Cabarrus Cheap Seats

Since I started this community blog experiment about a month-and-a-half ago: the results have been phenomenal.

In a little more than one month, traffic has nearly doubled, page views have more than doubled, the number of unique visitors is climbing steadily, and the RSS and e-mail subscriber list is growing.

The quality of the articles have been great and pretty steady. Of about sixty articles that preceded this one, about a dozen were original material from me - the majority were original articles from others and “thread holders” that I put up (many of them from threads on others’ articles) to hold comments that evolved from other discussions.

Speaking of comments, of the 1,500 plus comments left in the 16 months - 1/3 have been left in the past 7 weeks.

All that being said, there was a request about clearing up the guidelines for participating here at the Cheap Seats. Here are the five rules of the Cabarrus Cheap Seats

5. Use a fake name - If you don’t want to use your real name - go ahead. I’ve found that people take you more seriously when you do use a real name. Internet handles are a holdover from the days of CB handles and onerous character limits from old computer systems. Since this is a community blog in a not-so-large community, it behooves you to use your real name. You’ll find that the general evolution of a debate around here usually wind up with someone critizing someone else for using a moniker.

Using your real name will give you more credibility.

That being said - here are a few restrictions:

• Anonymous comments are not allowed. I’ve tried it during my salad days and the result isn’t pretty. There’s a pretty good article on how anonymity is hurting dialog on the Internet. If you want to use a fake name - that’s fine and there are reasons for doing it (i.e. single-girl-in-the-city-blogger Sister Toldjah); but “Anonymous” ain’t going to cut it.
• Disallowed Names: You run the risk of having your content deleted or worse if you use a name that is in poor taste, is someone else’s name, or is someone else’s handle.
• Don’t Provide Bogus Information - Providing me with a phony e-mail address when you post a comment is grounds for me deleting the comment.
• Don’t Harbor Multiple Personalities - Creating multiple users for one commenter.  That’s not cool - read this post to see an awful example of that.

4. Write lousy stuff - Just don’t be disappointed with the response when you do. This isn’t a group blog - it’s a community blog. That means that the authors aren’t hand-picked, they signed up for an ID and started blogging. The threshold is the same for commenting. The main guideline is to follow the tag-line at the top of the page about this blog being a “Spirited Discussion of Life in Cabarrus County, North Carolina”.

That being said, here are a few restrictions:

• Nothing Illegal - Libel, slander, misuse of copyright, etc. will get you teased, mocked, included in a punchline of the inside jokes of other Cheap Seats fans, deleted, banned, reported to the authorities, and/or introduced to the affected parties.
• Nothing Overly Salacious or Vulgar - Keep the naughty pictures and language on your MySpace page. Keep it PG, at worst. You won’t believe that hell that I caught just for other people’s comments about Joy Lane’s “pole workers”.

3. You still own your lousy stuff - Your opinion is your opinion and you get the kudos or consequences that come from it. Posting material on the Cheap Seats does not transfer ownership, but you do allow for the redistribution of all or part of your material. The Cheap Seats uses a Creative Commons license. You can read more about it in the footer. Even though you do own the material - that doesn’t mean that I take any responsibility for storing or continuing to distribute the content.

2. Realize I will share your e-mail address and other contact information - That’s if there’s a need to, like say your lousy, profanity-riddled libel piece gets me contacted by someone’s lawyer - I’m cooperating. If someone wants to add your e-mail to their list, I’ll tell them what I’ve always told them: “No”.  I’m not going to redistribute my contact list.

1. This is not a political blog - Most of the articles on this blog so far have been political in nature; but this blog is not restricted to political opinion or activism. This blog is here to talk about life here. Life includes schools, churches, interesting events and the history and stories of the people in it. That doesn’t mean that there’s no room for political articles - it just means that the articles don’t have to be political. And the political articles don’t have to be of any particular persuasion - even though most of them have been conservative.

The articles are to be of interest to the people in this community - what you want to make of that is up to you.

Register a username and post something already.

See y’all Monday.