Hi Guys,

Just a note. When uploading photos and you get an error it's most likely because the file is just too large. The software can automatically resize photos up to 3-5mb in size anything larger than that it chokes and issues an error. 99% of all files are much smaller than that unless you are using a very high resolution camera with minimal compression.

If you do get an error don't continue to try and upload the same file as it will just issue more errors. You'll need to use a program on your computer to reduce the size of it. I believe there are some listed in the Help section of the forum if you don't already have one however I'm quite sure it's an old list. You can Google and find one. Search for "free photo resizer". There are quite a few available.

Best regards,
Ron

__________________
Ron Curry
R.O.G. Founder/Administrator

To help ROG stay a friendly community where all can feel comfortable participating we have enabled a feature of the forum on a trial basis that allows members to let other members know when they are crossing the line of civil and courteous behavior.

WHAT IT DOES

It allows you, the users to anonymously (or not - your choice) put another member on notice that you find one of their post s inappropriate for one of the following reasons:

- Off-Topic - A post that has little/nothing to do with the Thread/Topic as originally intended by the thread starter
- Rude/Offensive Language - A post that contains offensive language which can include sarcasm, profanity or just plain rudeness.
- Insulting to another member - A post that is clearly intended as an insult to another member

HOW TO USE

Every post will now have a small icon in the upper left corner of the post that looks like a red rectangle lying on top of a yellow rectangle (supposed to represent yellow and red penalty cards like in soccer). When you click on this icon you'll be taken to a window that shows the users total infractions and a list of infraction types you may issue.

To issue an infraction, click on the yellow/red penalty icon then select the infraction reason and optionally click the "WARNING" box (to issue an anonymous warning). Then click on "SEND INFRACTION". A message will be sent to the offending user notifying them they've received an official infraction. If you clicked "WARNING" they will receive only a system generated message as a warning indicating they've received an infraction and why and nothing more.

If you leave the "WARNING" box un-checked 1 point will be added to the total of infraction points issued by others. If this total reaches 10 infractions within 3 days the offending user's group title will change to "TEMPORARY INFRACTION" and he will lose posting privileges until enough infractions expire to reduce number of infraction points below 10 at which time the users privileges will be fully restored to original.

Individual infractions expire 3 days from the time/date they are issued and are automatically subtracted from the offending user's total as they expire. The longest period a user will lose posting privileges is 3 days if all the infractions were issued at the same time and no new infractions are issued later. The shortest is 1 day.

At your discretion you may also send a PM to the offending user as part of the "INFRACTION". Unlike a simple infraction, this will NOT be anonymous and will be sent to the offending user from you. Therefore, if you wish to remain anonymous do not fill out the message section.

WHO CAN ISSUE AN INFRACTION AND WHO CAN RECEIVE THEM

To help ensure responsible use, only Donating and Lifetime members may issue an "INFRACTION". Any user may receive them.

Please use this system responsibly and use the warning feature except for repeat offenders who clearly deserve a "cooling off" period. Again, it's all totally at your discretion so please use responsibly.

WHAT TO DO IF YOU RECEIVE AN INFRACTION

If you receive an infraction it means you've offended someone. Read the notice you've received and the reason the infraction was given and take action to correct your behavior. If it's for rude behavior then start being courteous. If it's for off-topic posting then make sure you are posting in the correct forum (discussion postings in the Classifieds section is a big no-no) and start your own thread discussion - don't hijack someone elses. The bottom line here is to take the infraction seriously and as feedback that you should tune your behavior. Otherwise, do nothing. Infractions are not a permanent part of your "record". All record of them go away after a few days (unless you provoke more of them) so just relax and take positive action. As well, don't start posting that you received an infraction, start complaining or try to justify it. Such posts will only result in another infraction and will be deleted.

__________________
Ron Curry
R.O.G. Founder/Administrator

Ever wonder why ROG requires users to register with the real names? Here's why.....


Anonymity can turn nice people nasty
Faceless communication online or over phone often turns nice people nasty
By Diane Mapes

One minute, they’re nice, normal people. The next, they’re frothing at the mouth.

“It’s mind-boggling the things people will say and even the things I will say,” says Catherine McIntyre, a 38-year-old medical billing specialist from Houston. “People who’d never say something horrible in real life will do it again and again and again online. It’s like the behavior of crowds, or those mass beatings where no one gets blamed because everyone’s at fault.”

Sheri Pineda, a 59-year-old customer service representative at the Daily Breeze in Torrance, Calif., encounters the same bad behavior in the after-hours messages left by her newspaper’s subscribers.

