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Content policy
By uploading or submitting any materials to us, you automatically:grant us the non-exclusive right to retain or delete any of your own work that you post on Cafésaxophone (e.g. text, music, images, video etc.). We also have the right to republish or quote that content on our other sites or on social media, provided that we credit the authorship. You will retain the overall copyright outside of these terms.
TL;DR cafe moderation may delete, move, edit and retain. Apart from deletions due to spammers, scammers, shills and trolls (or other nefarious actors) we only do this either to make the content more organised and/or meaningful, or to help with SEO. We do not own your content or sell it on.
So who actually owns the content?
The rule above basically means that you absolutely retain your normal copyright in your words and media, but we have the right to use it here on the forum and our other sites with credit. We have the right to edit, delete it or keep it. This is basically the same as nearly every other forum I know of.You don't have the right to have all your uploaded content deleted, however we do often comply with (polite) requests to delete things if it doesn't harm the site.
If you write a tutorial on making cork grease with some photos you took and post it here, you still retain the copyright in that tutorial and those photos. It's just that we retain the right to keep that post here or to republish it on TamingTheSaxophone with a credit to you. I'd probably ask permission though. We do not have the right to sell it to anyone else.
NB: This is not about your personal info, ie stuff in your profile, email etc. as that is covered in our privacy policy and your rights under GDPR. This is about your own original content, ie words in posts and files that you upload.
How it all works in practice
We use a couple of acronyms/terms to explain:- UGC (User Generated Content) This is a term used in regard to websites in general and means stuff uploaded by members.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). This basically means what we do regarding the site to help it be well discoverebale by people via serach engines, getting our pages to show higher up the list of search results.
- Curating. This is the general organisation of UGC, which we do to make things more readable and better for SEO.
A quick note about SEO.
Google may penalise "thin" or irrelevant content. The policy may change from time to time but AFAIK penalise can mean a strike against your site in general, but more usually just means not indexing the posts, or indexing with a very low priority. Google likes well written, well structured, informative and focussed articles relevant to the title, heading and subheadings. Anyone who writes their own website can follow those parameters, but when we have a lot of UGC it is not possible. However we do some curating to get as good as we can.Google may also penalise duplicate or near duplicate content, or content that people don't stay reading for very long. (aka unengaging content)
It has been speculated that recently Google looks less and less kindly on UGC. I don't know how true that is, however we continue to do what we can to mitigate potential SEO issues due to UGC, along with some limitations of the software in how UGC is presented to Google.
Moving posts / merging threads
- We may move threads that are started in the wrong forum. e.g. we get a lot of saxophone questions in the Doorbell or Breakfastroom that need to be moved so they get found in the right forum. Furthermore Google does not index the Doorbell forum.
- Two or more threads about the same topic may get merged. Google sees one big (better) thread instead of two smaller ones that may be seen as near duplicate. If you start a thread about a topic that already exists, by merging the post/s then all the people interested in that topic who may already be watching the already existing one, will get an alert about your question. They may have new information about making cork grease.
- When it is beneficial for SEO, off topic posts may be moved. If they are in the Breakfastroom or Doorbell, we will often leave them as this does not adversely affect SEO. However in saxophone or music topics, a single OT post may be left, but if it starts off what could be useful as a whole new thread in itself we may create a new thread from those posts. This is to help with SEO as too much OT in a thread can get the thread deindexed or rank lower.
- For example if we are talking about making your own cork grease and somebody mentions lanolin that is obviously fine. But then there may be some OT banter, e.g. someone says I bought some lanolin it was quite sheep. Then someone responds that was a baaahgain. And the next reply is at least ewe weren't ripped off. We like that kind of humour but Google doesn't (it likes focussed informational content for search enquires) so we'd move it to its own thread Sheep Puns. This helps the Cafe survive in difficult times.
Editing posts.
User editing ability expires after about 20 minutes. This means you can fix typos which for some mysterious reason often aren't obvious in the editor as you compose, but become obvious once you've posted. Why not allow longer? This is because in the past we had people edit out so many of their posts that various threads become nonsensical. Subscribers get a bit longer.- We may edit obvious typos
- We may remove or label broken links
- We may edit titles, especially in information threads. It makes no sense have the title "A quick question," and then ask about making your own cork grease. We would change that to "How do I make my own cork grease" This helps the expert in making cork grease find a question they might not otherwise find. This is for general useability and SEO. (NB: Google does give weight to words/phrases specifically in titles).
Deleting posts/threads
- For obvious reasons we delete posts that are offensive, trolling or inflammatory. Sometimes they get quoted or referred to before we get to delete them so we also delete those posts (collateral). The same applies to commercial posts made without permission, or any posts that might cause a conflict with our affiliates.
- We delete useless posts or threads. For example if someone posts a link to their sound clip on Youtube but then removes the sound clip, that is a useless post (also against the rules!). If someone took the time to respond before the sound clip was removed then sadly it becomes a useless thread and usually the entire thread is deleted (we explain and apologise to the people who responded on behalf of the OP). These are particularly bad for SEO due to Google's engagement algorithm. Google knows when someone clicks on something they find in a search. Google notes how long they were "engaged" with that page before clicking off it. So if someone clicks on a link to listen to your sound clip, but it's gone, they will click straight back to Google and we get a bad mark from Google for unengaging content.
- We may delete very short +1 type posts - the post reactions(likes etc.) are there to show your agreement or appreciation for a post. This is mainly for SEO reasons.
- If a question gets no answers we may delete that if it has been sitting there for many years. This is thin content that just sits there doing nothing. Even if someone finds that question on Google and wants to know the answer, they click on it, find no answer and click back off of it. As above - bad mark for unengaging content.
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