We’ve been making some changes to our community policy to clarify the rules for our forum and to make it clearer what actions we’ll take if these rules are violated. This updated policy will apply from 30th September 2024.
The main changes are:
We have clarified some rules relating to actions that violate our community policy.
We have expanded the policy to cover all our social spaces.
We have clarified the actions we will take when the community policy is violated.
Only post your own content
Text, images and any other material you post must be your own work, or something that you have permission to share. Content you post must not infringe on anyone’s copyright or trademark.
So does that mean post such as folksy friday where we post a collage or video of other peoples products on here and social media are out?
Or do we have to ask each person if we can include a certain product link and image before we create the post?
I am asking because I do not want to fall foul of the rules
There’s some sort of Tracking thing embedded in it that my virus checker did not like. I can open the new policy from here, so it’s no biggie, but just in case you don’t know that it’s embedded. It may of course be there by design.
I’ve no idea if it’s okay or if it’s a baddie, but my Norton did not like it one bit…
Following on from Minpin Towers point, does this also apply to threads on the forum like the “share an item from the shop above”. Or when you show an item from someone elses shop as a thank you on the “my biggest fan” thread?
Or indeed any recommending of a shop other than one’s own, on a social media site e.g if a friend on fb is looking for an item and you want to send them a link to a folksy shop you think might have it.
Good point! I assumed that by putting my images of products onto the platform I would tacitly be giving permission to anyone else to use them for cross-promotion on social media, but maybe that isn’t the case - I haven’t been back to the Folksy policies to check. (I hope we’re not going to have to give up Folksy Friday, but if we all have to ask each seller for explicit permission for each image and link, it’s going to be a LOT more work to make an 8-image board each week and I can’t see many people having the time!)
Sorry for making you all worry, the part about only posting your own content has always been part of our policy, but it’s not really with things like Folksy Fridays in mind, because sellers are generally going to want people to share their items and get more promotion (as long as you give them credit).
However remember that everything you find online is going to have been created by someone, just because you have access to something it doesn’t mean you have permission to share it. For example, if you buy a pattern, a song or some other kind of digital download, that doesn’t give you permission to freely share it and that kind of content should not be posted on the forum without permission from the copyright holder. Obviously it’s not the sort of thing most people would do anyway, but we still have to make sure it’s clear in the rules.
Following on from the comment there on the folksy Friday boards - which I think are great and I used to do regularly and will hopefully get back to doing again soon - I agree it would take way more extra time… but you would also lose… as for me the really nice thing was, if you got chosen by somebody for their board, it was such a lovely surprise that just boosted your day when you saw it, because somebody had liked your stuff enough to include it in there without you knowing.
I would imagine it is ok to continue with the Folksy boards etc but it has made me wonder whether there are any shops on Folksy that don’t want us to use their images. I have come across it on Instagram, one of the sellers I have tried to promote a couple of times doesn’t allow tagging of her items. I do follow her on IG but wasn’t able to tag her shop name on a folksy friday board. Presumably as part of an online platform we are giving permission to Folksy to use our images for promotion but I never considered others sellers may not want us to use them although I can’t really imagine an online seller wouldn’t want extra exposure, BTW I’m all for it…share away as many times as you want to.
I think possibly the line about only sharing our own images is more to do with claiming someone elses work is our own, to only post images of things we have made ourselves in our shop and on the promotion threads only to post our own work. perhaps @Folksyadmin would be able to clarify it please.
Ok I was too slow didn’t see the reply…thankyou @kimfolksy for clarifying.
To be completely clear are you saying it is 100% ok for a Folksy seller (or ex folksy seller as they are allowed to post on here) or Folksy themselves to share anything from Folksy but not ok to share anything from anywhere else ?
that made me chuckle!