[Admin Note] Rules clarification - posting text of outside articles is encouraged

[SuperSleeper]

We have amended the Apnea Board Rules to include the following recommendation for our members:

13. Internet links sometimes change or are lost over time. When posting a link to an off-site article, we encourage members to copy or quote either the full text or the relevant portions of that article into forum posts. Apnea Board is an educational website and re-posting the text of articles, manuals, news and information is deemed "Fair Use" under U.S. copyright law.

Thanks to our Advisory Members for helping devise this clarification. If anyone has questions, please ask.

[Sleeprider]

Supersleeper, I have had lots of formatting problems when copying articles, or relevant portions of them. In some forums, the links come along for the ride, but here, they are all reset to plain text. That means copying an article can involve a lot of editing to restore important links and images. I presume this is a software issue where PHP does not play nice with links. If you have any tips to make it easier, I'm all ears.

[SuperSleeper]

Most articles, news items & blog entries that people reference here don't need the links or images to get the main idea of the article across. The plain text of the quoted article is usually sufficient.

For the few that do have a lot of essential links and/or images, we're not asking folks to re-post every link and every image from the original article. Rather, we're saying it's best to either re-post the actual text of the article (if it's not too long) or at least the relevant portions of that article, along with a link to the original article (in case someone wants to read it from the actual source).

When pasting articles, our software pastes it as plain text for a reason. To allow HTML or any other computer code into forum posts is a real easy way to introduce malicious code into our forum, which is why we disallow that (to protect our members from viruses and malware).

Members are free to edit their plain-text quotes of articles with the existing BB formatting code that's available when writing a post (using the formatting options that are at the top of every post that is being created or edited).

Hope that answered your questions - if not let me know.