h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"1) The BBC has a different meaning of words like "link" and "URL" from the rest of the English-speaking world. Solution: buy the BBC a dictionary. :-p"

Pedant.

If you'd like to explain that further, go for it, but I still think you're being over-pedantic just for effect...

"2) The House Rules are oversimplifying BBC Policy. Solution: rewrite or footnote the House Rules so they bear some semblance of accuracy."

The House Rules express the terms and conditions in a nice, friendly way. They simplify them, but not overly so. Could you explain exactly where they fail, in your eyes, and without diving so far into the realms of pedantry that I ignore you.

"3) h2g2 is going further than the rest of the BBC. Solution: Shoot Mark Moxon (with a water pistol, taking advice from the relevant guide entry)."

Whose side are you on?

1)
Pedantry is good!

A link is one of those things which is underlined and you click on - a "hyperlink" or whatever. As in the tag and the linkcolor HTTP attribute.

A URL is a Uniform Resource Locator, and is any piece of text of the form [port]://[name|address](/[dir])

For example, http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide or telnet://server.bbc.co.uk or mailto://[email protected] or news://alt.fan.everything.in.moderation or ftp://downloads.bbc.co.uk/illegal/mp3 or an IRC URL, which I can't give an example of which I can be sure won't be moderated.

A TCP/IP host name (or 'host name') is something like server or www {www being a special case}

A TCP/IP domain name (or 'domain name') is something like bbc.co.uk

A TCP/IP full name (or 'name') is something like server.bbc.co.uk or www.bbc.co.uk

A TCP/IP address (or 'address') is something like 212.58.224.31 (for www.bbc.co.uk)

Now, which of these items are permitted in forums, and which are not? In Entries, which will be checked by moderators to ensure that they are suitable, and which will not?

{I'm not asking that this question necessarilly be answered in the house rules - I just want to know the answers at the mo}

2)
How about this: first you tell me what the BBC Policy on links actually *IS*, and then I might be in a position to make unhelpful suggestions...

A wild stab in the dark might be to footnote "link" with the following:

The BBC views a "link" as any piece of text which could cause an intelligent reader to be able to view a webpage. For example, "come round to my house and I'll show you my website" is a link, and may not be posted by anyone whose website is not hosted by the BBC.

Which might be true. Or it might be false. I dunno, because I don't know what the policy is!

3)
I'll take that as "no, we're not going further than the rest of the BBC", shall I?

A side of beef, please
I could eat an ass.

I'll reply properly later (gotta rush to a meeting now), but as for your last point...

...we now *are* the BBC. So your point 3 is moot.

I guess I can always complain to "Points of View" then...

.'..we now *are* the BBC'....see I knew it, it's a secret reverse takeover it's just that they haven't realised it yet....the first step was URL's allowed in guide entries....one day the position of those logos at the head of the page will be changed round as BBC online becomes part of the inevitable rise of h2g2. We know, we've read the books.

Argghhh... I'm having some problems with the 'no URLs in Conversations' rule. In my opinion, this is going to cripple the free exchange of information that we have going on. I've posted more than one URL to assist another researcher in writing an article - URLs that I've looked up myself and thought would be useful. In fact, I'm not sure why the BBC has this policy in the first place.

Lentilla

... a commercial URL in here can be seen as an advertisement. SAy someone writes an article about hamburgers. You put in the MacDo URL, BBC thinks it may be seen as advertising.

Is that it?

Yep - a URL could be commercial, or unsuitable, or whatever, so *ALL* URLs pointing to ANY site are banned from forums. Even genuine ones.

I'd be more likely to mention the URL of the anti-McD movement, though.

And somewhere, Lucinda, a cow loves you for it.

One of the biggest problems with checking the content of linked URLs (and by 'linked' I mean 'pointed-to' or 'indicated') is keeping a constant watch on it. If/when URLs are allowed unrestrictedly, you could link to a site whose contents are 'passed' by the moderators as fine, then after it's been checked, you could change the content of the site entirely to something unacceptable.

With the current legal set-up, the only way for the BBC to be safe would be to check *all* external sites *constantly*, which is clearly impossible.

I agree that the Internet is *all about* linking to other sites, and I think that h2g2's community will change (a) the way that the law attributes accountability for linking to other, potentially harmful, sites, and (b) the way the BBC applies its rules for user-based content. Definitely in that order, as well - the BBC won't risk being sued or taken to court because it wants to be a 'little bit experimental'.

If we can keep this dialogue open, things *will* change to the way they're meant to be. The Internet, and the people on it, cannot be corralled - that's its beauty. It's a wonderful, uncontrolled, chaotic, self-ordering, anarchic, community-driven, evolving world alright.

Vive la revolution!

> "With the current legal set-up, the only way for the BBC to be safe would be to check *all* external sites *constantly*, which is clearly impossible"

Don't look now, but that's exactly what they do. Not constantly, but regularly.

I wish I shared your optimism about the 'net in general...

Well, they check them often enough so that the lawyers can use the "we've taken all *reasonable* steps" clause in the BBC's defence, should a case ever come up. I imagine that that's the very clause they will expand on in the future to allow their users more freedom without compromising themselves legally (or image-wise).

*breaks off pieces of optimism, passes it around*

This is indeed the case. The whole reason for the restriction on URLs to only Guide Entries is because we have to go back in a specified time frame and check them all again. It's a big job.

It's BBC policy to implement these regular checks across all our websites, and we can't have one rule for h2g2 and another for the rest. This trial is something we've come up with to test whether things can or should be altered now that the BBC is publishing user-generated content.

