All Entries Tagged With: "social site"

The Importance Of Terms Of Use At Social Sites

If you use social bookmarking and social networking sites for very long then you’ll eventually run into a situation where you are banned or threatened with banishment for not following the website’s guidelines. It behooves you to learn the guidelines of the sites that you use before that situation arises. I myself have been banned from one site and I have a friend who was banned at the same site just a few weeks later. Neither of knows what offense we committed to be banned.

Propeller is one site in particular that will ban you for offenses and not give you any indication as to what the offense was that got you banned. If you inadvertently break a guideline or someone reports you for behavior that you thought was acceptable then you have no recurse for appeal. They make it difficult for you to contact site administrators to inquire about your dismissal. Your account is simply closed and the next time you go in to log in you find that you can’t. All you can do is go back and read the site guidelines to try to figure out what you did wrong. And in many cases it is simply an innocent mistake that could have been avoided by being more familiar with site guidelines.

Every social site has its own guidelines and they vary from one site to the next. What may be acceptable at one social site may not be acceptable at the next one. If you are going to be active at the social sites then you need to familiarize yourself with the guidelines at each site and make sure that you behavior on the site conforms with their policies, guidelines, and terms of use. Otherwise, you could find yourself on the outside looking in.

Learn more about social bookmarking at BCP.