EDITORIAL GUIDELINES FOR ALYTH ONLINE

Alyth Online is designed to help groups, organisations and businesses in Alyth to engage more effectively with the local community and with visitors to our town. The following guidelines are intended to to ensure that everyone using the site has the experience they want. It’s important that you as a contributor to the site understand the importance of creating and presenting your content responsibly. The guidelines are, in effect, our terms of use for the site and our moderators will regularly check and evaluate all content on the site to ensure that it supports and reflects our values. If it doesn’t, we reserve the right to ask you to amend or remove it as appropriate.

What we ask our contributors to do:

• Do consider others –
  Alyth Online aspires to be an inclusive community welcoming people of all backgrounds, all of whom have the right to feel comfortable using the site, so please be polite and respectful in your interactions with other users.

• Do upload content that you have created –
  Respect the copyright and intellectual property of others. This means don’t steal text, photos or videos that other people have created and pass them off as your own. Credit people involved and welcome joint publications.

• Do moderate your content –
  You need to take responsibility for ensuring that what you upload is accurate, authentic, appropriate and appropriately placed. We will not tolerate content that misleads or offends other users.

• Do link back to Alyth Online when you post your Alyth Online content elsewhere –
  Links to and from content on Alyth Online to other sites and platforms are very valuable for helping all our users and the wider community enjoy the best experience of Alyth that they can.

What we ask our contributors not to do:

• Don’t upload anything that isn’t yours –
  This includes other people’s articles, text, photos, video and/or stuff you’ve collected from around the Internet without permission and/or credits. It also includes anyone else’s private data. If we think any content is violating someone else’s copyright or privacy, we will remove it.

• Don’t post anything against the law or normal standards of decency –
  If you wouldn’t show it to your mum or any child you know, then it’s probably not suitable for Alyth Online, particularly if it promotes what the law and/or the Advertising Standards Authority considers to be racism, sexism, discrimination, hate-speech, violence, terrorism, obscenity, sexual or malicious content. We ask you to be responsible and use common sense, but remember that our moderators will be checking and removing anything unsuitable, up to and including deletion of your entire content and access rights, and possibly reporting you to the authorities.

• Don’t criticise other users –
  Alyth Online is not a platform for you to harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate other individuals or organisations. If we receive a valid complaint about your content, we’ll send you a warning or terminate your account.

• Don’t abuse Alyth Online’s commercial function –
  Alyth Online is primarily an online local news and information website. If you are a commercial business, it’s fine to present your sales proposition here but don’t go overboard with spam or outrageous claims for your product or service. Remember that we follow (as far as possible – we don’t claim to be advertising lawyers) the Advertising Standards Authority rules.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

Other People (their content, their behaviour)

You will see all sorts of things on Alyth Online, some of which might offend you or which you might think is infringing your (or even someone else’s) copyright. If you think there’s cause for concern, you can either contact the organisation or individual that posted the content (but be respectful) or report it to Alyth Online staff via the contact links on the site.

In Conclusion

We’ve crafted these guidelines. If you don’t feel that you can abide by them, maybe Alyth Online isn’t for you. If you ever have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. Please feel free to drop us a line.