I've noticed several popular CG forums changing their forum rules lately and to be honest, some of the new guidelines/rules are a bit alarming to me. As such, I thought I'd take a second to mention it here and make sure people are aware of these changes as we often ignore reading the rules of sites, especially if we've been a member there for a long time.

Here are two examples of forum rules that I find alarming:

CGArchitect.com updated their rules not too long ago, here's a link: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/4587-...-agreement.html

I'm mainly concerned about this statement: "CGarchitect reserves the right to republish any content from the discussion forums." - To me that means they have the right to publish information that we (users) provide on their forum.

Today I noticed a similar phrase being used at the Autodesk AREA website, here's their forum rules: http://area.autodesk.com/forum/auto...ng/forum-rules/

Quote: "Without using customer names or identifying information, Autodesk reserves the right to republish content from the Autodesk Discussion Groups."

Ok, so maybe I'm just being paranoid and there is no real (or intended) harm in these type statements...but thinking in a worse-case-scenario what if a public forum (not implying CGA or the AREA site) were to compile a lot of the useful posts to create a book & sell that book for profit...without asking the users. I'm not implying that's the goal of these type rules or the intention of the two sites I listed here (or even if it's possible)...I'm just offering some food for thought in a worse-case-scenario.

I'm just pointing out that people should pay close attention to forum rules especially when they change and make sure you're protecting your rights.

[paranoid mode off]

EDIT: I've started a thread about my concerns for this rule at both the AREA site and CGarchitect. If you'd like to follow the replies and/or voice your opinion, here are the links to the threads:

AREA: http://area.autodesk.com/forum/auto...t-a-forum-rule/

CGA: http://www.cgarchitect.com/vb/36312...html#post252421

6/30/2009 Update: Both the AREA & CGA sites have responded to my posts about the concerns I had over these vague rules. Thanks to the replies I've received in the threads listed above my concerns about these particular rules at the AREA & CGA sites have been completely removed.

Now, if you've read through this entire post and come away with the impression that you can not trust either the AREA or CGA...then you've misinterpreted the meaning of my post here. I primarily wanted to shed some light on these particularly vague forum rules to raise user awareness. I did NOT intend to portray either of the sites in a negative manner.

Jeff Mottle (owner of CGArchitect) has even updated this rule because as this was brought to his attention he agreed that this rule could be misinterpreted. So some good has come from this blog post! (that's probably a first...lol).