To all Bulldog Barks & Bytes Members,

A situation has developed here on Bulldog Barks & Bytes that we need to make you aware of and ask for your input and assistance.

This site has been contacted by a representative of The Times (Shreveport) informing us that the posting of articles on this site that appear in The Times is a violation of The Times Terms of Service. The Time Terms of Service states the following:

http://www.shreveporttimes.com/customerservice/termsofservice.shtml

Shreveporttimes.com Terms of Service
Shreveporttimes.com Terms of Service
Updated 2005

General

This Shreveporttimes.com website (the "Service") is owned and operated by Gannett Publishing Company and contains material that is protected by international copyright, trademark and other intellectual property laws. Unless otherwise specified, the Service is intended for your personal, noncommercial use only. You may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit or distribute in any way any material, including code and software, from the Service. You may download material from the Service and may use the Service for your personal, non-commercial use only, provided you keep intact all copyright and other proprietary notices.

As part of our Service, Shreveporttimes.com agrees to provide you with information and other computer services subject to these Terms of Service. You agree to use the Service in accordance with these Terms of Service. Accessing our Service, in any manner, for the purpose of obtaining information, technical or otherwise, about the Service constitutes use of the Service such that the party accessing the Service is bound by these Terms of Service. Because the Web is an evolving medium, we may need to change these Terms of Service or impose new conditions on use of the Service, from time to time, in which case we will post the revised Terms of Service on this website. By continuing to use the Service after we post any such changes, you accept the Terms of Service, as modified.

You may establish a hypertext link to this Service so long as the link does not state or imply any sponsorship of your site by Shreveporttimes.com. However, you may not, without the prior written permission of Shreveporttimes.com, frame any of the content of the Service, or incorporate into another website or other service any intellectual property of Shreveporttimes.com, its parent or affiliate companies or its licensors.
We have also been asked to remove from this website any and all posts which containing the text of The Times articles.

We believe there are two areas where this must be done. First, the news portion of our site is currently being reviewed for any Times articles and those articles are being deleted when they are found. We have already deleted recently added articles, but are having to go through almost 800 prior articles to determine if they need to be deleted. Second, there may be posts on this message board which contain the text of Times articles. We will be performing a search for these posts to determine if they need to be deleted as well.

In addition to the above request, we have been asked to in the future post links to the articles instead of posting the text from The Times articles on our website. This applies not only to the articles on the front end of our site but also in your posts as well.

What Should You Do?
  • When wanting to post an article, post a link to the article instead of the text of the article
  • If you see an article posted by a member of this site, please use the “Report Bad Post” icon (little triangle with a red border) under their username. Include in your comment that you believe this is in violation with a media outlet’s Terms of Service. An e-mail will be dispatched to all administrators and moderators of this site to review the post and make any needed edits. Use of this feature does NOT adversely affect the reputation or ability to use this message board! It is merely a way to inform us of posts which may need to be reviewed by an administrator or moderator.
  • We are currently seeking guidance from The Times on whether or not an exert of an article can be posted by a member to comment on as long as a link to the entire article is provided. It is our understanding that this IS NOT a violation of the Terms of Service, but want to confirm this before stating it is acceptable.
What are We Doing?

First, we are making you aware of this situation and are asking you to self moderate you posts to comply with this request. We have already told you what we are doing in relation to existing content on this site and we will be continuing to work on removing existing posts and articles from The Times. While The Times is the only media outlet which has contacted us concerning this issue, we believe others may have similar concerns. This will impact the content on the front end of our site. We are currently looking at a redesign of our homepage content and alternative ways we can provide information to you, our members. We have asked The Times if they have available an RSS or XML feed which can be customized to feed us only articles relating to Louisiana Tech. We have not heard back from them yet. We will be asking some of our other sources for news content the same question. If, or when, these are available, we will incorporate them into the front end of our site. The good thing about RSS and XML feeds is that they give a title and description of the article and link directly to that article which is what The Times is asking us to do. Until the time an RSS feed is available, we will not be posting any articles from The Times on our homepage. They may be linked through our existing Google RSS feed, but no new articles will be posted.

By significantly decreasing the articles we are posting on the homepage of this site, we will have the opportunity to provide new and more focused information concerning Tech Athletics. We hope you will be pleased with this redesign and would ask for your feedback when it is available.

How You Can Help

We would like to have your input and response to this. Specifically, we would like any suggestions you may have on how we should post articles from The Times, The News Star, or any other newspapers or websites. Also, we would like you to tell us what you would like to see on the homepage if we were to remove the all the articles from the site.

We appreciate your support of this site and value your opinions. Please share them with us!!!


The Bulldog Barks & Bytes Administration Team