“It’s appalling the way people talk,” Pineda says. “They’ll rant and rave and cuss at us with extremely foul language. And I think a lot them specifically wait until we close the phones. They’re looking to let it all out and then get on with their day. And then they’re surprised when I get back to them. They’re like, ‘You actually heard that?’ and will be embarrassed.”

Hello. You have reached the split personality zone. Press 1 to melt down. Press 2 to hang up and act like a normal person again.

I, anonymous
Between out-of-control customers, vituperative online posters and road-raging drivers, it’s hard to find an individual who hasn’t succumbed to the siren song of faceless, consequence-free communication. Online boards are clogged with insults hurled by readers hiding behind deceptively mild screen names — (“I hope you rot in hell!” signed Kittyface) — and customer service reps endure blistering tirades from disembodied voices week in and week out.

These days there are a dozen ways to communicate without actually having to look somebody in the eye. As a result, not only have we developed an abrupt, abbreviated way to chat (IMHO), but our technological advances have spawned new psychological terms such as “online disinhibition effect” to explain our tendency to open up — in both good ways and bad — when we’re sitting in front of a screen.

But our split personalities aren’t limited to the Web. They tend to show up whenever no one’s looking.

In a February 2008 study published in the journal Psychological Reports, researchers found that out of four groups of participants, only those in the anonymous group took part in antisocial behavior — in this case defined as violating rules to obtain a reward.

“I definitely believe that anonymity affects the frequency of antisocial behavior among individuals to some extent, even when these individuals have a reasonable sense of morality — so-called ‘ordinary people,’” says study author Tatsuya Nogami of Nagoya University in Japan.

“In my personal opinion, people generally try to comply with social norms in everyday life, even when such compliance with norms and rules conflicts with their personal self-interests. However, if you can get what you want without receiving any punishment or negative evaluations from others, are you still 100 percent sure that you’ll always refrain from engaging in that kind of undesirable behavior?”

Rage against the machine
Cindy Helgason, a 48-year-old soap maker from Des Moines, Iowa, says she can’t stick a sock in her anonymous persona no matter how hard she tries.

“Normally I’m a goody-two-shoes,” says Helgason. “But whenever I get in the car, I yell and cuss a blue streak. Everybody who drives slower than me is an idiot and everybody who drives faster is a maniac. The worst part is this isn’t a very big place. My kids will say, ‘Gosh mom, that’s Mrs. So-and-So,’ and I’m like, ‘Oops!’ That’s one of the reasons I took the sign for my soap-making business off the back of my car. I don’t want to be associated with the person I am behind the wheel.”

According to psychologist Patricia Wallace, senior director of information technology at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth, a car can offer us the same kind of psychological distance — and/or personality-cloaking capacity — as a computer.

“When your windows are rolled up, you feel relatively anonymous,” says Wallace, author of the book “The Psychology of the Internet.” “Not long ago I saw someone I knew going down the street furiously honking at the car in front of them. I turned the corner and waved and suddenly they weren’t anonymous anymore. You could see the incredible shame come over them because they’d demonstrated this behavior that from their perspective was out of character. Anonymity can draw out some very troubling behavior.”

McIntyre, the billing specialist from Houston, says the online news forums she’s participated in over the years have led her down many a dark and dysfunctional corridor.

“People get sucked in,” she says. “You can be whoever you want, you can put out there whatever you want, and there are no consequences. I even got sucked in and was mean to people. I consider myself better than that, but I did it too, and that bothers me. I guess it’s just the dynamic.”

Rider University psychology professor John Suler wrote about this dynamic in his 2004 paper “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” In it, he describes both toxic disinhibition — angry, threatening behavior such as that seen in flame wars or cyberbullying — and benign disinhibition, in which people make overly personal revelations due to the intimate nature of the medium. (Think online daters who “fall in love” without ever meeting.)

A lot of this effect has to do with feedback — or lack thereof, says Wallace.

“The environment affects how you behave,” she says. “Any time you go to places where you’re not known — even if it’s a hotel in another city — you might be more aggressive. So when you construct an environment like the Internet or long-distance call centers with a help desk worker in Bangalore, you’re creating an environment that facilitates uncharacteristic behavior. You’re not getting those nonverbal cues that calibrate your behavior and give you feedback if you’re going off track. Those people who do customer service for Comcast probably need double doses of Zoloft.”

Cherise Oleksak, a 35-year-old cable TV customer service representative from Fife, Wash., says dealing with people’s disinhibited side can definitely be a challenge. Some scream and rage; others get a little more, uh, personal.

“You’ll get people who will turn into perverts,” she says. ”They’ll ask you out or ask you to do phone sex. They’ll be like, ‘Can you read those pay-per-view adult movie titles out loud to me again?’”

