Forum Moderators and Rules/Guidelines

[Ghost]

I must admit that for me this raises a bit of an eyebrow. I'm surprised that both of you got this position.

Congratulations to both of you regardless.

If Ghost has enough guts to post that comment without having to put "no offence", I'm gonna poke for further inquiry. (I didn't realize that Ghost has been here over a year though when I posted, but I'm not gonna hit delete...) I was concerned about potential 'office politics' or maybe social disputes though doing it on my own.

Before anyone jumps the gun, I was trying to imply that I thought the choices were odd. Acorn and Nova I think will do just fine and I think they're excellent additions. They were unexpected, so to me there were odd choices. This doesn't mean that they are bad choices. I was just really surprised that Acorn & Novacain became mods, that's all.

I didn't feel like I was insulting anyone, and I wasn't. So I didn't feel the need to say "no offense" FYI. I apologize for the attitude I just don't feel like I should have to explain myself.

[AprilSeven]

@Takiko

Not sure how long you've been familiar with "ABO" but there are a quite a few folks who have been members here pretty much since the beginning. We've had things to deal with here, as I am sure you'll see on any forum, but overall it's a peaceful, friendly place with lots of ongoing conversation, games, role play and other activities.

Over the past year we've had some change-over in members who serve as moderators - for the first time since the forum was created, as I understand it. That's actually a testiment to the people involved, and when you consider that this is an international site, with members ranging from children to senior citizens, that's quite a broad audience to serve.

I've been a mod for almost a year, and was really surprised when I was asked to join. But it turns out there are always people being considered for the moderation team because at any time our lives might require we step away from the job of making sure ABO is running as smoothly as possible, and we'll need to bring new people on board. That's not to cite certain members as "favorites" - just as someone leaving the "mod squad" doesn't mean there's any kind of "problem."

As a group, we're not looking to "go after" people - quite the opposite. We tend to take part in all the serious and silly things that go on here, but we work to keep our forum free from spam, and content that is illegal, inflammatory, distasteful and downright .

Actually we're really proud of the active members here - many of them "moderate" the forum on their own, because there is a real sense of ownership by all. It's our little Astro Boy haven, and we all contribute to its well being.

That said, being a moderator means you really need to make an effort to read what's happening here - even if it's not a thread you might read as a regular member. When things go wrong - like when the site goes down - there's communication back and forth. It's a responsibility, like anything else you volunteer for. It takes time and effort, and yes, it can be tiring. See retired mod Jeffbert's little :d evil: - bless him, he worked round the clock for many, many years! It's harder work than you might imagine, but it feels really good to give back to Dr. Tezuka in this way!

Hope that gives you a better idea of what goes on here. No big, burning secrets or drama. Just hard working fans!

[MightyAstro]

Congratulations to littleacorn and Novacain. And Happy New Year to everybody at ABO if I haven't said so already.

[jeffbert]

April, your inbox is full!

[AprilSeven]

yaaaah I've been BUSYBUSYBUSY! I just made some room. Thanks Jeffbert!

[Astro Forever]

Hello everyone! Here are informations on various topics that we felt we should share!

Banned members
We make all our possible to avoid banning members. But let's face it: some people are jerks, and when we have jerks causing troubles and refusing to calm down, the only viable solution is to ban them. While we always do our possible to explain them, you may have noticed that many members are banned right after registration, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Obviously, we don't try to reason with them, sometimes don't even wait for them to post. Those however aren't real users, they are spambots. We have ways to spot them even before they post, thus the speedy bans.

Deleting accounts
Requests to delete an account will not be granted.

Copyrights
Copyrights are a tough topic. We would really want to just let you share whatever you want, but there are two problems to consider. First, obviously, when you share Astro Boy episodes, you don't pay for them. Tezuka Production needs the money, so it wouldn't be fair to cheat them of their hard-earned cash. Second, and this is why we are starting to be much more strict, is because copyright laws are becoming extremely strict themselves. You may have heard of the SOPA. This is an USA set of laws designed to criple copyright infrigements. Basically, when a website is found to infringe on copyrights, it is shut down at DNS level, which means that it becomes impossible to find it world wide. You understood correctly: this law will be applied world wide despite being from USA only, because the USA control the DNS system. So even if a server is located in Australia, it can be cut off the Internet by this law. At any moment, someone finding illicit material can request the website to be shut down. This may happen without a proper trial, even without notification. So we may simply discover one day that http://www.astroboy-online.com has ceased to exist, without even knowing what link caused that.

