I was initially impressed and positive when I first came across Pearson Longman's ELT Community site. Great interface, good discussion sections and ideas, and an intuitively user-friendly format.
I've since avoided it completely (and NOT because I have a personal gripe against one small wing of the overall company).
This section of the incredibly detailed Terms and Conditions page on the site not only turned me off, it actually got me a little bit angry (not least because it was tucked away far down an overall list of serious legal mumbo-jumbo):
By posting your comments or materials on the Interactive Areas and the Community, you grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, world-wide licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, publish, make available, distribute, include in other works, sub-license and display any content you submit to us in any format now known or later developed. By submitting material you acknowledge that you waive any moral rights you may have in it.
If you do not want to grant us these rights, please do not submit your comments or materials to us.
And this after a very lengthy and fastidious lecture about how users are permitted to use and prohibited from using the so-called "community" and its content...
You bet your bottom dollar I am not going to submit my comments or materials to you, Pearson.
Community?
"Your" place?
"Your" space?
I knew (from personal experience) that Pearson was pretty obsessed with profit, but actively luring in ELTers with the promise of their own community and then forcing them (quite possibly without their knowledge) to waive any moral rights to their own materials (which could then appear in commercial Pearson products)...?
Not pretty. Not good.
