Is Writersco Safe?

  Personally, I think Writersco is a safe enough place to have a bio and display your work, but your comfort level is your own. Regardless, here are some ways to keep yourself as safe as possible in WC.

Legal Stuff

  First of all, read our Terms and Conditions. Other places where you can see links to them are in the quick links box, on the top left hand corner of Mainpage; and our Welcome to WritersCo page. That's right. They're easily accessible. I hope they're to your liking.
  Okay, now that you've been smart and read our T & C, decide whether they seem fair enough for you to want to participate in WC, and in what ways.

Personal Safety

  This is the World Wide Web. Don't write more about yourself than you want strangers to know. Believe it or not, some strangers are mean.

Safety of Your Art

  Plagiarism is on the rise, and many peoples' consciences are weakening in this area. Be careful what you post, and where.

Protecting Your Art

  Maybe you don't mind if everybody who can view Writersco is able to read your stories. If you do mind, there are a few ways of keeping the whole world from seeing your writing, without having to keep it off Writersco:

On a Wiki-page:
  While editing the page, there is a drop-box labelled, "Editable and viewable by whom option:". Using this box, you can choose to make it viewable to non-members by exporting it - or you can choose not to.
  You can also choose to limit which members can see the page. Choose "viewable by forum members only," and suddenly you will see a list of private forums of which you are a member. Only members of the forum you choose may see the page. This works best if you use a forum that takes some work for users to join - if they need to ask for the password or be added manually. You may want to create your own forum and manually add the select few to whom you want to show the page.

On a Writings page:
  You cannot choose to stop exporting a Writings page, but you can still keep random people from seeing it anyways. While editing the page, select "viewable by forum members only," and the same advice applies.
  Here is how to make a legal statement about which rights you are claiming over a particular piece of writing. While editing a Writings page, you will see a drop-box labelled, "License". You should choose a license, in order to designate what rights you claim over that particular piece. The definitions of the different options are in Writersco Terms.

On either type of page:
  You can always clearly state the licensing information directly on the page, in addition to the other methods of protection.

If Somebody Plagiarizes Your Work

  If you find that somebody has plagiarized your work, you might want to prove that you had created it before them. Writersco can help you with this. We back up the data on the site so that we can recover from the last backup if information is accidentally deleted. Of course, this also carries the usefulness of us being able to tell a judge the earliest date at which you uploaded a particular file, or created a particular page.
  It is also important to be able to give the judge the licensing information with which you uploaded the piece of writing, so always protect yourself by specifying the appropriate license.
  Whether this evidence holds up in court depends on the laws of the involved countries.

Safety Elsewhere

  Well, I might as well give you some more general tips. Here are some useful pages.
About the Ads
Scams
http://www.sfwa.org/beware/

The help-index
The wiki-index