For this reason, we came up with these guidelines:

[FONT="Comic Sans MS"]We need YOUR help to keep ABO "Legit" by not posting certain kinds of links![/FONT]

Many of us have enjoyed episodes, trailers, movies, AMVs, etc. that feature content directly out of actual anime by Tezuka and others. What you might not realize is that much of this is, unfortunately, in violation of copyright laws.

So even though we dearly love Astro and the rest of Tezuka's 'Star System' we need to learn what is and is NOT acceptable to post on Astroboy Online. If we remain "relaxed" about content that is copyrighted, we could face serious penalties - or be shut down altogether!

- "Nooooooooo!!"

As you can see, Astro is NOT happy about this!

Here's what we can NOT do anymore:

• Don't post links to download or watch any anime episode, television show, movie, manga, or music video (even if it's on something like YouTube)
  
• Don't post an invitation to members to contact you for information on how to access these kinds of links
  
• Don't post a link to another site where visitors can readily find these kinds of links.
  
• At this point, don't post links to anime, movies, manga, etc. at a foreign-language location (such as Japanese or Korean).

Now for the Good News - Here's what we can continue to openly share:

• Our own fan fiction, artwork, AMVs, videos, etc. (just not using a significant amount of content from Tezuka's original work - any doubts, just contact a moderator). Songs are allowed in AMVs.
  
• Links to an excerpt (about 10% or less) of a show, a movie, an episode, etc. This falls under "fair use".
  
• The contests can continue - we might have to eliminate links to music videos, but that doesn't mean you can't enter the name of the song and artist.
  
• Links to legal streaming sites such as Crunchyroll or Hulu

How you can help

• This is a HUGE undertaking, and we are asking every ABO member to be a good steward of our forum by helping each other understand what we need to keep off of the site, and if you spot something that should maybe not be posted, just contact a moderator and we'll check it out.
  
• The best thing we can do is let Tezuka Productions know how we feel about the lack of readily available anime/manga outside of Asia. If they give us access to more material, we all win!
  
• Please understand this isn't a fun thing to implement, and is going to be a great deal of work, but we've got a lot of bright, creative and fun-loving people here on ABO, and we're confident you'll all work with us to protect our special corner of cyberspace!

Any questions - simply contact one of your friendly moderators!

- I wanna be a mod!!

- Yeah, that'll work; you and Spider!

The rules page will be updated soon to reflet these guidelines. This is not that different to what we had been doing in the past months, but hopefully it will prevent confusion!

[jeffbert]

I must ask this, what about images taken from programs, such as the threads I post about episodes? I know it is at best a gray area, but the few frames with some text DO give more than just the basic synopsis of the episode. Sometimes I lose track of common sense limits I ought to observe, & post far more images than I initially intended. irate:

[Satus]

This is very informative, thanks Astro Forever.

If I recall, using an image of lower quality than the original (smaller, more jpeg compression, etc), for something like a review or to educate, counts as fair use. So a summary with a few images might be okay? But threads like the "All 2003 screen shots" thread are probably pushing it.

[Astro Forever]

The reason why we took so long to come up with these rules had something to do with questions like these! We thought of the screehshots, but we couldn't conclude that we had too many.

I should have added that these rules were subject to change. If we feel something puts us at risk, we'll address it, and if we feel we can allow some things, we'll be happy to let you know!

[MightyAstro]

Just one little question I thought of now.

Is it true that it's impossible to put a moderator on your ignore list? Only curious. I'd never try it myself even to find out. Certainly I have no reason to put anybody on ignore let alone a mod. Everybody's so nice here.