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

I have seen that the essence of the guide has remained very similiar. The rules have remained the same... Basically... Although, it has come to my attention that the moderation of this site is much stricter than necessary. I agree that messages of hatred, profanity, pornography, and etc. should be banned; but don't you think that the rule about "No off-site objects (including pictures)" is a bit strict. Where shall we get our banners, our badges, our trophies of our allegiance to the guide? Throughout history, numerous articles of literature were censored (or moderated to make it seem less communist). Beautiful pieces of written art: Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Numerous books of science including all of Charles Darwin's pieces. Is this not an iron curtain over the H2G2 COMMUNITY? Do I have to get Joni Mitchell to write a song?!

I'm confused by your posting.

You understand the need for moderated postings, but not for moderated images?

Besides, allowing off-site images is a form of bandwidth theft in most cases and in some cases it's even a matter of copyright infringement.

Since h2 and the Beeb can't be certain of the copyright status of every image posted to the site, it's in their legal best interests to prohibit the practice.

I miss the photos too. I had a picture of my family posted on my bio page. I had taken the photo and owned the copyright, but it still was removed with all the others.

Of course, in a fit of pique I could quit the site and post a child pornography photo in that same space and never return to h2g2 and that's one of the BBC's fears I reckon.

It sucks, but they need to protect themselves from morons and bad people. The old h2g2 ethic of 'be cool and we'll all get along' is far too laid back for a large corporation with a lot of money to be won from silly lawsuits.

An ounce of prevention...

We're also hoping to implement some kind of picture uploading to the h2g2 servers, but we've only just re-opened - give us time!

In the meantime, though, we has to remove off-site objects, for sound legal reasons.

Mark

Yes I agree, lifes a bitch.

But come on, what's the alternative? I know censorship is open to much abuse but I think the moderation on this site is quite acceptable. And lets face it, anythings better then Yahoo! Or, God forbid, No h2g2 community!

I think we're all just going to have to bite the bullet and get on with it.

FABT

What's this about biting bullets? s, FABT, s!

Or of course.

Although iamge uploading will/would be wonderful, at least we have the fairly enormous h2g2 Picture Library to tide us over. There are some very nice graphics in there.

I suppose that Mark brings up an excellent point, along with everyone else. I just miss my pics... That's all... I'm really looking forward to the image hosting. The sooner the better. I can't think of an alternative. Being forced by sick people with illegal images, I think that everyone's doing the best they can as fast as they can. Well, thank you; everyone!

Hopefully image hosting won't take too long to be done, but I think it might be a while because of the sheer amount of storage space required, and some way of uploading images needs to be implemented...

No doubt they'll test it on the volunteers again. I just love reporting bugs!