In regards to advertising, it is perfectly fine to blog about products or services you want people to know about, but it has to be from your experience, or from friends or something you genuinely discovered and want to share and have an opinion on to help the Minti Community. That is perfectly fine.

What isn't fine?

Blatant sales one-liner from a person that signed up a second ago and will never contribute to the community but spam the blogs will constant lines of links and fake avatars and no completed profile.

Does it come down to working out what the intent is? YES You will always know that before you even report?

- Is this member passionate about sharing their knowledge about a product or service as a mother?

YES then you cannot report.

- Is this member just here to provide spam links or spam our list of members?

YES then you can report, but check... if they are a legitimate company, then you can tell them or I can if escalated,

"that member profiles are not the place to do their free bast of an ad campaign. Best that that actually contact myself or Belinda about a proper engagement with our wonderful passionate members and give them some real value that actually "is" accepted."

Case by Case and Boardline Content? Reviewing certain issues case by case helps us refine the policies as well as judge on "boarderline content". I always like to review the "intent" this is usually a good reference point.

Do you have YouTube videos you want to share?

Click here for easy instructions.

 

To ensure proper delivery to the correct recipient, respond to your Minti mails by logging on to your Minti account, instead of using your personal email.

When you upload photos to post on your blog, mark it 'private' and only people in your Friends list will be able to view it.

For more info click on the link provided below...

"Rewards for writing a good article"

It's a great idea if they are first time writers of a Minti article to send them this way to Minti's Editorial Guidelines

http://www.minti.com/parenting-advice/233/Mintis-Editorial-Guidelines/

Do you need to contact Minti Administration about something, but don't know who to contact? The Admins on Minti are Izzy, ClayCook, Matthew, and RachelCook. You can also use the Contact Us form where your query goes directly to Minti Support.

Do you have a burning non-parenting related questions you've just got to ask? Check out the Bulletin Board - the place for non-parenting questions, announcements, and notices.

Have some questions about article writing, here is our Minti article providing great information on our editorial guidelines when publishing advice in the form of an article.

Minti's Editorial Guidelines

In case you haven't had the chance here is a quick Minti article on our Code of Honor and your voting rights as a member.

Minti's Code of Honor - protecting the rights of members

Join in the fun at these great and positive groups:

Foto Friday - Sharing photos on Friday - of family, pets, or anything else.

Terrific Tuesday anyday - Sharing your good news (or congratulating others on their good news) on either a Terrific Tuesday or any day of the week that's terrific!

Family Funnies - Tell a joke and have a laugh

Fairness and Respect - tantrums not welcome here please :0)

You are not allowed to "flame a member" for their opinions and comments. Take the argument offline or into a group area. Flaming a member will result in your account being reported and you may get terminated.

Some Minti friends are using this neat trick. In your firefox options you can preload you favorite minti pages. For example, you can pre-load your homepage, activity list, favorite group, watchlist, read/publish with multiple firefox tabs. If you broadband or dial up panics, you can cut this down to maybe three tabs firing up or two.

Instructions:
Home Page as Tabs
Instead of using only one web page as your homepage, you can make your home page a set of tabs.

1. Select your favorite web sites and open them in tabs in a single window.
2. Select Tools > Options > open the section that says "Main" or where you go to "change your homepage" that you can set to load when you open firefox or what auto loads now.
3. Look for "Startup", press the "Use Current Pages" button.

Now when you press the Home button, your favorite web sites will load with just a click.

Give it a try...and access more of Minti at once

If you have the new version of windows you can open a "group" in a new tab thus not losing your main page on Minti, although if you open to many new tabs or have too many web pages open this will slow the Minti pages that you are trying to open down.

I have just found this info on to help clarify that you can make references and quote sources in your articles...this extract was from the University of Berkeley...

Source...

Why cite sources?
Whenever you quote or base your ideas on another person's work, you must document the source you used. Even when you do not quote directly from another work, if reading that source contributed to the ideas presented in your paper, you must give the authors proper credit.

Citations allow readers to locate and further explore the sources you consulted, show the depth and scope of your research, and give credit to authors for their ideas. Citations provide evidence for your arguments and add credibility to your work by demonstrating that you have sought out and considered a variety of resources. In written academic work, citing sources is standard practice and shows that you are responding to this person, agreeing with that person, and adding something of your own. Think of documenting your sources as providing a trail for your reader to follow to see the research you performed and discover what led you to your original contribution.

I feel that it is any advice directly providing benefit for other parents in bringing up their children, however that means everything related around the family unit and all the topics that fall under the family and parenting. However, the advice has to show why it helps being a better parent as a result (via experience sharing, quoting, explaining etc)

Maybe the stress test is..."will it improve the quality of life for other/my children", if yes, then explain why?

When researching this idea, I felt that the market was already saturated with general advice, and real parenting advice based solely on sharing to improve the quality of life for children globally did not exist like Minti does and I see this as a unique feature of Minti and holds a higher purpose.

I think it's awesome groups is for anything... We have areas like groups to handle other things like household tips and general tips, for general advice at the moment is great on blogs, groups and forums...we are thinking of what we can do for general advice...if you have any ideas please feel free to share (currently anything that is non- parenting advice in Minti is getting rating down).

Watch Minti’s Heart Beat - We have added an "Activity" option to the menu bar which shows all member actions as they happen on the site. Watch out for new members, articles, groups, blog posts, comments and votes – Take Minti's pulse

Blog Once, Publish Twice - Run another blog outside of Minti? You can now mirror your external blog posts into your personal Minti blog. It's your decision whether to show entire posts or just a taste of what's going on at your own external blog. Get more traffic to your external blog using this cool new blog mirroring tool (you will find this at the top of your blog).

More Powerful Search - Search results now show whether information on matches from Advice articles, Advice comments, Q&A responses, forums or member blog entries so you can always find that elusive bit of information.

I recommend you use the firefox browser for Minti.
Some members have reported issues with other browsers.
If you are encountered some errors with Minti, download and install firefox from here.