Robin Taylor, 42, a customer care representative from Nashville, Tenn., says she’s seen this split, as well.

“We get people who act horribly. Horribly!” says Taylor, who works for a cell-phone company. “They’ll cry, they’ll scream, they’ll shout, they’ll cuss. And I know most of those people would never do that to your face."

“I guess they feel they can say whatever they want because they’re anonymous, but the funny thing is we have all their information: their name, their address, their phone number, even part of their Social Security number. Not that I would ever retaliate, but if we ended up with some psycho (employee), it could happen.”

Going public
Interestingly enough, some folks are starting to retaliate.

Surreptitious tape recordings of outrageously bad customer behavior have started to pop up on YouTube in all their profanity-laced glory.

In 2004, comedienne Margaret Cho posted dozens of hateful e-mail messages she’d received in response to a monologue on her Web site, along with each sender’s full name and e-mail address. Shamed — and deluged with their own hate mail from Cho’s fans — some posters sent in abject letters of apology.

In the online world, abusive users hiding behind anonymous screen names are being outed, sometimes to huge public embarrassment as when Whole Foods chief executive John Mackey was unmasked as the sock puppet responsible for posting numerous attacks against competitors on a Yahoo! financial message board. And media sites from Sacramento to Soho are stepping up their moderation of anonymous comments in an attempt to keep the incivility down to a low roar.

“When we first started with online blogs and that sort of thing, people weren’t aware of how much the environment could affect their behavior, but now people are getting much more savvy about it,” Wallace says. “But the issue that needs to be considered now is there’s no privacy. People need to recognize that they just can’t send out these blogging responses and e-mails and expect their anonymity to be preserved. It probably won’t be. Recording devices are everywhere and Web 2.0, with its user-generated content, greatly amplifies the Net’s power to expose and publicize.

“It also archives forever."

Hello Rotorway Owners Group Friends,

Rotorway Owners Group (also known as ROG) is a bulletin board service designed to enable its users to communicate and exchange information, opinions, experiences, and other content with an emphasis on Rotorway, RotorX and other helicopters, amateur aircraft building, and aviation and related topics in general. We created ROG as an online service that is structured and managed to encourage kind, respectful, and courteous fellowship and open, honest, and useful dialog and debate uninhibited by the influence of advertisers and the social chaos so ubiquitous in so much of modern social media today. In support of this mission we wish to remind all users of the following:

1. ROG , by definition, is an interactive computer service based in the U.S. and per Section 230 of the U.S. Communications Decency Act: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider". In accord with this law ROG, it’s owners, and staff bear no responsibility whatsoever for content contributed by the users of ROG or otherwise made available on ROG. Users of ROG are solely responsible for their own content and it’s accuracy, usefulness, and appropriateness.

2. It is entirely the responsibility of the reader or users of ROG to apply good judgement as to the accuracy, relevance, and useful nature of any and all content found on ROG. Therefore, the use or application of any and all content found on ROG is solely at your own risk.

3. ROG is based in and is subject only to U.S. law.


Other Policies and Values…

We believe in open, honest, and friendly debate. We believe it is unethical and diminishes the value of ROG if we allow it to be bullied or coerced by advertisers and companies, or any other entity, into creating, editing, or removing content. This is the reason why ROG doesn’t accept paid advertising.

While we are eager to develop positive relationships with ethical vendors, manufacturers, and service providers who are relevant to the ROG community, our priorities and loyalty is, and remains, to our users.

ROG encourages mature, data driven discourse however we require that users behave in a courteous and respectful manner while interacting on ROG. We do not allow chaos. Therefore, on rare occasions ROG staff may be compelled to moderate posts and other content as tools to help keep ROG aligned with the ROG mission and values. We can’t review all posts or other content and therefore expect the ROG user community to police themselves and to call our attention to situations needing action where this has failed.

In extreme cases certain users who undermine the operation of ROG and/or the ROG community or threaten it’s existence through actions or content may be temporarily or, in exceptional cases, permanently banned from ROG. This is considered a tool of “last resort” and has been applied in only a very few cases in ROG’s 23+ years of operation and never without first attempting to resolve the situation through less extreme measures. We approach these actions with a very light touch and great seriousness and only the most egregious cases will be acted upon in this manner.

If you are concerned about a posting or other content here on ROG, your first step is to take it up directly with the user/member that posted it. If that doesn't get appropriate results then please send a note to one of the ROG moderators who are listed in each forum section.

Keep it clean, friendly, and informative and all will be well.

Thank you!

__________________
Ron Curry
R.O.G. Founder/Administrator