How to Avoid Bandwidth Theft
If you copy something (pictures or text) from another community or any site on the Internet, and paste directly to your community, message board, or anywhere else on the Internet, it is called bandwidth theft and the site you took it from is charged back for your use of it. This has nothing to do with copyright, but is very upsetting to the original owner of the information or picture, and can cause you a lot of trouble. You must copy these things to your own computer first.
If you are copying text, first paste it on your word pad, note pad or word pro. (If some of the text does not copy right on one of these programs, try it on one of the others, then copy it again onto the one you prefer and it will usually be all right.) After you have done this and edited it to your satisfaction, copy from there and paste it to the message board (or wherever) in your community. You do not have to save this material to your hard disk, but if it is something that you would like to keep, it is a good idea to do this.
If you are copying pictures, first you have to create a folder, or a place on your computer to save them. When you find a picture that you want to keep, right click on it and if it is copy able, select ‘save picture as�?or sometimes ‘save image as�?then select where you want to save it and left click on ‘save�? This is the place where you will get all the pictures that you want to add to posts, and if you delete these pictures from your folders then they will disappear from your posts unless they are in one of your photo albums in the community also.
You can either download these pictures to your photo album on your community and copy to posts from there, or you can select them one at a time from the ‘add pictures icon�? (the picture of the mountain in the bar at the top of the posting box). From here you can go to your photo albums on any community you belong to by clicking on the name of that community at the left of the screen, or you can go to any folder in your own computer by clicking on "my computer" at the top of the screen, and select pictures from there following the instructions.
by Eane
About Bumping Threads
It has been brought to my attention that recently a site was closed for Activity Meter Cheating "Bumping" and since that sites been closed theres been people running round giving out partial bits of information causing much confusion and panic. So I'm posting this just to make things clear. Firstly, MSN hasn't been closing groups for this for quite some time, they done it a while back and only acting on reports, because of so many complaints of activity meter cheaters.
What is bumping
A Bump is when someone posts a message at the end of a discussion in order to purposefully move that message back to the top of the message board to make it more visible
So why are groups being shuttered for this ?
Putting it simply they are NOT closing groups for bumping threads. MSN is closing groups that have been found to be purposefully cheating the activity meters. By "excessive" bumping
What's Excessive Bumping?
Excessive bumping is where a manager/member starts a message which intent is only to incease the number of messages posted that, in an attempt to get them ranked higher on the activity listings. Some examples are the follow
Sign In - A group that asks their members to post a message whenever they visit the site, often only an emoticon or one word is posted,
Diamond Web Award - Some groups have posted threads in order to get members to vote on their diamond web award. Some groups even ask their members to vote every time they visit and post the number the votes are up to. This not only is deemed as excessive bumping by MSN but is also against the rules of Diamond Web Awards. If you have one of these types of thread I reccomend you remove it ASAP.
Things to Avoid
Avoid bumping up a rules/important imformation message with the same emoticon/words each time, it's possible that someone could report you for cheating and MSN may take this one thread out of context.
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If you have a discussion on your message board and it's sole purpose is to generate large volumes of posts then you should remove it, as you are at risk of being closed by MSN. After some lengthy discussions with MSN after the last spate of shutterings for these reasons I was fairly assured that MSN was only closing groups that were Obviously cheating the meters.
The latest group to be shuttered for cheating the meters appears to be subject to an "attack" from another "rival" group, the members/managers of this group have been noted to be gloating about getting the site closed by sending all of their members over to bump up threads for the last couple of weeks and then reported them to MSN. This group may or may not have been purposefully cheating *BUT* the groups manager failed to see a problem with all the bumping going on, which gives me the impression that there were discussions on the board that were getting bumped extemely often that the manager was allowing to continue. As a manager this is something you really need to keep an eye on. Many groups have been shuttered due to sabotage, CM at one point was under attack by child porn being planted on our message boards and list pages, thankfully with the help of MSN they were able to trace the passports that were uploading these images, and shortly after it stopped. I acted quickly and removed the images and messages, making note of the image URL's I then sent a message to MSN explaining that there were images being planted on my group, including the URL's to the images. You must be careful about this too, MSN has been known to close groups who are reporting such activities, as they think someone is reporting the group for containing illegal images, not a manager asking for help.
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