It's recently come to my attention that people on this site are being intentionally misquoted. This happened to me a few times and there is nothing more insidious. In fact it's called libel and it's illegal. To be clear, I am not referring to misunderstandings or interpretations. I am referring to direct quotes, either framed in a quote box or quotation marks.
For example, if ted posts a statement...
I like Mexican food .............................................................................
flamer can respond with...
"ted" wrote:
I like Mexican food
I can't believe you just said you hate Mexicans. .............................................................................
That's not libel. But if flamer does this...
"ted" wrote:
I hate Mexicans
That IS libel.
.............................................................................
To anyone who does this and thinks they are being clever let me explain why it isn't.
1. The original quote will still be available to verify so malicious intent CAN be proven.
2. Your anonymity does not protect the site owner from legal action resulting from your "clever" stunt. According to this site's policies, all the content on this site is owned by the proprietor of this site, which means the business that operates this site CAN be sued if libel can be proven. So your putting a business at risk.
All this being said, I am hereby creating this topic as an explanation and a fair warning. If anyone is victimized by this kind of BS, I encourage you to post the incident with links to this topic. These events have been reported to the admin but he is unsure how to deal with the issue. There certainly isn't any algorithms or filters to catch it. So it's up to the users to maintain the integrity of our exchanges.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What to do if you are victimized by intentional misquoting.
1. find your post and right-click on the "#" mark to the right of the date stamp. Then select "copy link address" to your clipboard.
2. Next, open a response to the offending post where you were misquoted. Then add a link using the
tag and paste in the address that you copied to your clipboard. This provides a direct link to your original quote.
3. re-quote your original quote so the intentional misquoting is plain to see... The link is your way to proving to them that your version is the original.
4. post that response then right-click on that "#" mark again to copy the link address for your response to the clipboard.
5. post that link to this topic. So we can all see it.
Thank you.
straightUp