Ok, I got suspended for "quoting an article word for word". Sorry, was not aware that you weren't allowed to do that. I spent time searching for the most suitable web article and posted it. I think most people in this forum posses the ability to reword an article. Personally, I find it a waste of time and my intellectual properties, but I guess I may need to reform that mindset. In my oppinon, the article deserved a more professional definition then what I could offer. I wonder if I used quotes that would make a difference. Also, I have seen other posts that were "quoted word for word", approximately makeing up 90-95% of the article.
Anyways, the e-mail sent to me said that my web hosting account has been suspended. I don't have a webhosting accounting yet, so does this even effect me? If so, how long will it be till im unsuspended??

We don't suspend people for just quoting/copying. We don't send out emails about being suspended. You may wish to extract the email headers and forward those to NilsC through pm. And if you are not hosted, then your account can't be suspended. This is just a spam, scam. We are trying to figure out why and how exactly this happens. But that is the very reason we stopped sending out emails about suspending.

The reason we react this way on copying or quoting entire articles is because it usually makes a long post worth a lot of credits, which is severly abused. The point is that you earn those credits, not by copying someone else's words. I too use quotes from sites at times, but don't copy entire articles, just a few sentences and then comment. And I always provide a link back to the original article. Or do it like this "I've read in an article (link to article) that so and so on". If you see posts that are copied, you can report them if you want to. We try to 'catch' most, but we're not perfect nor can we read every single post here.

Ok, thanks alot! You've been realy helpful. I'll definitely PM that administrator about the e-mail. *note* I was worried for a moment. I know understand why you don't approve of mass direct quoting. Im not use to a system where you get more points for a longer posts. Anyways, thanks for the quick response.

See, for copied posts, when we do the credit adjustments - it works fine for hosted members. The system calculates the credits he might have got for this post and deducts a suitable amount from the hosting credits. But for non-hosted members this goes complete bonkers and sets the value to somewhere in the -12800.xx range. But that doesn't affect the members account in any way other than showing up as an ugly figure right on top of the page.



lloyd - if you see such posts - you should bring it to the notice of the mods. There' a button named "REPORT" on the left hand corner below each post. Use that button wisely. It's not always humanly possible to keep track of all such posts even with a great team of dedicated mods working in here. Slipups do happen. It's not entirely true that you can't put in parts of copied articles in here - but you cannot simply copy the whole article or combine 2-3 different articles and put them in here. The rule is that whenever you're quoting some part of an article word-to-word, use the QUOTE tags to enclose that part, and add in a "Source: <URL>" line at the bottom before the closing /QUOTE tag. This way the credit systems knows that it's a quoted part and credits are alloted accordingly.

Other than that, if you learned some new concept or wish to talk about any topic that fits into our forums, you are always free to do your research and come up with an article, a good part of which consists of material written or rephrased by you (from your understanding) - and the rest can be quoted stuff (only if you're using these quoted para's to enhance the flow of the article)...

Best Regards

Sorry, You got the suspended mail by mistake. It was a bug. I just corrected my script. Thanks for pointing it out.