Quadsville

On Sunday, on page 2 of the Quad-City Area section, we run a page with Quadsville excerpts. A featured blog, group, photos, a Nerd Word, etc. (check it out). Anyway, this past Sunday, I ran a photo submitted by Aclay of a little boy helping clean up his grandma's yard after the storm. You can see it here.

This morning’s (July 27) edition of the Times had a picture of my youngest son (Erik Colclasure) cleaning up at his grandma’s house after last week’s storm.
My 6-year-old middle child (Brandon Holtam), who is very inquisitive, was asking questions about those two pages we were looking at. By the end of our conversation, we had come to the conclusion that the stories (letters and pictures) on those pages were things different people felt were important and wanted to share with others.
After our conversation, I went back to reading my paper and he went in another room to draw. Some time later, he came back with the enclosed paper. He said this is what he cares about and asked me to mail it to you to share with others.
Amanda Colclasure
Davenport

And here is the enclosed drawing!:

Now doesn't that warm your heart? Of course, I had to share it with all of you.

For the record, the other important things shared on last Sunday's page were this blog entry by Mise and this post by Fly on the Wall in the National Security & Foreign Policy group. And this photo from Jenius.

Thank you to the folks who participated in our first live chat yesterday. Tim D'Avis, Jim Gale and I answered questions about Quadsville and qctimes.com comments. You can see the instant replay here. What experts would you like to see future live chats with?

Rules of the Road

Administrators and moderators have the right to delete, move or close any comment or forum at any time. The following rules and guidelines clarify our practices and provide an explanation of what content may lead to message deletion and/or user bans.

Play nice: Messages containing intentionally misleading information, defamatory content, threats, verbal abuse, harassment, bullying, obscenity or personal information about other individuals are not allowed. Comments should be brief and stick to either generally known facts or the facts contained in a news story. Keep a civil tone. Resist making personal attacks or indulging in name-calling. If your item doesn’t get posted or is deleted, tone it down a bit and try again. This refers to both public and private messages on Quadsville and qctimes.com.

Keep your posts commercial-free: Advertisements, chain letters, pyramid schemes and solicitations are unacceptable. To inquire about paid advertising, please email sales@qctimes.com.

Keep it local, and/or personal: This is a site focused on a geographic region and people with interests there. Please help to keep it that way – posts devoid of any local or personal angle are considered off-topic and possibly subject to removal.

Spam is not allowed: Spamming includes multiple disruptive, meaningless or repetitive messages, or messages posted solely for solicitation. Messages considered spam, trolling or flaming (as determined by the sole discretion of the moderator) can be deleted without warning or explanation.

User Accounts: Registered user names must follow the same rules as forum posts. Any user accounts considered objectionable or created for the purpose of spamming or promoting commercial interests may be deleted. Deliberate or continued abuse of user accounts will result in a ban of the user’s IP address.

Signatures: All content posted in the user’s signature field must follow the same rules as forum messages and user accounts.

Fair Use: Do not post entire articles into comments or forums. This is a potential violation of copyright laws. It’s unnecessary and results in needlessly long posts. Instead, post a brief abstract of the material and a link to the complete source. If you are not sure how much of an article you can legally post, please simply post a link to the material.

Don’t see a message you posted earlier? If you recently posted a message and cannot find it anywhere, the message may have been deleted because of objectionable content. Feel free to try again or contact the moderator for details.

What to do if your account has been banned: If you try to login and receive a message that you’ve been banned, do not immediately open another user account and continue the inappropriate behavior. Such action could result in a permanent ban. Instead, contact the administrator and find out what caused the sanction. We may or may not reinstate your privileges after such a contact

1) If you want to point to another article on another site, please link to it rather than copying and pasting entire articles. Use clear attribution, and do not use more than a paragraph of the text of the article in your post. In the future we will remove such posts and we will ban repeat offenders if necessary. Copy & paste may be easy, but it's not fair to the original author or the original publication.

2) If you can't behave like a good neighbor, we don't want you here.

Bix on Twitter: I'll be tweeting from the Bix route. That's right, texting as I run. Or try to run. Read more here.

Streaming video: Live, streaming video of the race will be broadcast on qctimes.com/bix. After the race, you will be able to watch it, too, and even download it to your computer.

Race results: Also at qctimes.com/bix, as fast as we can get them up.

There's lots more if you just poke around qctimes.com/bix, including photo galleries, all sorts of searchable race records and an interactive course map.

Also, we will have a live chat here in Quadsville at 3:30 Wednesday with me, Tim D'Avis and Jim Gale. Ask us all your questions about Quadsville and qctimes.com comments. We are working on fixing/upgrading a lot of things, but we know a lot of you have questions. The chat will appear on the Quadville community page under What's Going On In Quadsville.

Have a great weekend!

Thanks,
Tim

What's happening in your neighborhood?

If you have tried to edit your group settings in the last week or so, it probably hasn't worked. But it's fixed now. And if you started a group recently, you'll probably want to go look at those settings and make sure group members are allowed to post entries (otherwise, why have a group?)

To do this, go to My Stuff>>Administration and click Manage next to your group. Then click Group Settings in the gray box on the left side of your screen. I would recommend setting it so that people automatically become members and can post. You can choose if you want to approve comments and posts before they go up. I would start without moderating (as we currently don't have a way to notify group owners by email if there are pending posts - working on it). If problems arise, you can change your settings at any time.

Questions? Post 'em here.

Mike Olson also had a good find earlier in the week when he came upon a car fire while out with his camera. You've got to see the photo. 

These are great examples of community journalism and I'd love to see more of it on Quadsville.

Images in your profile photo and video galleries should only be images that you own the rights to or have permission from the owner to use. Basically, that means if you didn't take it or shoot it, don't put it up there. Funny forward you received from Uncle Joe? Don't post it as yours. A photo of your favorite celeb? Unless you met them and posed for a cheese shot, that's out, too.

HOWEVER, if you want to comment on a photo or video that isn't yours, such as a news-related item, you can include it in your blog post with proper credit given. 

To include a photo with your commentary, start a new blog entry and click on the "Advanced" tab. You'll see a bunch of icons above where you enter the text of your blog. The one showing a mountain is the Insert Image icon.

You will then have the option of uploading a file saved on your computer (local file), grabbing an image from a specific Web site (URL) or searching the Web for an image.

Once you have added the image, you can place it wherever you want in the text by dragging it with your mouse. You can make more changes by right-clicking and editing image properties. Here is a photo of a monkey I found through a Web search:

In both cases - photo and video - you should say where you pulled the content from. AP video, for example or a photo from CNN.com. You can - and should - also link back to original blog posts if you are quoting national bloggers or to the site you pulled other content from. To do this, just highlight the text you want to link (ex: I saw this on DailyKos), then click on the icon that shows the globe with a chain link under it. Copy and paste the entire URL of the Web site into the form and click save. Viola.

All of this, of course, also applies to photo and video galleries on groups, as well as to tracking back to news items you are discussing on your groups.

Any questions, just post them below and either I or Tim will jump in with an answer.

That is all. Carry on. :-) 

I'd like to hear from more people on this issue. Check out the two links above to join the discussion on qctimes.com or on Quadsville.

Catch up on the posts you missed, or just keep the dialogues going. Thanks to MB for this page... eventually we'll make it a little nicer to look at.

The forums were the hardest hit, and they're also the least-used feature on this site. We're considering closing them down as their function seems to be redundant.