Dear members,

Our forum rules have recently been updated to clarify some recent concerns. Please take a moment to review the forum rules here:

http://www.ohbaby.co.nz/Forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13912&PN=1&TPN=1 - http://www.ohbaby.co.nz/Forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13912&PN=1&TPN=1

Thank you for being a valued part of the OHbaby! Community, and happy chatting!

The OHbaby! Team

tictacjunkie wrote: Hmm, half the questions I ask involve asking "does anyone know of a good...Blah Blah?". Or recommending certain brands of wipes etc for sensitive skin which as a parent of children with severe eczema I know it's hard to find that info. So is that not allowed now? Or what about statements like "I prefer sleepsuits to gowns"? Or I went to BlahBlah movie & it was crap?

Thank you for bringing this up. There is a pretty clear difference between someone posting something like, for example, "My sister has opened a new baby shop in Wellington named XYZ, go check it out!" and something like, "Can you recommend some good baby shops in Wellington?" Product reviews should be posted in our Product Review boards, but in general, recommendations -- as long as they are genuine personal opinions -- are not frowned upon.

tictacjunkie, I'd love to know -- are you really a Tic Tac junkie? Because the orange ones are my favourite.

AandCsmum wrote: So if someone wants to sell their old nappies like they have done so via the nappy thread, this is a no-go now??

emz is right, AandCsmum -- this isn't permitted and hasn't been for quite a while now, and is something we'll be looking into a bit more closely from now on. I hear of people having great success with selling nappies on Trade Me, though!

Hannahbil wrote: Wow so no sharing recipes from cookbooks?

Hi Hannahbil, this comes under the heading of "copyright infringement". Unfortunately anything that appears in print and is copyrighted is not permitted to be reproduced without the publisher's permission, or we (OHbaby,as well as the poster of the copyrighted material, can face legal action. This isn't a rule that's unique to OHbaby! -- it's the case for any message board, anywhere.

Here is a good general explanation of copyright laws in New Zealand:

http://www.copyright.org.nz/basics.php - http://www.copyright.org.nz/basics.php

The Copyright Council of New Zealand has some excellent information about copyright rules on the website, although it can be a bit difficult to understand at times -- even for someone like me, whose job it is to understand and uphold the rules!

Snappy wrote: Thanks Katherine. Can you clarify the rules against someone starting a thread asking for others to pitch in on a photo session? I have asked but no-one has answered me. There has been instances where people have started threads, without any links to my website at all, and they have been removed.. yet others stand. Mine were the only ones that got removed... and all I have been told was that it was just "weird" that they got removed...

Hi Snappy, I'm not sure what the content of all of the removed posts was as I am not the only staff member moderating these message boards. However, I appreciate your question and I'll try to answer as best I can. Asking people to pitch in on photo sessions is a tricky situation, as it constitutes drumming up business for the photographer -- which is a form of promotion/advertising. So that is the likely reason why threads of that nature were removed.

Additionally, we often get reports of threads that are infringing on forum rules. Unfortunately, we don't have time to trawl through every single post in every single thread on here (we are a very small team!), so we rely on our message board members to be aware of the rules, and to get in touch with us if they see something that is inappropriate. In general, the members of the message board are a pretty good self-managing bunch!

We don't target or single out specific posters or remove specific people's threads with any sort of malicious intention. It is the content of posts we are looking at. It does happen that some of the same issues/types of threads come up over and over, which is why we've made an effor to clarify the forum rules recently -- so that we can nip problems in the bud before they begin.

I hope that this helps address what you are asking!

Snappy, I can understand your frustration, and I wish I had a better explanation for you, but I am sorry that I don't. It might help to know that many of the threads that we remove are done so literally within minutes of their going up -- so hardly anyone sees them, meaning there are probably other threads that were removed sooner than the ones mentioning you. We are fortunate to have some pretty devoted message board members who don't hesitate to point something out to us before we even get a chance to look! In the somewhat distant past (a few months ago) I can remember a couple of photography threads being removed for the reasons above, although I can't for the life of me remember the usernames involved. All I can say is that our team does our best to keep things fair, and you have as much right as anyone else on here to let us know if there is a thread on the boards that is breaking the rules.

