As you may have guessed, "Eye on Soaps" is not a conventional website and some of our values are not the same as those reflected by other sites on the net.  To familiarize our readers with our goals in providing this services, we will diagram our objectives below.  We here at Eye on Soaps are pretty liberal and open-minded.  We created this website after an extensive and exhaustive perusal of a huge number of soap sites on the net and you are looking at the product that came from that study.  We talked to literally hundreds of soap fans to ask what they wanted in a site and combined those thoughts with our own preferences.  From that, emerged some very distinct feelings about how the set would be run and the image it would project.  These are discussed below.

What We Don't Care About...

-    We don't care if you take our stuff for your website or newsletter. We feel it's a little ridiculous to get all snotty about someone using photos (which you carefully swiped from someone else or scanned from a book) or  words, unless they are claiming them as their own and/or refusing to give the author credit for the work.  The exception would be photos personally taken by the authors.  You won't see any big warnings on our site saying, "WHAT YOU READ HERE MUST STAY HERE" or "NO COPYING ONTO OTHER SITES!!"  Hey, take what you want from the site, but there are a couple of requests we have in return for the carte blanche of the material.  Creative commentary is hard work and our people crank out some of the best columns around.  While we don't mind you using the words you find here, please give credit to the person who worked so hard on it by providing a by-line, giving a link to the site and letting us know where you have used it so that we may come and gloat over our work.  Nice and simple...that's all we ask.  IF a writer on our site DOES ask that photos or info not be reproduced elsewhere, please honor their wishes.

-    We don't give a damn about who scooped what first. It never ceases to amaze us how up in the air other sites get about "Don't Forget, whatever you do, that WE scooped this back in aught six LONNNGG before this other site scooped it" and the mentality of "TOLD YOU SO!!" when a spoiler or rumor pans out.  Jeez, people, OK, so you told us.  That whole neener, neener, neener crap got old along about third grade.  The spoilers are released by the network, they get passed along and that is that.  We'll put them up when we get them and if someone else made it to the computer first, we aren't going to cry into our beer and lose our last shred of ego.   Well, fiddle-dee-dee!  We are waaaay too smart and beautiful to worry about such silly issues.

-    To some extent, we don't care about deadlines.  We really do want to get the news and commentary out to you in a timely manner.  We have a triage for the posting of information, so the spoilers go out first, then the recaps, next is the news, then the commentary, spotlight focus and Q&A.  Everything else falls into rank and file behind those leaders.  We have a basic guideline for when new items will be posted and this is included on the front page of each of our sites.  While it is our goal to get the information to our readers in a timely manner, it is important that the readers recognize that we are moms, wives, teachers, students and career women (and man, counting Joe our Techie).  Most of all, we are human.  We have families, friends, jobs and lives that extend beyond Eye on Soaps.   It is the sincere hope of the owners that not one of our more than 20 staff members ever considers Eye On Soaps to be their number-one priority.  Although, of course, we do like for our employees to get the work done they have committed to doing, we hope the readers will understand that sometimes other things will get in the way of a column being posted on time or a recap making it to print the same day.  Also, please remember that at this time, there is only ONE person (with SIX kids and a young husband - wink!) to post everything that goes on all three sites, so it takes some time and effort to get it all up.  We'll do our best.  We'll guarantee that, but we are human and...

-    We don't care about being perfect.  Make no mistake...our collective here at EOS knows a LOT about ABC soaps, as well as a few of the others.  We know enough to comfortably consider ourselves to be experts.  But as we said above, we are also human and will, from time to time, make a mistake.  Sometimes when Katrina is posting at 3 a.m., running on Dr Pepper and No-Doz, there may occasionally be a link that goes to Timbuktu instead of the Spotlight Focus or we may remember things wrong in our old-woman brains and need a jog to correct the info.  You don't have to get nasty about it or act all superior.  Just give us a poke and lovingly and gently coddle us through our mistakes.  Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time we get it right, so no gloating over the point one percent, dammit!  There are real people behind these words and we have real feelings that don't need to be trampled upon.

What We Care Very Much About...

Now that we have bombarded you with our 'don't-give-a-damn' list, here is our 'what we love' list:

We care about these shows.  Most of us have had these ABC soaps in our lives longer than any of our friends, our spouses or our children.  They have stuck with us through thick and thin, always there to entertain us, day after day.  In return, we stick with them as well.  You will find us griping and bitching about the writing, the acting, the ludicrousness of it all, but underneath, please know that we come from a place of love for these characters and each show. 

We care about our readers.  Just because our families and personal lives might sometimes interfere with our production on the site, it does not mean that we don't care about the people who take the time to come read our work.  Your feedback is important and we welcome your comments (but please, be nice about it).  When some of you didn't like the black background that hides the multitude of graphical sins on the site, although we could not rebuild the whole site, we did begin doing everything twice: once in the standard form and once in traditional black on white for printing and easy reading by those who can't see the light print on black background.  Readers said they wanted commentary, commentary, commentary and we've got it.  You wanted games that didn't insult your intelligence and I think we pulled that off.  You wanted spoilers posted through the week as they are released, so it's done.  You name it and if it's possible, we'll do it.  We particularly felt a desire to make the site friendly to those folks who do NOT want to be subjected to spoilers.  We make a sincere effort to keep spoilers out of the news items and to label commentary so that spoiler-free people are not surprised by a spoiler creeping in on them.

We care about preserving the dignity of the actors.  Most of us are total strangers to the actors, still, they have given us something in the form of performances over a great deal of time.  We return that favor by honoring their private lives and not exploiting them for news.  Deeply personal issues of the actors will not be discussed without the actor's permission.

We care about each other.  Through some pretty strange circumstances, a number of very sharp, witty, intelligent, talented people came together to create Eye on Soaps and we stand together as a pretty formidable force.  Through this incredible network of soap fans, we are able to answer almost any question that you present and we greatly value the contributions that everyone makes on the site.  You won't find any cat fighting, backstabbing or game playing here.  We all work together with a common goal of creating the most user friendly, one stop shopping ABC soap site on the net.  We have a job to do.  We have immense respect for one another and that, as they say, is that.