TechSpy rules and culture

It's that time of year again when I have to blog about some of the more commonly misunderstood rules. Over the past year, I've seen a lot of cases where users make arguments based on rules that don't exist.

1) ====Story Format====

Title - Must be the same as the original story (minus words such such as BREAKING, EXCLUSIVE, etc.) Also it would be nice if you removed the exclamation points since some people may not find a news story as exciting as you may. I will make an exception in cases where the title has more than 100 characters.

Description - Generally should be short (usually a short excerpt from the story itself). When creating a news post linking to your site always refer to yourself or your site in third person. Do not write "we" or "I", instead use your website’s name when referring to your article. Note that we shouldn't be too pedantic about how the site name is referenced (e.g. If I say NYT instead of New York Times, there's really no reason to make a report about it).

2) ====Sourcing====

I can admit that the wording in the official rules can be quite confusing, but here's what they are trying to explain. It's required that you link to the most original source.

Let's say you found a story on Site B about XX topic that based its story from a post on Site A, then you should create your TechSpy post around Site A (Title, Description and the main link out) and put Site B as the Credit URL since Site B isn't the most original source.

As a website owner who may be recycling a story, you are still required to follow this rule and put your site link as the Credit URL and not the main URL if you base it off someone else's post.
If your website is www.coolgadgets.com but your story came from www.techcrunch.com, then you are required to submit the the TechCrunch story and put Cool Gadgets as the credit link.

The whole point of this exercise is to give credit to those who first created the content because sometimes bigger sites tend to get all the traffic even though they found the content on a smaller blog that did all the hard work and research to create the story.

Exceptions to this include:

- Press Releases (press releases tend to be biased, so I favour 3rd party news stories instead)
- Social networking posts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook)
- Forums
- Scientific papers (most are either paywalled or written in scientific terminology not easily understood by general readers).

Even though the rules do say you can link to Twitter or Forums if an industry person talks about something, we won't bust you for that.

We understand than many of you are website promoters, but given our sourcing rule, it's obviously challenging if you are a newish blog on the tech scene. So where do you search for news?

You can base content of:

- Press Releases
- Social networking posts (e.g. Twitter, Facebook)
- Forums
- Original Content
- Store fronts (seriously, linking to a product page gives us no context)
- Scientific papers and journals

and that's just a few.

3) ====Story Types====

Please select the most appropriate story type when submitting new content. We won't have added the option if we didn't think it wasn't necessary. (e.g. news, rumor, opinion piece, image, etc.)

4) ====Rumors====

Please note that stories that are based off hearsay, leaks, or any other form of unconfirmed information is to be considered a rumor and not news.

5) ====Plagiarism====

If you are caught stealing news from another site or blatantly copy/pasting content, your story will be reported or failed depending on the severity. In the case of copy/paste stories, you will be banned for a minimum of 30 days.

6) ====Bad Engrish====

TechSpy is an English website. If your content isn't up to par, your story may be reported. This really applies mostly to contributors whose first language isn't English. We aren't victimizing anyone when we make these kind of reports, but we have to ensure that pieces are up to minimum spec.

If you can't sort out basics like spelling, tenses, simple punctuation, and other grammatical issues, maybe English blogging may not be your forte.

7) ====Don't Approve or Report posts blindly====

Always click through to check the actual story. Managing contents are not based on total points, but on accuracy. If posts are approved or reported and are contrary to what's in the story, you may be warned or penalized depending on your history.

8) ====Keep it Tech related====

While we do allow some Science stories from time to time (even though it's not really part of our mandate), let's stick to tech related content. This should generally cover NEW content and not so much "it uses some form of technology so I guess it's acceptable". Remember that folks come here mainly to catch up on breaking tech stories, so submitting something like "How to take photographs with your DSLR" or "Guy dies while making love to a phone" would be considered too off-topic.

Hope this clears up any confusion.