Site Content Policy

[Badger]

Site Content Policy

Over the last several months, we've received a number of communications from members who have donated articles, pictures, videos and other content to the site, either in the form of posts and threads within individual forums, or formal articles published in the Milsurp Knowledge Library. We've also started receiving emails from members who visit other sites complaining about various forms of outright plagiarism.

Essentially, they've indicated they've run across various types of content (including their own), often directly cut-n-pasted on other sites within posts in a complete or partially extracted format. Some examples have been fairly extreme and absent of basic courtesy in crediting the author, or even a simple link to his work posted here. As a result, they've asked us to clarify our policy on the content which they've donated and advise all of our membership accordingly.

The Military Surplus Collectors Forums is designed to encourage the open exchange of information amongst the general military surplus collector community, thereby helping everyone to better enjoy their chosen hobby. The site is open to anyone who takes the time to Register and agrees to follow a simple set of Site Rules. Access to all on-line research libraries and most forums is provided completely free, although some Contributing Members have graciously chosen to voluntarily donate a nominal amount of money, to help defray several thousand dollars in annual system bandwidth, server, disk storage and maintenance costs. We do appreciate their assistance, which enables us to maintain a fast dedicated host server attached to high network bandwidth, guaranteeing excellent performance under heavy user loads and minimizing traffic delays.

We recognize that the Internet is an open and highly dynamic environment, where information in all forms is cut-n-pasted regularly from one site to another. People generally do this to either sincerely help answer questions from other posters in similar forums, or sometimes using that information to simply enhance their own personal stature within a community. Fortunately, the latter is a rare occurrence, but we've all seen it over the years.

Our policy position on this practice which we believe is both fair and equitable to all parties, is very simple.

The Military Surplus Collectors Forums and its content contributors encourage the open sharing of information across the Internet. On behalf of contributors and the site ownership, we ask only that any of our members who cut-n-paste information on other sites, please maintain the information in its original context and format, observing one basic rule of courtesy. If complete or partial contents of posts and threads from within individual forums, or formal articles from the MKL (Milsurp Knowledge Library) are posted elsewhere, then please provide clear references crediting the author(s) and their original material, as well as provide a web link back to the source post, thread or MKL article here on the Military Surplus Collectors Forums web site.

We have asked our content providers and other members, to advise us if they feel their are any examples of their contributions being cut-n-pasted inappropriately elsewhere by our members, in clear violation of this joint policy established to protect the integrity, accuracy, completeness and relative date currency of their original content. Those members will be requested to follow this joint policy and if they fail to do so, they may have their access privileges to this site revoked.

Thanks to everyone who requested clarification as to our site policy in regards to site content and also those contributors who helped develop this basic policy statement.

If anyone has any questions, please don't hesitate to send me an email at badger@milsurps.com.

Regards,
Doug

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