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At the moment, there are still a lot of advice posts that should clearly be in Q&A, and some that should clearly be in either a personal, or group blog.  Personal opinions and experiences are a part of providing advice - for of course you agree with and understand your own advice.  Merely venting or providing your personal opinion without providing a solution or course of action that is helpful isn't advice.  I feel these postings detract from the genuinely helpful and original advice articles that have been posted.  As a collective group of advice, it brings down the total value of information produced by site members. 

Some advice about particularly traumatic experiences and how the writer dealt with them are advice - for those experiences help other people who may be in the same situation, but are afraid to speak out, or seek help.  It also helps the rest of us to have empathy for people in those situations and perhaps to recognise the signs that someone may need assistance.

People shouldn't have to sift through to find the real advice when they click on 'read advice' they would already have done that on a web based search.  When someone looks for advice on Minti, they should know that they are getting advice that is going to be of assistance to them.  Be it parenting advice or information about the site itself and online communities that will help them to get the most out of their experience on Minti.

Minti's profile is growing daily, and increasingly, when you google a parenting concern, it is Minti advice that features highly on the first search page.  It is because of this that I think we need to raise the standard and tidy up the advice section, so that we can be taken seriously.  Even if people choose not to join Minti, they should feel that if they need good advice, or want to recommend an advice site to someone else, that Minti has good quality, down to earth, original, positive, helpful advice.  It should be easy to read, presented in a format that is easy on the eye, and we should take note of the little red line that appears under incorrectly spelt words, and try to get that right too - whenever possible, we all make typos - however they can be edited later.

All the articles in the Advice section are a reflection of the people who make Minti tick - us, the members.  The same can be said for all the comments that belong to that advice - so we need to try not to resort to swearing, or personal attacks.  ANYONE can read the advice section and vote on the advice - let's hope that it is advice that shows Minti in a good light.  We owe it to each other and certainly to the team that created Minti to keep this in mind at all times.

The votes don't necessarily reflect this either, as there are sympathy votes for all sorts of stories and poems that are very touching and great to read, yet they aren't original, and should be in blogs.  Many people when advised that their question should be in Q&A are just leaving it in advice - then to top it off, they get sympathy votes, so that question gets a high ranking as advice - and keeps popping up when you do a search on that topic.  We need to keep that in mind when voting - it does affect the listings when people search for advice.  Let's all work to maintain the integrity of Minti Advice and keep using our emails, lounges, personal blogs and group blogs for our general personal opinions, poems and emails.

I don't like reporting questions that are in advice, or things that don't look original etc.  However if people keep insisting, can we devise some sort of generic, friendly, explanatory email that gets sent to them giving them say 48hrs to re-post it in the appropriate forum?  If they don't take that option, they could be sent another one to say that it has now been re-posted in Q&A if appropriate, and since we can't post it to their blog, we could start another group to store what someone wrote and they can choose to repost it somewhere else if they choose?

I am going to email this to Angie and Clay anyway, as I really think it is something that needs attention.  I myself tried to do a soft sell on this by writing about how fun it is to write advice, then linking to all the other great articles on writing advice, however I don't think that is enough on it's own.  Perhaps we should change the write advice page and make put this, ' Click here if you already know how to write a parenting advice article for Minti.' At the bottom of the page, and the note about Q & A at the top? 

Has anyone else had any thoughts along these lines, or does anyone have any suggestions about how this can be approached without upsetting anyone?