Site Rules

These are the official rules for this blog. If you break them…Griselda will make you disappear!

Just kidding.

But, seriously, these will make things easier for everyone who reads the blog. If you have questions, comment on this page or email me at obliviousprattler@yahoo.com.

PLAGIARISM

I don’t mind if you use the same information. It’s not mine anyway. All I did was find it online—that’s easy to do. We’re all talking about Winx Club, right?

But please write your own article. Don’t re-post mine. This especially goes for the Musings & Rants posts; they’re my personal opinions. If you agree—or even disagree—with me, leave a comment on the post!

But it bothers me when someone sticks my words on their site and says, “I agree with her because—” or “she’s right/wrong because—” Unless that’s the point of your post—for example, I said something that upset you and you wanted to say why. But that’s rarely the case and was not the case in the situation described above.

This isn’t The Associated Press. Even if we share an opinion, we have different ways of saying it.

Quoting me is fine; in fact, I’m flattered that you found something you think is worth quoting! But if you do, please do the following:

1. Make it clear that it’s a quote. Mention the author or the blog.
2. Put the quote in italics, put quotation marks around it, or use the blockquote html code, especially for large quotes. (You only have to do one of these things, not all of them. I’m not that excessive.)
3. Link back to the post where the quote came from or to the blog itself. This is the most important rule. You know how teachers make us write a “Works Cited” page with our research papers? Link-backs are like citations (only easier to create).
4. Quoting me quoting someone else cancels me out. Link back to their article instead.
5. If you’re going to quote half my post, I’d rather you just linked to it somewhere or cut down the size of the quote.

If you need an example of what I want, see this article on Winx-Fairies. You don’t have to do everything the author, Stella Solaria, did (like plugging my blog, which was very kind). For a comparison, here is the article she quoted from. She only took one line from my translation of Roxy’s profile and wrote an article that looked nothing like mine. Even though we both mentioned Roxy’s mother, I focused on what happened to her and she focused on who she might be.

The bottom line: let’s be ourselves. Be original. We all are.

COMMENTING

Please comment! We want to hear what you have to say! We love comments; in fact, we look forward to logging into the blog each day and seeing new comments. They make us very happy!

Keep these rules in mind, though.

1. Keep comments G-rated. No offensive or suggestive language/links. I will not publish a comment if it contains any of this.
2. Do not comment as someone else. You should never give your real name online if you can help it, but don’t pretend to be someone else, especially not to make them look bad. Once you pick an online identity, try to stick to it.
3. No flaming. Do not mock or put down another commenter. I won’t encourage fights.
4. Stay on the topic of the post as much as possible. A little trailing off occasionally is fine—I do it all the time—but if we’re talking about the Believix powers and you start talking about strawberry milkshakes (as much as I love them), I’m not going to publish your comment.
5. No spamming. Spam comments will be deleted automatically.
6. (Added Dec. 2011) Do not “correct” old posts. I’m not gonna edit them, since most of us will have moved on.
   Example: I wrote an article speculating that Artù may not be a normal dog:
   
   Notice it was posted in May 2009, nearly three years ago. We all know by now I was wrong, so a comment like this isn’t necessary and will be deleted:
   
   “I’ve seen the whole season, and no, Artu’s just a regular dog…”

I will always publish your comment as long as you follow these rules. So please comment as much as you’d like! Your opinion is valuable to us!