TANJ: Future swear word created by Larry Niven in Ringworld
This is a story about a web master who puts the buck ahead of the interests of his readers. I suspect there are many who fall into this category, but this particular one lies, cheats and plays dirty in general to chase the revenue generated by Google Adsense based on the number of hits his site gets. Yes, I have been banned from the site just to be completely up front about it.
First, a little of my background. I've always had an engineering bent ever since I was a kid. I remember one bored, rainy afternoon when my parents couldn't put up with me any longer. Out came the recently replaced washing machine pump and some tools. "Take this apart." That kept me busy for hours, and more importantly, out of my parents' hair. Electronics has been a life-long hobby since I was a kid and part of my profession.
I have a degree in mechanical Engineering, but I've always leaned towards electronics. My first job on my career path was at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington with the Acoustic Range Group. Our overall mission was to ensure submarines leaving the shipyard were quiet - a noisy submarine is a dead submarine. My main focus was in machinery noise monitoring. Defects in machinery produce characteristic vibration (which becomes noise in the water) patterns. If a machine does not meet noise goals, the vibration signature can be analyzed to determine why - a machine might be out of balance or have a bad bearing resulting in excessive vibration levels. By analyzing the vibration data, the exact nature of the defect can be determined and corrective action taken. This is a perfect job for an ME (mechanical engineer) with EE (electronics engineer) tendencies. A vast array of electronic instrumentation is used to diagnose mechanical problems. As part of shipyard support group, my work involved many measurement and diagnostic challenges.
Starting at that time, I wrote a lot of technical documents for the benefit of my co-workers, sharing specialized knowledge. Explaining things clearly and concisely, along with an explanation of underlying principles, was important to everyones' understanding of the topic.
After leaving the shipyard, my career continued along a similar path working for a private company and later for my own company.
During these years, I have produced numerous in-house training documents, customer training documents, have done a number of technical presentations to national and worldwide technical organizations, published several peer-reviewed technical papers and have had two magazine articles printed. These are but a few examples, but it serves to show that I have technical writing skills and a background in producing technical articles. My writing efforts not only include the technical, but other issues, such as those caring for an elderly parent with dementia, as can be seen at The Pragmatic Caregiver.
Over the last several years, I have developed an interest in microcontrollers, Namely Microchip PIC processors, primarily of the PIC18F-series. My programming language of choice is Swordfish Basic, a powerful language which allows some awesome things to be done on a chip the size of a quarter.
I've continued my writing efforts recently in articles and forum posts about microcontrollers and Swordfish Basic, producing many articles for a web site focused on PICs and Swordfish Basic, Digital-DIY. Many forums cover electronics and microcontrollers and I've been a regular contributor at several of these including the Swordfish Basic forum, Sparkfun's forum, the EEVBlog forum.
When I publish an article on Digital-DIY, in the interest of sharing the information with others who may benefit, I often make a posting on other forums with enough information to explain the article and a link back to the article at Digital-DIY. A minor claim to fame is a link posted on Hack-A-Day for one of my projects. This is done in the spirit of sharing knowledge with others who may be interested. Digital-DIY has no Google Ads or other source of revenue based on the number of hits - there's no financial benefit to attracting hits to the site.
When answering questions in forum posts, I also frequently link back to Digital-DIY. There are a number of great tutorials there, written both by myself and others. I am familiar with the content at Digital_DIY (I'm a moderator there as well as a contributor), so it makes sense to link to a tutorial or article that provides a good explanation, drawings, schematics and other information to answer a question rather than provide just a brief answer that may not address all of a poster's issues or spend more time and effort to write a more detailed answer duplicating information that already exists.
This has worked well with no complaints from anyone until recently at one particular site. The web master at EletroTech took umbarage at one of my posts in particular and all of my links to Digital-DIY, as shown by the ban notice below.
Advertising Digital-DIY? By linking back to content there? Advertising???
Sharing useful and relevant information with the community is advertising? That hardly makes sense for a site that claims to be for the sharing of information among enthusiasts. The web master was mute when asked to provide some rational for this ban.
It didn't take much thought for the situation to begin to make sense. A little text block saying I am banned surrounded by large ads for Digikey and Stanford University. As Judge Judy says, "follow the money." Informing and educating the readers of the forum is less important than the buck!
Some of my posts at ElectroTech have been edited with the comment "Edited to remove advertising and spam." This I consider libel.