I should also note that thread removal is not usually something that we have to do very much of. Of the hundreds of threads that are started each week, we may need to remove two or three, and sometimes weeks go by where we don't remove any threads or posts.

It all depends on what's going on in message board land. There has been a lot of activity on here recently and while we absolutely love to see all the different discussions and opinions being offered, it also means that the more stuff is going on, the more chance there is that a fuss will be kicked up over something. It's human nature, I guess!

Our message board community is 99% friendly and positive and supportive, and we definitely value that. "Rule-breaking", which is a phrase that sounds a bit silly to my ears but is the best I can come up with on a Thursday night, usually happens because someone wasn't familiar with the forum guidelines, not because someone was trying to cause trouble. That's the reason why we don't keep track of whose posts we have removed -- because we believe that no one deserves to be singled out and that our community members have their own and each other's best interests at heart.

Snappy, thanks for your questions, and for being persistent in trying to get to the bottom of this. I appreciate the time you are taking. I can see how it is confusing, as we are finding it hard to clarify in the right words as well. I would say that when people ask for recommendations, it's perfectly fine to leap in and recommend someone -- there is a thread on here now doing just that.

It's not so much the issue of "exposure" that we're worried about, as a word-of-mouth recommendation is more about expressing an opinion and sharing a positive experience with other people -- which can only be beneficial to the other message board members.

There is a pretty fine line between "promotion" and "recommendation" sometimes, depending on how things are worded. We don't mind recommendations -- when it's a genuine "I had a sitting with so-and-so, they were awesome, this is their website" type of thing. It's when the posts are "drumming up business" that we get to the line being crossed -- when it's something like, "So-and-so is awesome, and they are coming to my town, they have six spaces left, let me know if you want to come get your photos done and I'll book you in". The latter is what we'd consider a breach of the forum guidelines.

I hope this helps and that I haven't made it clear as mud!

I'm sorry that you felt that way about my comment, fattartsrock -- it certainly wasn't intended to be patronising, just a gentle pointer in the right direction for more information. Unfortunately, it's easy to take things the wrong way when you're reading the words that someone has written and not seeing their accompanying facial expressions and body language. Please rest assured I meant no disrespect.

I've been on here for the past couple of hours trying my best to address people's concerns and encourage our members to communicate with us, while taking an awful lot of flak in the process, and certainly facing a great deal of written angst! The staff who work at OHbaby! are human too, not faceless entities hiding behind computers, and we care a great deal about our message board members, both new and old. If we didn't care, I wouldn't be spending so much time on here trying to get things sorted out so that we can all move forward in a positive way. That's our object in all of this, and I'm sure that's the object of our members too.

Katherine wrote: . The staff who work at OHbaby! are human too, not faceless entities hiding behind computers, and we care a great deal about our message board members, both new and old.

Without wanting to sound horrid - the moderators used to be active members of the forums, they used to partake in the conversations - which made us feel like they were "one of us"...not the faceless big brother censoring us. We only hear from moderators / admin now when they are reprimanding or censoring (or clarifying rules).

Thank you for bringing that up, MummyFreckle. Unfortunately our workloads don't permit us to be on the forums as often as we used to be able to, and as we are currently without a website editor due to the lovely Emma's departure for Sydney several weeks back, we don't have a dedicated staff member who is "in charge" of the forums. We are currently sharing the website editor's jobs between us, on top of our regular workloads, while we look for a person who is just the right fit for our team and for our website. When that new person is on board, they will be more actively involved in the message boards.

In general, we don't like to "interfere" in the message boards too much, as we believe that as adults our members can pretty much fend for themselves! And we do involve ourrselves in positive ways -- for example, I posted up the winners of the Burning Question draw earlier today -- and it's unfortunate that only the interactions that can be perceived as negative are the ones that gain the most attention. Although this is much like the newspaper -- the terrible stories get many more reads than the happy calm ones!

.Mel wrote: See now that's why I think this site needs dedicated mods, not just a website editor. You need to have people who are assigned to various parts of the forum and who look after those threads. That way it's taking the pressure off of you, Angie and Kelly, and obviously Emma's replacement. I cant' understand why a Magazine Editor and a Managing director would want to be moderating boards when they should be concentrating on the magazine? So why don't you let your members moderate?

