Hi Everyone,
I wanted to stop in for a brief introduction and pose a few questions following my new membership.
First of all, I came to this site through my research on the occult, Satanism, Ouija, Buddhism/Hinduism, physics, and metaphysics. These subjects have always enticed me with great wonder, passion, and longing for something more than the current rationality of our realm of modern man. Specifically, I was researching Ouija board stories and experiences to draw commonalities among intent; personal power; inorganic and other beings and entities; crystals; seeing energy bodies and auras; and ritual, when I was linked here by Google.
My first substantial post intends to draw conclusions from my online and book readings as applied to the realm of Ouija boards as tools of intent to move the assemblage of other perceptions both in dreaming and in the physical world. In so doing, I first read this forum's rules as found in the various stickies, and I didn't see anything relevant to the length of quotations of copyrighted works, so that created my first series of questions for the administrators and other experienced members.
Without turning this into a forum war, which I read was forbidden; I will post my questions and plan of action here. I actually had no war on that forum yesterday, as I did not interact with anyone. As soon as I posted my first post, something as what I believe to be an automatic spamming rule, or else a lightning-fast administrator, instantly banned me. I hope it was due to the length of my post, but because I saw my post had actually posted and been read by three members before I lost all activity privileges; I think it might have been an overzealous administrator. I posted my introduction, points and conclusions; and quotes with full credit, title, and authorship. If this was not a length-culling spam rule, then I would suspect the admin banned me since my quotes were about 5 paragraphs long from each source.
I believe there is real value in posting true text directly rather than summarizing and using in-sentence quotes, as it gives the reader the author's context and style, and this full posting helps the reader to see and identify the true intent and the power of the text. Finally, it increases the probability that the quote will actually be read since there is no additional action needed for a link, and especially, the likelihood increases when a book not available online and not owned by the reader is the source. My actions definitely are not plagiaristic and do respect intellectual property, since the quotes are minute fractions of the entirety of the works; my conclusions are far broader and drawing from multiple sources; and finally, they are not redundant to the quotes.
With all that said, my question is, are long quotes (only about 6-7 extremely small paragraphs [due to one sentence quotes making frequent paragraphs in one work] from each work, or approximately 3-4 normal average paragraphs of about 475 words total per each work's quoted passage) allowed at OF? Normally in my interaction and posting on many other forums, I have never had any problem with quoting exceptionally large, properly-credited quotes in my posts, in what I believed to be adding real value to the community. However, with yesterday's banning in a similar forum, I thought I would gauge the milieu here on OF.
One more thing to add about me, so you don't have to learn this as we get to know one another much better over a long period of time, is I sometimes drop off the board and out of the community for weeks and even months at a time; quite often without warning. This is usually due to other life commitments and endeavors.
Thanks in advance for a warm welcome and our forthcoming communal symbiosis.
C
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