fixing reposts
I received some feedback during the week that creating a full content re-post wasn't ok. I accept that this is a pretty common view, probably the view of the majority of people.
But what to do if you like the idea of full content re-posts? I am more than happy for people to share my writing, but I wouldn't want to re-post content from anyone that would be upset by that happening.
I've been thinking about that for the last few days and decided that I would start by checking for a new microformats property called repost-allowed. This is an experimental microformats I've added to Dobrado that can currently have one of three values: full, link or none.
If the property is set to full, the author of the post allows the full content of their post to be reposted. If the property isn't found, or set to link, then a link to the original is shown instead of the content. I also added none in case the author preferred that a re-post wasn't created at all.
I'm open to ideas if people think this is useful, or maybe there's a better way? For now I'm going to set repost-allowed to full in my own post templates. I'm ok with just reposting links if no one else adds this markup, though I've made re-posting content from Twitter an exception since that seems to be more acceptable.
But what to do if you like the idea of full content re-posts? I am more than happy for people to share my writing, but I wouldn't want to re-post content from anyone that would be upset by that happening.
I've been thinking about that for the last few days and decided that I would start by checking for a new microformats property called repost-allowed. This is an experimental microformats I've added to Dobrado that can currently have one of three values: full, link or none.
If the property is set to full, the author of the post allows the full content of their post to be reposted. If the property isn't found, or set to link, then a link to the original is shown instead of the content. I also added none in case the author preferred that a re-post wasn't created at all.
I'm open to ideas if people think this is useful, or maybe there's a better way? For now I'm going to set repost-allowed to full in my own post templates. I'm ok with just reposting links if no one else adds this markup, though I've made re-posting content from Twitter an exception since that seems to be more acceptable.
When I repost something, I very intentionally designed my reposts so that the post on my site would clearly look like it was written by the original author and not me. Specifically that means things like not having my name or photo anywhere near the content, and instead having the original author’s name and photo in the same place that my own photo would appear on my posts. You can see some examples at https://aaronparecki.com/reposts
Granted I don’t ever show the full text of a blog post I repost, but I do show the full contents of notes, regardless of their length. In practice this means I don’t have many occurrences of large amounts of copied text. If I were to repost a blog post, it would show only the blog post title on my site. It’s debatable whether that’s a “real” repost, but I’m happy with that decision.
In any case, I still think the more important issue here is how the repost is presented rather than whether or not a repost should be allowed in the first place.