We have a political/breaking news forum and members post alot of copyrighted material. Is there a hack that can be used by the members to count/limit the words in a particular article posted? Thanks.

JUST copyrighted material? Explain more please.

Mor people have requested this. I think they want a [ARTICLE]article goes here[/ARTICLE] and the ability to limit the ammount of text it shows via the CP.

[ April 23, 2001 02:13 PM: Message edited by: -radiokilla- ]

Our main forum is for political breaking news and the members post articles/news stories from other sources for discussion. However, under fair use copyright laws, the posting of these articles are limited to 200 words plus a link back to the original site.

This practice is not always followed and many sites are being taken to court and sued successfully for violation of copyright infringement.

To ease the job and worry of the administrators/moderators, I was wondering if there was a hack available to truncate copy/paste articles to 200 words or the space they inhabit. Thanks.

Yes, something like Radiokilla is suggesting would be just peachy.

If your users lack the intellectual capacity to understand the law, educate the users...

Any code hack you implement will be forgotten or bypassed by users who don't know any better or who do not care.

Solution: Just have them LINK to the article in question rather than quote areas from it. It's cleaner, it avoids code hacks, and leaves no room for misinterpretation.

The purpose of this hack is to avoid a lawsuit like FreeRepublic is undergoing. Educating our members is not a real solution since a rival or enemy (we are a political board) can easily post the entire article and then email the author. Anyone smart enough to skirt the software is more rare than the rule, so we would really like to see this implimented. At least we can't be sued if we are doing all technology will allow us to. We have reason to believe this will be a necessary component of our board quite soon. Any help is appreciated.
Thanks!

As I stated above, any code hack that you implement can and will be bypassed.

If some dimwit comes along and decides to get you in trouble, there is nothing you can do to stop it.

In order to stop it, you would have to limit each and every post that ANYONE makes to 200 words.

That would really, really, really irk people, and still would not resolve the issue.

Move Along.

[ April 23, 2001 06:13 PM: Message edited by: qasic ]

So you're saying 'No' we do not have a hack for this particular function. Thanks.

Qasic:

I was re-reading your request and found that my reply did not fit. This is why I edited it.

q