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| About FBP News ~ Help for users ~ Submit a new article! | ||
Greetings, forum participant. The purpose of this page is to introduce you to the mechanics of this forum. Those of you familiar with "weblogs" such as Slashdot and Kuro5hin will feel at home, but others may be wondering how it all works.
This kind of forum is based on messages, some of which have the status of articles. On the entry page, you can see the most recently published articles, presented in reverse chronological order. But what you see on the entry page is only the beginning.
For presentation purposes, any message can have an introduction (preferably a short one) and a body. The entry page only shows article introductions. If you hit the "read more and comment" link of an article, you reach a page with its full text. There you can also read other people's comments to it and contribute your own comments by selecting the "reply" link. In this way, a tree of comments is built for each article published at the "top level".
All messages posted here will be (indefinitely) kept in our messages database.
In the future, we hope to provide full text search capabilities here. But you may already search for messages (articles and comments to them) in a few ways, selecting:
In addition, the editors maintain a highlight box listing links to a few articles which are still considered to be particularly relevant.
You can always easily return to the entry page by hitting the big forum name or logo on the top bar (or the corresponding text on text browsers).
There is also the "breadcrumbs" set of links on the left below that bar, which shows you where on the site you currently are.
Anybody can submit articles, by following the "Submit a new article" link. As on many fora similar to this one, articles (messages at the top level) are only published (made visible on the forum entry page) after approval or editing by one of the editors.
Some measure of "self-moderation" in the submission of new articles is of course expected: comments to an existing article should preferably be added below it and not in the form of a new top-level article, unless you feel that there is a new issue deserving a separate discussion which could be somewhat "off-topic" under any top articles already in sight.
Anybody can submit comments (messages) under existing articles or comments. Unlike articles, such comments become immediately visible to the general public.
When you do post an article or comment, you may find convenient to identify yourself, in such a way that what you write here is recognized as coming from you. We suggest that you register yourself as a forum participant, since this will identify yourself to the other forum participants in a more consistent way (and it will be much easier to find all messages written by you).
But if you prefer (even after you have registered yourself) you may at any time choose to post your messages as a non-registered user, although we suggest that even then you provide at least your name. Notice that, as a registered user, you always have the option of not having your email address publicly shown.
We recommend that you always choose descriptive and clear titles for your article proposals and comments. In addition to the title, there are two input areas for your text when posting: one for an introduction (or for a complete short message) and another one for the body, the rest of the message (this only shows up on the separate page devoted to presentation of a full article or comment).
You should always carefully preview your message (using the "Preview" button) before you finish posting it, since you won't be able to modify it later (unless the forum editors do it for you, which will only happen under exceptional circumstances).
A convenient feature available here is the possibility of attaching arbitrary files to your articles and comments, which others will then be able to view and download. We just ask you to be be moderate about the size of the files you post...
The encoding (text type) you choose for your message determines how its text will be interpreted internally and displayed for readers:
The simpler option is... "plain text". In this case you just write simple text. Explicit line changes will be respected [i.e., converted to the HTML element "<br />" when presented to the reader], and in the remaining text line changes will occur automatically (on the reader's browser) depending on the available horizontal space. Note that any HTML code you try to include in these plain text messages will be ignored by browers: "<i>xyz</i>" will show up as "<i>xyz</i>", not as xyz.
This is the most flexible option. Apart from automatic HTML tidying and security-related markup adjustments (to be introduced in a few weeks), any HTML you write will be respected when you choose this text encoding. Note that if you were intending to write plain text (as described above) but select HTML encoding instead of plain text mode, you may have some surprises with the output, notably with text flow. As always, we sugest you preview your messages before finishing submitting them.
If you have never written HTML, this can be a good opportunity to try it. Some very basic knowledge of HTML will probably be sufficient for most of your writing needs here. We therefore included here an extremely short introduction: "Learning HTML in 10 minutes".
Technical note: to be accurate, we should say that in FBP News we use, in fact, XHTML, a (stricter) reformulation of HTML. But, even if you have never heard of XHTML, you probably won't need to worry about this. Messages posted through our forms are (whenever possible) automatically corrected and adapted to conform to the XHTML spec in use here.
We appreciate any comments on the functioning of this forum. Reports on bugs or usability problems are particularly important to help us correct those as soon as possible.