So, I realise I should make this explicit because I’ve already adopted this policy for a year now:
We (meaning Commoncog staff) will never publish any post from the forum on a public medium without first asking permission from the poster. The only exceptions to this are, of course, posts by Commoncog staff.
We may, of course, occasionally write things like “In a forum post, member X (username) argued Y” in a publicly-available Commoncog essay, but if the member has any objections, we take down or modify that immediately, no questions asked. (We will also ask permission for this if we want to cite specific members, see below.) For verbatim quotes, however, our policy is that we must ask permission first, before reproducing it in a public setting.
An example of this may be seen in the How to Use AI Without Becoming Stupid essay, where I asked for @brian’s permission first before I published his post on how he used AI to self-improve on fiction writing.
This also applies, naturally, to screenshots of forum posts (those following me on my socials will notice I only ever screenshot my posts, never anyone else’s) and to any other sort of reproduction (e.g. ‘save to PDF’).
Just wanted to make this crystal clear.
) so I don’t mind it too much, but good to know!