Dear friends, we have considered your suggestions on site improvement, and today would like to announce a major change regarding videomaterials on Englishtips.org
Many of you mentioned the need to make changes to the Movies category, as it has grown into something huge.
Unfortunately, in the past few months we have been receiving an enormous amount of publications containing movies, tv-series, documentaries. Their amount was so big that it started 'clouding' the very core of this site: publications with immediate educational connection, such as coursebooks, teacher's books, educational videos.
Very often users were not very careful when submitting those numerous publications, which resulted in a lot of submission errors and increased the workload for myself and our Trusted Contributors who had to spend several hours daily to check/edit/approve/reject them. We have aslo had an increased amount of problems with multiple mirror links, subtitles and copyright complains.
Some users were simply publishing videomaterials (sometimes of quite poor quality) to earn so-called 'collector points' at file-sharing services, splitting the files into many smaller archives in order to increase the overall download numbers.
And the main reason that made me take this decision below was the fact that many of those videomaterials were not really suitable for Englishtips.
Yes indeed, some people learn from watching movies with subtitles, but should it become the biggest section on Englishtips and do we need to have each episode of each new TV Series? My answer is no. Despite the positive aspect and educational value of fiction videos and tv series, my main focus as Administrator of this website is to preserve the educational spirit and keep Englishtips.org from turning into a 'publish-all-you-can-get' sort of low-sort website.
That is why we are introducing the following changes regarding videomaterials on Englishtips:
1) Starting from 3 December 2009, we accept only EDUCATIONAL/INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS related to learning/teaching English (for example, coursebook videos and separate videocourses). They will be published to the special category titled EDUCATIONAL VIDEOS
2) The existing videomaterials will be reviewed and moved to the new category if they match the standards. Those having no immediate educational value ( = no immediate connection to learning/teaching English) will be deleted from the site after the specific 'grace' period (1 month).
3) We are aware that many users would want to keep their own publications/download links, or even keep sharing new videomaterials. You still have this option.
We have created the following new categories in our FORUM - you're welcome to manually transfer your publications/links that you want to 'save' there (as 'normal' forum messages):
--Movies
All movies must have English soundtrack and English subtitles. Please leave a note about subtitles present in the archive.
--TV Series
All tv-series must have English soundtrack and English subtitles. Please leave a note about subtitles present in the archive.
--Documentaries
Subtitles are optional. Please leave a note about subtitles included/not included in the archive.
--Cartoons/For Kids
Kids' movies and cartoons. Subtitles are optional - please leave a note whether they are included in the archive.
We would still require you to provide descriptions and cover images.
4) We are asking the users who would like to 'save' the videomaterials to transfer them manually into the new FORUM CATEGORIES before 6 January 2010. After that date we'll delete the existing videocategories from the site.
Site administration reserves the right to delete offending video links from the forum and restrict access to them. We do not hold any responsibility for the content users publish in the forum and will neither moderate, nor update/heck links in the forum sections.
Thank you for your understanding: this (quite unpopular) decision is needed to keep the site focused on providing the widest collection of learning and teaching materials around!
Let's make Englishtips.org better - together!
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