I absolutley agree with Mel - I think we all appreciate that Katherine and Angela are pretty darn busy with other parts of the business, and I are doing a great job of those things. It seems like a big ask to jump in here on an evening and try to moderate too.

.Mel, that's certainly something we have considered, and to a degree our members are self-moderating at present. But the "hiring" of dedicated forum moderators brings up a lot of questions for us.

One of the biggest issues is whether our moderators are impartial and able to make decisions on a professional level that are in the best interests of the company and the message board members, and this is difficult, since so many of our members have personal relationships on these boards. Any moderators would need to be representatives of OHbaby!, which means representing the company at all times -- meaning, a degree of separation from the other message board members, and extreme care in what they are posting. It can be quite limiting, being a message board moderator, and would require the giving up of some freedom of speech!

I would be very interested to hear how our members think this would work. How would we choose someone for each forum? What criteria would be important? How much time could we expect them to spend moderating? What would they do if they had to delete the post of a friend? These are all things we'd think about, but we'd love to know your feedback.

First forum I joined was members who were mods, not paid either so I don't see the issue with having a few members as the mods on here. They don't have to be paid and that way the people who are dedicated to the mag can stay that way.

Little_Red wrote: Man, everyone is taking this a little too seriously! It is a chat forum, it is free, it is a form of entertainment. If you don't like it don't use it!

Valid point, but you haven't been around as long as quite a few of us and seen the changes we have. While change can be good, i think this is taking it too far. It used to be a wonderful community and now I see it as we (forum members) are the little noones and the admin are going to take away our fun. Look at my post count, if it wasn't a wonderful place would my post count really be that high??

It seems like one rule for one and one rule for another. people quote quite a lot of things and your rules are now saying we can't - not much fun in that.

Also someone else said it as well, most musicians would love to see their words being used they wouldn't jump up and down because a forum member in New Zealand quoted their lyrics, it isn't the United States where you can sue for anything.

And Chops is right, you are a business, we shouldn't have to worry about your staffing issues. Althou as a long time member I do understand Emma has left a huge hole for someone to fill, but having a couple of members being your mods wouldn't hurt your business.

Thanks for your repsonse Angela, although the  "you dont know whats going on behind the scenes" theory is understandable, I still think that a reason (even without going into details) would be the courteous way to deal with closing / locking a thread. A simple "Apologies folks, this thread has been closed due to a complaint etc" would be better than nothing.

I dont think that any of us would want to see OB engaged in legal issues or problems because of the discussions on here, but I do think that censoring what we can and cant say or talk about is problematic for an open forum. Perhaps you need to initiate better controls ie registration prior to reading posts (therefore google searching would show the result - but would force people to register before reading it). By forcing people to register you can also get them to "sign" a disclaimer stating they will follow the rules and that OB is not responsible for opinions / views / discussions on the forums.

You are right - these discussions do seem onesided, because yet again you have asked for our opinions / feedback on a subject but you dont like it when they are not as complimentary as you would like them to be. We are not mind readers, we do not know what is going on behind the scenes - because you dont tell us (even in the broadest  / vaguest of ways).

Ginger....lol at your thread being deleted without you realising, I am now wondering if I have started/commented on anything that was against the 'rules'...I assume not?

To everyone else who works/has a business from home...mucho respect ladies!!! I'd LOVE to do it but quite frankly am too damn tired hehe  *yawn*

Flissty wrote: As a suggestion (since, from memory, they were invited) ... One forum I'm on has a section for WAHMs. It has quite structured rules about who can go on there and how often they can post but it is designed for people who have small (often very small) businesses, who could not afford to be advertisers, but it means the community they belong to can support them and their businesses. They may advertise, seek testers for products, get info about whether there is a market for a product they're considering etc. I would love to see something like that to support our community members in getting businesses off the ground. I would want to see it limited to active community members cos I get really annoyed when people "we" (sorry, don't mean to sound snobby or exclusive) don't know come and flog their businesses and that's it. This way, people like Snappy and Lexiesmummy and all the other girls who are doing some crafts and wanting to sell small quantities (sorry for leaving people out - PG brain) or have small businesses who have contributed a LOT to this community (and therefore this business, b/c the online advertisers are here partly, if not mostly b/c of the online community) also can get support from the community. JM2CW

Love it!!! I would much rather support one of our own where possible. Great thinking Flissty