When my temporary ban was lifted and I logged into ElectroTech, I received this message from the webmaster (he apparent has no name and only goes by the ridiculous moniker ElectroMaster):
Posted by ElectroMaster
Dear Jon Chandler,
You have received an infraction at Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free.
Reason: Advertising Digital-Diy.com
-------
Hi John, [Comment: I love how people think I misspell my own name]
I have already warned you about referring people to digital-DIY.com, so this time you have received a two day ban. I am also warning you if you come back after the ban and post ANY links or incentive for our members to visit Digital-DIY.com you will be banned forever. [Emphasis mine]
I have also put a nofollow tag on all links to digital-diy.com so that the gets no search engine PR from the links.
The offending thread:
A Simple I2C Thermocouple Measurement Solution
(you only offer part of the solution and refer the members to your site for the code.)
Regards,
EM
Here's a link to the referenced article.
Since I effectively could not share any articles there unless I duplicated them there (a waste of time and effort) and I couldn't reference a storehouse of knowledge in replying to forum questions, it was apparent that my time of being a contributor to ElectroTech was over. Furthermore, since my posts had been labeled as spam, advertising or in some non-explained way, harmful to the site, I requested that all of the materials I had posted to the site be removed.
According to a number of references I found, in lieu of agreement otherwise, forum posts remain the property of the poster and all copyright protections are in force. Here is one such example.
I reviewed the terms of service agreement and there was no copyright assignment or waiver, so I was within my rights to request removal of my materials.
I received this response from the web master:
Waived all my rights? I don't believe that was in the terms of service agreement, but maybe I missed it. I clicked the link in the webmaster's response and found the following:
Forum Rules
Registration to this forum is free! We do insist that you abide by the rules and policies detailed below. If you agree to the terms, please check the 'I agree' checkbox and press the 'Proceed...' button below. If you would like to cancel the registration, click here to return to the forums index.
Although the administrators and moderators of Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free will attempt to keep all objectionable messages off this site, it is impossible for us to review all messages. All messages express the views of the author, and neither the owners of Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free, nor vBulletin Solutions, Inc. (developers of vBulletin) will be held responsible for the content of any message.
By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws.
The owners of Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any content item for any reason.
Posts and content submitted to Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free, unless source quoted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain License.
Notice the last sentence. It wasn't there when I reviewed the terms of service a few days earlier. It appears hastily written and isn't really very clear. Also notice the lack of a line space between it and the previous line. It looks ok on the web page but when copied and pasted, the blank line disappears. For the geek crowd, if you look at the source, each of the lines above is enclosed in paragraph tags. The line that appears to be a recent addition is not.
Also, the last line is clearly not in keeping with the goals of Creative Commons. It in fact is very unlike Creative Commons.
So, it comes down to my word against the webmasters whether the last sentence was a quick hack job. Or does it? Google Cache is my friend in this case! A saved copy of the page from 17 January 2011 reveals the truth:
Forum Rules
Registration to this forum is free! We do insist that you abide by the rules and policies detailed below. If you agree to the terms, please check the 'I agree' checkbox and press the 'Proceed...' button below. If you would like to cancel the registration, click here to return to the forums index.
Although the administrators and moderators of Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free will attempt to keep all objectionable messages off this site, it is impossible for us to review all messages. All messages express the views of the author, and neither the owners of Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free, nor vBulletin Solutions, Inc. (developers of vBulletin) will be held responsible for the content of any message.
By agreeing to these rules, you warrant that you will not post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, sexually-oriented, hateful, threatening, or otherwise violative of any laws.
The owners of Electronic Circuits Projects Diagrams Free reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any content item for any reason.
Wow. Caught in a lie Mr. webmaster. The last line was a hasty hack and not in the TOS to which I agreed.
I pointed out to the webmaster than he had been caught in a lie and again requested he remove my copyright material. His reply:
Time to lawyer up? I don't think it's worth the effort. Besides, a public hanging will be more fun. Much more fun.
The answer here is extremely simple. The webmaster just needs to click a button and delete all of my posts and materials as requested. What's next? Do you think somebody who has gone to the effort of creating a blog is going to give up the quest?
If you'd like to let the webmaster know that you think he's a idiot, please send him email. Be sure to give him my regards. electromaster@electro-tech-online.com
Thanks for reading this... and sorry for making a big deal out of the trivial.
Jon
