Thursday, December 10, 2009

Public Service Announcement

Hi there!

We're glad that you're participating in Skywatch today.

We had some (smaller) problems in the past, that concern the Mr. Linky Name entries.
We tried to point them out with info in the sidebar and in our posts, but unfortunately
they are not being read by many, so we had to edit almost half of the made entries
manually to correct them. And that takes up a lot of time - that we could skip, if
everyone would take a little time to read and then make his name entry.

There are two things, that we would like to address:

1. The length of the entry: There is only so much space available (27 letters to be precise) to make your name entry, without breaking the layout of the table and adding additional rows for all entries, causing you to have to scroll much more. Of course we want to avoid that and have the entries as compact as possible.
So please - keep it short. :)

This is a good entry: Jane Doe, MS, USA

This is a not so good example: John Doe @ The raving Journalist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America.

So please - Only your name or your Blogs name (not both), and if you want to add
State and Country (which is totally optional), please use abbreviations.

No cities, areas. And there's no need to tell us that you're "in" Indonesia, or "of" Utah.
And for all we know, London is not a country, neither is Idaho.

The whole adding the location is a thing, that we thought might be neat, to see.
But it is entirely optional - and if your entry is too long - just leave it out. :)



2. The entries themselves:
While it's not a big problem what you enter, when having only a couple of dozen entries, it becomes one, when way over 100.

Our Main goal is to keep the links readable.
If special characters, like @ ~ etc are being used, or Entries are made in all caps, the
readability suffers.
While we understand, that you want to make your entry stand out, we think that every
entry is equally important and should have the same chance to be seen and found as the next one.
Since we are a community - please do consider that, when you make your entry. Be a team
player. ONLY letters, digits and comma.

No Special Characters, Brackets, Dashes etc.  ({[!@#$%^-_&*:<


And a last note on our policy on commercial sites.
We don't have a problem, if you run Ads on your site, or sell things.

We have a problem, when you use Skywatch/MyWorld to promote your products
or anything at all. That we won't allow - Skywatch/MyWorld is entirely Non Profit.

And we have a problem with sites that has "paid for" content. If you are being paid for
blogging and don't comply to US Laws that have been established by the FTC for
this instance - please do not post. And if you want to and are not sure - use our
contact page, send us your link and we check your site and give you the OK. (or not).
These measures are there to protect the visitors we send to sites of participants.

Thank you for reading and your understanding!
We will run this Announcement a couple of times, so that everyone has the chance to
read it. And for those, who think they don't need to be courteous and respect the
community - well those entries will no longer be edited. They will be deleted.
They can be re-posted correctly, of course.

Enough said - let's go to the fun part!