Article Submission Rules and Guidelines - The Basics

[Marc]

Article Submission Rules, Regulations, and The Fine Print

How To:

• Every month a new 'sub-forum' will be started specific to the month. Start a New Thread in the forum for the appropriate month.
• Title the Thread Appropriately. It is the Title of your article. This is important.

The Concept:

• Any Registered User can submit an article - an original work - for review by all other Registered Users. If this proves to be popular, barring any significant drop in advertising revenue, I will happily keep the feature going.
• I am looking for original content from authors or others who would like to share their business systems knowledge, thoughts, experiences and beliefs.

Rules:

• Simple - Write an article. A bio would be appropriate to demonstrate your 'credentials'. Not required, but...
• Expected (Hoped for?) - Images and Data - Please use the Attachment feature. If you feel you need images inline, I can do that here - Please PM me.
• Original Writings ONLY - Copy and Paste of any copyright material is NOT acceptable.
• I do not want to have to monitor for links which go DEAD a year or more (or less for that matter) from now, so no graphics or other files linked to external sites will be accepted.
• Data - You must support your article / position with data. Preferably graphics data as post 'attachment(s)'.
• Articles are limited to 30,000 characters if you put it in the body of the post. If your article exceeds this limit, please PM or e-mail me and I'll help. Or,
• You may submit a 'Word' or 'rtf' document as an attachment if you wish, rather than just submitting text and attachments in a post, but if you do so please give us a good description of your 'article', including your premise (theory, hypothesis, whatever), in your post.
• You may submit an HTML or XHTML document. If you do this, particularly if you have graphics, I suggest you put the file and graphics in a ZIP or TAR or GZIP file and attach it to the post.
• Acrobat (pdf) files are acceptable, but I request they not be LOCKed in any way.
• PowerPoint presentation data files are acceptable, however, .pps (slide show limited files) are not.

Remuneration:

• At the end of the month I will start a thread with a Poll. In this thread, all Registered Users will have the opportunity to vote expressing your opinion of which Article (Thread) they gained the most from.
• The Poll will be open for about a month. The Close Date of the poll is stated in the poll.
• The 'Winner' of the poll will be sent a check for US$ 150.00.

Please ask questions and post comments about this Elsmar Cove forum feature in this thread.

Added 9 June 2004 at 6.25PM EDT (Zulu -4 hours):
To satisfy potential liabilities in response to Chris Paris' (Oxebridge) complaint to the Ohio Attorney General's Office:

• Void where prohibited by law.
• People under 18 may submit articles but their parent must be involved in the process.
• Children over 18 years of age are encouraged to participate.
• There is no charge or other requirement to submit an article in the forum other than to be a Registered user.
• Registration in the forums is open to everyone.
• Registration in the forums is free.
• Registration in the forums is not an inducement to buy anything.
• Article submission is not an attempt to get anyone to buy anything. There is nothing to buy which is in any way related to submitting an article.
• There is no requirement to listen to, or to read, a 'sales pitch'. For anything. For any reason.
• Voters understand when they vote their name will be recorded by the software and is visible to everyone - the monthly polls are OPEN polls.
• I personally do not vote in the poll so that no one can claim bias on my part, nor do I, nor will I, attempt to bias the poll.
• While moderators may monitor the poll, they are absolved of all responsibility - I assume all liability for the accuracy and honesty of the voting.
• If you submit an article and your article is not voted to be the best of those submitted, you can and may complain publicly in a post in the forums. If you e-mail a complaint, it will be posted in a public thread for discussion and resolution. I don't hide things here. If there's a complaint, let's all discuss it.

Should any other potential 'legal' aspects surface as a result of Chris Paris' complaint, or any other complaint, I will post them in this thread and I will amend this post - Post 1 in this thread - appropriately.

24 June 2004

Please remember - This is not a contest per se. I am not the person 'voting' - YOU are. I want original content and I am willing to pay for an article. But I cannot pay lots of bucks. I'm not a big company. I'm Marc - A One Man Band, so to speak... So - I ask for article content submissions, and then you - the Registered Users - 'Vote' as a part of the Elsmar Cove Forums 'editorial board' and, based upon the results of YOUR votes, I pay the contributor of the article judged as best US$150.

If you submit something and you don't get the majority of the 'votes', please consider the response (the vote count) a 'Rejection Notice for This Month' {I really hate this but it's a legal neccessity to say because of Chris Paris' (Oxebridge) complaint to the Ohio Atty General's office that this is an illegal 'contest'}. Submissions are journalistic submissions subject to 'rejections' by the board {all Registered users = 'the board'}.

[Govind]

Marc,
Great Idea.We really appreciate your efforts to promote "Quality" contribution among professionals.
Couple of questions:
1.Once submitted, will the article become the property of Elsmar.com?
2.Can we send the article for publishing in Quality Magazines (with the poll results)?
Govind.

[Marc]

1. No - The content will NOT become property of Elsmar.com, me or anything like that. If you post an article it is in the public domain as are all posts in this forum.

2. Yes - you may send the results anywhere you like. It is YOUR article - NOT mine.

[Greg B]

Marc,

This is a great idea. I think it will give the 'professionals' within the Cove mebership the opportunity to express their ideas in detail rather than the sometimes 'quick' responses which are required to satisfy questions from the 'floor' (this is not derogatory - it means general public). I personaly would even forego the monetary prize simply for the peer reward but that is MHO only. I can't wait to see the first batch. I may even try one of my own.

On the advertising side, I do not see anything under the advertising banner other than BSi which I visited yesterday and gained some very good articles from, db's sites and symphony. There is simply nothing in the box below 'Please Take a Minute and Check Out The Potential Solutions Below!. Amazon used to be there as I used it several times. Is this normal or is my PC (I have Kerio firewall) somehow blocking it?

Greg B

[Marc]

Originally Posted by Greg B

Marc,

This is a great idea. I think it will give the 'professionals' within the Cove mebership the opportunity to express their ideas in detail rather than the sometimes 'quick' responses which are required to satisfy questions from the 'floor' (this is not derogatory - it means general public).

I hope to see a variety of topics. Someone may want to write about something they did to solve a problem. Or how they improved something. This is a chance to be creative as opposed to answering folks question(s) as we normally do here.

Originally Posted by Greg B

On the advertising side, I do not see anything under the advertising banner other than BSi which I visited yesterday and gained some very good articles from, db's sites and symphony. There is simply nothing in the box below 'Please Take a Minute and Check Out The Potential Solutions Below!. Amazon used to be there as I used it several times. Is this normal or is my PC (I have Kerio firewall) somehow blocking it?

The box below the 'Please Take a Minute and Check Out The Potential Solutions Below!' should have Google Ads. If they're not showing for you I have no idea why. They changed their system including how much they pay but if you're not seeing any Google ads, and if that's the case with others, I'm not sure what to do. I see them on every page. It is a 'script' so its possible some browsers don't show them, but this is the first hint that some people may not be seeing the Google AdSense 'box'.

I dropped the Amazon advertisement because when I last looked a couple of weeks ago it showed only a US$ 1.75 'profit' for something like 3 months which obviously isn't worth it. They don't pay until at least US$100 is due - which at the rate it was going would take quite a while.

[A Navajo]

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Hi Marc,
This is simply great and thanks for offering a reward. This will motivate us to write good articles.
rgds
Navajo

[A Navajo]

Good approach to create more Quality professionals.

[sal881vw]

Hello Marc,
Now that is what I call continous improvement.