As for all that stuff about what constitutes a link, a URL and all that gumpf, that's just intellectual meandering. The point is that the expectations of BBC visitors are that the BBC will never point them towards anything unsuitable, so a posting which says 'visit this cool site which you can find by searching for "Big Vern's Cat Farm" in search engine x', which then turns out to point to a porn site, is not going to be acceptable, even if it's not a URL, a link or whatever other semantic pedantry you want to discuss.

It's all about expectations. The BBC does not want to direct its visitors to anything that will offend them (as that would lower the BBC's standing in their eyes) and that's why links are checked. Until h2g2 came along a 'link' in BBC parlance was an A tag on an HTML page on the BBC website, put in by a staff member. Now, the goalposts have moved, but the concept is still the same: expectations must not be shattered by any BBC sites.

That's a bit more explanation as to the logic behind this odd-sounding URL policy, but we know it'll never placate the 'But this is the Internet! Wake up and smell the coffee!' brigade.

Baby steps, everyone, baby steps...

*The BBC does not want to direct its visitors to anything that will offend them*

I guess the sensitivities of the PTB at the BBC find it offensive that people would want to visit a site not controlled by the BBC

Let's try that again

I guess the PTB at the BBC find the whole proposition that people would want to visit a site not controlled by the BBC offensive

Nope, it's just that the BBC have a reputation and image to maintain - they may have come under fire recently for showing stuff people don't like (although not nearly as much as Channel 5 and the other commercial TV companies in the UK have), they still have a largely untouched reputation as being safe providers of stuff of reasonable if not high quality. Naturally they are keen to keep this image, so they have to be very, very careful.

Also, because the BBC is not a commercial organisation, they can't afford to have anything that looks like advertising because that's breaking their charter and would get them into serious, serious trouble.

Some people agreed with this little blurb of mine, and thought the Towers should see it, too, so here goes...

It is my opinion that the external URL's will be the hottest issue with the new beeb Guide. The Towers are not going to be able to lift the ban, but the researchers are going to need a suitable workaround. The beeb wants to learn about online communities, and they're going to discover rather quickly that one of the most important functions of such a community is the rapid exchange of information across the globe. Ready references to the internet form a vital part of that. Kill them, and you kill off the most culturally relevant service such a community has to offer... although you can spread ignorance quite readily in the resulting vacuum.

So, in other words, I can't say "come and see me, and I'll show you a good webpage" (censor - please remove whats in the quotes). An entry on search engines is hugely flawed, unless I avoid mentioning that if you search for stuff, you might actually find stuff related to what you search for. The company a*****n.com can't be mentioned by name, neither can I mention the ticker code A**N, since that could be resolved to a domain name by someone prepared to look at appropriate registrar of companies.

I can't mention that a URL exists for people who want to F**D content which is the S**E as some other content - say, to check for copyright violations. I can't even mention the existance of a site which creates virtual CITIES which are based with GEO-ness. I can't discuss a popular music swapping entity which has been in the courts recently. I can't discuss any of our political parties, since they all have websites which can be easily deduced from their names.

Heck, I can't mention my own user name, since my own user name is a .co.uk domain name as well, and people could work it out, and hence enter it in the browser. Should I replace "myreddice" with "[name removed by censor]" again? 'Lucinda', of course, is the name of a site as well. I haven't checked 'Xanthia', or 'myre', but I'd be betting that they're .com websites as well.

Of course, many MANY words are sitenames. I can't talk about virtual s, because there's a .com dedicated to them (with an appropriate URL - guess it). Since every 3 and 4 letter word is now a URL, any 3 or 4 letter words must be banned from forum conversation. Almost all words in the dictionary, up to about 8 letters, are registered - so pretty much all conversation is essentially neutered.

So I'm left with trying to make conversation using only the words 'bbc', 'beeb' and 'h2g2'. Normally, I'd use those three bits to do morse code communication - but since morse code isn't English, that's banned too - or at least it'll be refered to TPTB, who'll use advanced code cracking techniques on it to discover what I said (and god help us if I passed it through PGP en passent).

God forbid anyone actually did search for 'Big Vern's Cat Farm' on google (or indeed, any search engine). They might actually see something that wasn't h2g2. Heck, am I even allowed to mention the existance of that big "search" button in netscape 6? Am I even allowed to talk about netscape 6, seeing as netscape is a .com and everything?

I'm just waiting for y'all to jump up and say "April Fool!" - Cos this has to be a joke, right? {any affiliation to any website based on the concept of april fools, or with a .com URL including it, or which can be found by searching for it in a search engine, is purely co-incidental}.

Why exactly do URLs get this harsh treatment, but not phone numbers. It seems, according to the house rules, that I can happily mention that the phone number of my optician is 02476 383 250 - and I'm allowed to mention the number because it's publically available (go to yellow pages - I can't tell you the URL, but you can guess, and search for opticians in nuneaton).

Yet, if you HAVE to check URLs regularly, it seems you have to check phone numbers regularly. Yet phone numbers ARE allowed in forums. And URLs aren't. Because??

If you go to Waterloo station in the UK, a certain terrestrial station, which isn't BBC, ITC, or channel 5, will advertise its URL to you - a fairly obvious .com which won't surprise you. In order to prevent my post from being blacked out, I won't say how you get to waterloo station, nor will I mention the service with the obvious URL which goes UNDER the GROUND to get to it, nor the way that TRACKs or RAILs can get you there in an aboveground manner. (barring the wrong kind of snow). I sincerely hope no-one else mentions these pieces of information.