdfunding campaigns by purchasing an ad on the forum. Otherwise the forum just devolves into free advertising space--and then people get disenchanted with the forum's content and start to abandon it.
I like this, given the nature of this sub-forum it makes a lot of sense to keep the crowdfunding posts here, but putting them all in one thread would keep them out of the way and keep people in the loop.
You could end up with a lot of those posts very quickly.
Create a class of TrekBBS user called "Sponsor" and have that type of member pay a small (but not non-zero) annual fee to be a member. Then only allow sponsors to post threads like this, and only in approved areas (e.g., the subforum idea). This is what my HOA community forum did, and it works great--sponsors get to hawk their wares, which regular users can seek out if they wish, but the ads (and that's essentially what those posts are--ads) don't overrun the forum, and TrekBBS makes a little money to offset hosting costs. Win win win.
Or we could just simply say no solicitations, and kick-ban violators for three days.
I don't think banning someone for 3 days for posting about a fan-film fundraiser is appropriate. When people make posts like that, they are just trying to help filmmakers out. People shouldn't be punished for good intentions. The best thing to do is to close the thread whenever this happens, and for the Moderator to message the person who posted the thread about why it was closed, so it doesn't happen again.
I could go with that, but I think a deletion of the thread or at the very least its contents should be included. You want to stop it, then stop it.
