Members Please Read

[john]

This thread is a combination of several others, drawing together important information for members in one place.

Newsletters

There are two newsletters associated with Songstuff:

Site Newsletter

Our site newsletter focuses on news from across the site, plus featured artist links, and news from both indieland and the mainstream music industry.

Visit the link below to subscribe or unsubscribe from our site newsletter.

Site Newsletter

Forum Newsletter

Our forum newsletter does include a small amount of news from across the site but the focus is primarily on forum activity, updates and upgrades and news of interest to our community members.

Visit the link below to subscribe or unsubscribe from our forum newsletter. To recieve the forum newsletter make sure the checkbox next to "Send me any updates sent by the board administrator" is checked.

Forum Newsletter

In addition to these newsletters site members also recieve occasional emails to inform them of news relevent to site members directly regarding the functionality of their accounts.

Songstuff Blog

We have an official Songstuff blog - Songstuff Stuff

http://forums.songst...log/music_site/

Please Subscribe to this blog for important announcements.

Reviews and Critiques

Although we have member who regularly perform reviews or who do their fair share of reviews, I have noticed an increasing number of members posting for critique while making little or no effort to review the work of others.

We rely on peer review on these boards. That means you. We have guidelines for posting stating that for every lyric/song/recording you post for review you should post critiques of minimum of 3 other works on the board that you posted for review on. i.e. if you post a lyric for review, then review 3 lyrics.

Our active membership changes. Even if you have posted reviews of other's work in the past, please don't view it as a bank. Just because you wrote 10 reviews in 2006 does not mean that when you post in 2008 you don't need to perform 3 reviews. Please do current members the courtesy of treating them how you would like to be treated.

If no one took time to do reviews that part of the board would be dead as people would stop posting for review when they stop getting replies.

Inexperience is not an excuse for not posting your opinion and being prepared to talk it over with the author.

This is run on an honor system. Please adhere to the guidelines and respect your fellow members.

If you value Songstuff as a resource and you would like this community to be helping with critique in the future, then please make these boards as active as possible. As writers and engineers YOU reap the benefit of being active on Songstuff. Help your fellow writers, musicians and engineers.

Please do your fair share, or more.

Anti-Spam Guidelines

It is necessary to have anti-spamming measures on the Songstuff boards. As ever, we are open to your opinions on this set of guidelines and if you have any suggestions, comments etc, please PM a moderator or post in the sitestuff board.

The Songstuff boards are intended as a community to support Songwriters, musicians and other involved in the creative industries to discuss issues, and to help artists promote themselves and gain valuable feedback.

While an individual post promoting something commercial may be permited, the post must be on a relevant topic, be intended to promote discussion within the Songstuff boards, confined to one board and not repeated while a post promoting the same service / product is still on the front page of any board.

This does not affect the promotion of free sites, free products and free services. Such posts should still be respectful of being on-topic, and promoting discussion/feedback.

Just to make it clear:

1. Spamming the Songstuff boards with adverts for purely commercial services is not acceptable, and is likely to result in having membership revoked, and being banned.

2. Repeated posting of mainly commercial adverts will be treated as above.

3. Posting off topic 'adverts' of anykind is not acceptable. These posts will be removed.

4. NO PORN LINKS

5. NO RELIGIOUS OR POLITICAL EVANGELISM. This is a music site, not the place for your personal crusade.

6. Do not flood the boards with identical posts

By "Purely Commercial", we mean there is no free product or service.

Moderation

Read the board guidelines by clicking on "Board Guidelines" from the top menu on the left hand side.

If a board member is warned by a moderator, or directly by a Songstuff staff member, and that behaviour continues, action will be taken to revoke membership of the boards.

Be respectul of other board members: use of inciteful, racist, or sectarian language is not permitted.

If you read a topic that does not conform to the guidelines, please report it to one of the moderators.

