Great Western Coffee Shop

I love being an admin / moderator here on the Coffee Shop because there's so little to do other than keep an eye open, and read so much fascinating posting.  It's only occasionally that "issues" arise - and one did last night concerning content from another site accessed via the forum.  Resolved during a phone call, but just worth a comment.

* If you post here on the majority of our boards, you're posting in public and anyone can read what you write, copy and paste it, provided a link to it for others, etc.; our server does have a number of places it will not accept connections from though that is largely done to save overloading and not to prevent content being read anywhere

* If you post in "Frequent Posters" or "And Also" your post will only be visible to registered members who have posted over a threshold of time are broadly likely to be known to other members - at least from what they have said in their posts.  We ask that the privacy of all posting in these areas is respected - it's kept purely within the group unless specific permission is given by the original poster.

* If you post in "How Stuff Works" as a Transport Scholar, it's between members who have chosen to be in that deeper technical area, but there is not the same "bond of privacy" was ask in Frequent Posters.

Permanent links are available to ALL forum threads, and within the threads, so you can share links into our content.  If you provide a link to the restricted areas to someone who's not logged in with authority to view, they'll simply get an "off limits" message.

Now - quoting from elsewhere is allowed either with copyright permission or in critical review if it's public on another web site; that "critical review" is what's used a great deal to give a taster of what you can and away from the Coffee Shop. I do a lot of this - others have in the past and are still welcome to do so - to bring news to members.  In the last hour, I've reported a few lines from The Guardian on the takeover of Arriva, for example.  If you feel the mark has been overstepped, please get in touch and report the post.

Often, members (self included) will post links to external sites. You are very welcome to do so on the Coffee Shop - this is a WEB of information after all.   Proviso being "keep it to content on topic" and "please try to avoid links to spambots and sites with dubious or nasty content".  Please note that we who are running the Coffee Shop are not (and cannot be) responsible for other sites and you should be careful of  dubious links.  You can ask us to take a link down if you are concerned, but there's no way I or anyone here can change the content of a third party site you've linked to though us.

Last night's call questioned what permission we (Coffee Shop) have to reproduce public content from another "enthusiast" site, with the query coming from the author on that site.  The answer is that we don't have permission - but we weren't reproducing that content; we had only linked to it.   Explained, discussed, everyone happy.   In an extreme case, we (admin / moderators) could remove a link to an external public site - but for clean / on topic sites that would be extreme!

Sounds as though the para above covers the piece you refer to? Just make sure that after quoting the gist of a piece, you comment on/"review" it.

I presume the other site is afraid that coffee shop is becoming the number one site about railway issues.

Its a shame really,as I thought that ALL rail sites were about improving issues about OUR railway.

It has really changed over the years - not just in rail but in general.  I was an early adopter of the internet, with news groups and email and early use of gopher which was overtaken by the web with hypertext transfer protocol.

In the early days, people found it hard to be comfortable making their content freely available - they were nervous and preferred not to have people linking in from outside.  The web was a way for the Bromley and District Commuters Association to communicate with their members, and there was a reluctance to let there be access outside their known visitors.  Links in from elsewhere were distinctly unwelcome, and if found would result in an email asking for them to be removed.

With an ongoing sophistication including things like log in processes to sites and cookies adding "state" to visits, it became first possible and then commonplace for sites to be able to be selective as to where people arrived and where they arrived from, and the requests to delete  links have long since gone away. But we are perhaps past the peak of free data for all, with paywalls charging for access.

I can understand and appreciate site owners not wanting content - including public content - copied in quantity onto other sites. They want that asset of content to bring people to their site and read other content and click through adverts to generate income which helps pay the cost of the provision of the data in the first place.   They also want to ensure that their data is current - the web is a maze of dynamic documents and copies are merely a snapshot in time ... and for this reason, yes, it's in the interest of all parties that links and a chunk of words around them to give people an idea of what they're going to see (perhaps a short quote) has become the sensible standard.

There was also in the early days the question of bandwith - it was a lot more expensive back then.  Although pages were less data hungry than now, images were.  Some saw people linking to their site as akin to shoplifting as it cost them money.