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DaniWeb is designed, developed, and maintained by a small team consisting of myself (Dani), James, our systems administrator, and Davey, our community manager. I have been working fulltime, largely behind-the-scenes, and often putting in 80+ hour weeks, ever since I was a teenager, to build DaniWeb into what it has grown into today. Servers are expensive, and all of our expenses are paid for out of my own pocket. We have no debt and have never taken any outside funding since our inception in 2002.

This website and its community have been both my livelihood as well as my passion project for more than half my life, and it warms my heart to see how many others out there it touches. If you have ever found DaniWeb helpful, useful, fun, a great learning experience, a place to meet, talk to and share ideas with smart, talented people, or has in some way enhanced your life over the past two decades, please help us out with a financial contribution.

Welcome to the October 2016 DaniWeb Digest

Recently we were asked where the support link was for DaniWeb users. Our usual response is to suggest that DaniWeb is the support link; the database archive of questions and answers, and access to a membership full of experts. In this particular case, the support required was to do with membership of DaniWeb itself and account management. Actually, the previous advice still stands: asking for help in the Community Feedback section, with your posting suitably tagged, is the quickest way to get our full attention. If the support required had been dealing with, say, some inappropriate behaviour (abuse, spam etc) then the quickest way to deal with it would be to flag it. Quite literally, in fact, as there's a little flag to the right of every post. Click on this and a 'flag for moderation' dialog appears. Simply complete the reason for flagging and hit return. That request for moderation will immediately be made available to our team of moderators, and generally speaking the first to log in and see it will deal with it.

Talking of problematic posts, please be sure that you are familiar with our member rules. What's that you say, you didn't know there were any? That's perhaps understandable as, being a friendly community type place we don't think that a big flashing sign saying 'read the rules' on every page is the way to go. Nor are our moderating team the type to be all over members like a cheap suit for any minor infringement of posting etiquette. However, you can and should read the rules so you known what is and isn't acceptable. The link is actually right there at the bottom of very page even if you don't realise it: go to the navigation strip that starts 'About Us' and ends 'Terms of Service' and hit the latter. The second entry which is headed 'Terms of Use' has the link to our posting rules. You can go straight there by clicking here if you prefer. But do go there, and do read what it says; it might save you from making a genuine mistake or even earning an account infraction (which can accumulate to form a time-limited posting ban) that could have been easily avoided.

And while we are on the subject of the rules, every now and then we find that it's necessary to remind members that they need to ensure they own the intellectual property rights to everything that is posted. It's one of our community rules, after all, and common sense to boot. Oh, and it could lead to an infraction if you fail to follow it. So, please, do not simply cut and paste large swathes of text from another site and submit it as your reply to a question, or as a new post here. Quite often such postings are easy to spot, and moderators regularly search for cut and paste content like this. As well as the intellectual property aspect, it's also not helpful for our SEO. Search engines such as Google will apply a penalty when the same content has been copied to multiple sites. Worse of all, such behavior is most often associated with spammers: both those that seek to include an obfuscated link to their own sites under selected keywords in the article text, and those who use the method as a quick way to post something with a signature attached for no other reason than to publicise the links in it.

It's easy to see how the moderators might think you are a spammer yourself if you follow their patterns of work. Please do not use our forums as a vehicle simply to advertise your products or services. If you want to advertise with us, we have plenty of information about our rates here. Of course, if your product or service is directly related to the question being asked, and genuinely helps to solve the problem being faced, then it is acceptable to reference it within your answer to that posting. Our moderators are, however, well versed in spotting blatant advertising posing as a genuine response and will deal with it accordingly.

DaniWeb rules also clearly state that you should "provide evidence of having done some work yourself if posting questions from school or work assignments" yet this doesn't seem to stop a number of members from simply posting their assignments verbatim and expecting the community to provide the answers for them. There are a couple of things which should immediately jump out at anyone as to why this is wrong. Firstly, by posting that question verbatim there is every chance that the poster is in breach of copyright. Secondly, the poster simply isn't going to actually learn anything if DaniWeb does their homework for them. None of which means that DaniWeb isn't prepared to help you with your homework, quite the opposite in fact. All we ask is that you show us that you are trying to solve the task, and provide evidence to that regard. Most commonly this will be in the form of your code; simply post up how far you have got and tell us where you are getting stuck. That way we will be able to point you in the right direction without just giving you the answer. We will do all we can to guide you, to help you to understand how to spot problems and how to solve them. This understanding of the problem solving process is part and parcel of being a good programmer.

Finally, a quick reminder not to post editorial articles that you have already published on another website (for the same search engine penalty reasons). The keyword to take away is to keep it original folks, if you want to repeat information found elsewhere then either link to it if it's relevant to the discussion or better still re-write as a new piece but in your own words.

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