New member agreement and guidelines

[eG Member Relations Team]

We're proud to publish a revised member agreement for the eGullet Society.

There's a lot of information in it, and we hope you'll read it carefully. Even though we've simplified it, it still covers a lot of territory, so it might be helpful to highlight a few of the most critical changes:

• We have shortened nearly all of our policies and guidelines. With the exception of the ones our lawyers made us write a certain way (e.g., the privacy policy and the arbitration guidelines), we tried to keep things down to a few short, plain-language bullets. We hope this will clear up ambiguites, especially in what constitutes topicality and appropriate behavior.
  
• We have increased our fair-use quoting allowance from 100 to 150 words.
  
• Our new external linking guidelines are particularly significant. If you link to an article, please explain what's in the article well enough so that when the link dies the post and topic will still make sense. Hosts or managers have the discretionary power (though they will use it only if there is no reasonable alternative) to edit posts that do not adhere to this guideline.
  
• The forums are littered with image links that no longer have images associated with them. The new policy does not allow off-site hosting of images. Everything will have to be in ImageGullet. Please read the External linking guidelines carefully. Starting soon, we will no longer allow images that are hosted on another site to appear in eG Forums. You may still link to images, though we prefer that you do not. Very soon, we will increase ImageGullet allocations for all members in order to help smooth the transition.
  

There are two new guidelines:

• Membership and staff categories
  
• Arbitration guidelines
  

The member agreement and guidelines are here. Happy reading!