Warn System

The boards employ a warn system. It is used by moderators to indicate to members when they have behaved in a way that infringes board rules. For minor infringements warn level will increase, and subsequently decrease on request and review of a moderator. Moderators will post an explanation of their reason for issuing a warning. Members can read their own warn log.

We are a fairly relaxed community. This system is there to support moderators when they try to keep our boards free of abusive posters, copyright infringement and commercial spam, not to interfere with normal activities of a member. For minor infringements it is generally sufficient for a quiet word between moderator and member without requiring warnings or use of the warn system, although posts may be removed or altered (for example removal of a copyrighted item that would fall out-with the definition of "fair use" as determined by publishing companies and copyright owners).

Warn system actions vary from a simple comment and increase in warn status through posting moderation (all posts reviewed by a moderator), temporary suspension of posting or even viewing privileges, to a full ban and account removal.

We have guidelines on what is acceptable and what is not. Please read them. If you are unsure, please ask a moderator.

If you feel you have been warned unjustly, or indeed treated unjustly, please IM the moderation team to discuss it. Do not vent on the boards, or the shoutbox.

Blog and Gallery Guidelines

There are basic guidelines on posting new albums and images to the gallery, and on starting your blog, in the board help files (click help on the top right).

Basically you can manage your albums and blog from "My Controls".

In the album navigate to the category you want and click "add album". Then select the album name and you can add images etc.

For the blog you can export your blog as an rss, and of course it works with blog pings from technorati and similar. Cool huh?

There's a 2Mb file size limit.

Members have a limit of 2 albums, 8 pics per album, 500k max file size

Members who haven't posted in a while will be restricted to 1 album, 8 pics, 200k max file size until they post on the forum.

Site's like Technorati maintain lists of updated blogs for blog subscribers. The interconnectedness of blogs is known as "The Blogosphere". You can register your blog with them and then "ping" them to let them know your blog is updated. I'm not sure, but I think trackback is to find out what other blogs etc have linked to a blog post.

You have to "validate" your blog initially by posting a tag on your blog and letting them know. This confirms you own the blog. You can then remove the tag. However, you have to convert the link code that they give you to use bulletin board code. I can help if you have a problem.

On my blog on the right you will see links for recommending the blog or to add it to your account like Yahoo. Also there is an RSS (news stream) export for your blog. That means people using news aggregator application can, like the Songstuff news streams, subscribe. The aggregator then pulls info about your latest postings and displays them alongside other subscribed RSS news info.

the idea is that when you write a blog you want people to read it. Ideally you want people to subscribe to it. Technorati collates lists of blogs and ranks them according to the number of other blogs that link to yours and the number of subscribers. The cross linking is effectively like the friends function on this board, or on social networking sites like myspace.

This is known as the blogosphere.

The ranking is useful in that it creates blogs that are an authority on any specific subject. For example, on my blog I have created separate channels that correlate to subjects like songwriting. So a visitor on Technorati is look for a good Songwriting blog, if a lot of other blogs have recent links to my blog that weights the results to put my blog nearer the top.

Part of the interconnectedness is that Technoratie can be set up to check (ping) your blog regularly for new posts. You can also set your blog up to notify technorati (and other sites like them) when you add a new post (also ping).

When someone posts a link to a specific post on your blog using the perma link, I think the track back is used to see where visitors have come from. That way you can see who has linked to you.

I would recommend registering with Technorati and the other sites (3 are listed in your blog controls). You can then register your blogs with them. As part of that you need to validate that you actually own the blog you are registering. To do that they will provide a piece of code for you to include in your blog. Once the validation has been done, you can remove this link.

Songstuff doesn't allow members to post html. You have to use BBcode. So the code technorati provides will have to be altered. I managed to validate, so give me a shout if you have a problem.

Also, once registered you can get some code that you can use to make it easy for people to "vote" for your blog.

Once you are registered, we can of course increase our rank by linking to each other's blogs, where of course the topic or subject is relevent.