Is it okay to scan & share magazine articles at MCF?
 

In my collection of car magazines, there are a few articles concerning 4th & 5th-gen Monte Carlos. I was toying with the idea of scanning & sharing them here; maybe start a 'reference section'?

At their own websites, Motor Trend and Car & Driver do have links to some of these articles that show up when searching there for MCs, but I have two or three other interesting articles that don't show up there or elsewhere.

Advice, admins?

I would love to be 100% in support of this idea. The problem I have is I'm not a lawyer. My assumption is that scanning and distributing those publisher articles may be a violation of a copyright law and if the authors/publishers got wind, Internet Brands may get served with a notice to remove them. We actually had to edit a couple of posts long ago made by a MCF.com member for reposting copyrighted material.

What I will do is contact a member of Internet Brands and see if they can weigh in on the scanning and sharing of articles (they may have been through this before with other forums they run).

FYI - I checked with the fine crew at Internet Brands. They said go ahead, scan and share. If an issue happens they will address it at that time.

Sounds good!

Now for the forum, would there be a good image size/resolution limit to follow? (There's no need to have it larger than actual printed page size, at any rate.)

Is there a specific section of the forum where they should go?
And should the scans be posted as attachments?

Sidestreet
I believe the forum has defaults for those. If you scan as an image, it will automatically decrease/compress to the allowable size. I have tried to upload documents and it will not let you upload if it is above the allowed size.
Each type of file has a limit to size.
If you go to your quick reply area below and click go advanced
then scroll down to manage attachments, it will bring up a pop-up where you can select a file.
Below the search area, it tells you the allowable files types and associated sizes.
I would basically try to put the article into the category to which it most applies. But if you can't decide, you could always put it in Off Topic!! :)
Hope this helps!!

I would rather not build a new section. Ideas I could suggest:
- Place a thread in "General Monte Carlo Talk" or "Off Topic". You can use one thread to house all the articles or related articles. Seems like not too long ago we were trying to consolidate how many sections we had on MCF.com, so I think it's best we hodl to that at the moment.
- I would recommend attachments, this way they are on MCF.com (some people share stuff off sites like PhotoBucket, and that's fine, but if they delete the account with PhotoBucket or move the pics, MCF.com looses the content). If they are pics (like JPG format), as Barbara said, the forum will resize/compress as needed (usually works well). PDFs are only allowed in a couple spots with limited size (I think 2mb). But PDFs would not be a bad method.
- If you are going to do multiple threads, I encourage people to make use of the prefix options for thread titles. You can search on a prefix, which makes it helpful. If this is of assistance, perhaps I should build a new prefix, something like "Articles". This way if you use that prefix, it's searchable to all.

Food for thought. There is no dead set right or wrong method. Feel free to sound off thoughts or pitch ideas and we'll do the best we can to make it all work. :)

Order of scan should be car pic...girl pic...car pic...etc. Oh...guess we don't do that here!