A little while ago mea37 generously offered to write the FAQ for Goats: The Forums, but he hasn't had the block of time to pull it all together into one document. There's been quite enough carrying-on about the lack of a FAQ section lately. Rather than whining about it, let's work together to finish it. Hopefully there will be some genuinely helpful contributions to this discussion, and compiling the FAQ will be as simple as copying and pasting into a document and e-mailing it to Jon or Phillip.

To play this game, pick a question you have found to be commonly asked and answer it in the most informative and concise manner you can figure. Perhaps our lovely assistants with moderation points could make it easy to run a filter to find the most useful posts.

Should this be with suggested answers? if so:

Q: Why is Oedipa_Maas so grumpy?
A: Some people [goats.com] won't send her beer.

Q: How do I show Phillip that he is great?
A: Send him [goats.com] beer.

Q: Why hasn't jon responded to my mail?
A: Someone else sent [goats.com] him beer.

Q: Are you some kind of idiot that relates everything to people sending beer?
A: No [goats.com] sometimes I have to go and get it myself and those stinky techamalogical bastards don't help. Man I hate those stinky techamalogical bastards!

Oh right. I missed the point about "commonly asked" and "informative"... possibly because I had to go and get [sydneypubguide.com.au] my own damn beer. Well screw it and screw you! we value surliness [goats.com] and think that pedantry is it's own reward but damn you'd best not be thinking you are inherently funny or someone [goats.com] will shatter your illusions [amazon.com]. Then Ken will kick your arse.

Oh yeah. everyone asks how to put a link in a post. I'm not telling.

In Response to tor (#12829):

I think you've had enough for the day, mate. Would you like a glass of water?

And yet, it was only 2:45 on a friday. What a good job you must have.

I'm gonna be evil and boring, and take this seriously... Sorry. One question per post, correct 'em by replying.

We'll assume you've read the all comics. (If you haven't, go do it now. Come back here when you're done.) As with any Internet community, the best way to get started is to lurk for a while. Read lots of threads - especially the active ones. An active thread is one that's been posted to in the last day or two. When you think you've got the hang of it, pick an active thread and post something. It may be worth thinking about what you want to say. Is it likely to be interesting or amusing? There's nothing wrong with making dumb jokes (for instance) but do you really want people's first impression of you to be that you are an idiot?

Or you can just jump in. Nothing to stop you. But don't come crying to us when you get flamed to death, your karma ends up in the toilet, or all your posts get labelled "stupid".

Also applies to posts labelled "Stupid", etc.

Karma is a measure of how valued you are by the community. Every so often, random people are given the ability to moderate five posts of their choosing. They get to raise or lower the score of each post by one, which has the same effect on the poster's karma. If people like your posts, you end up with high karma (and your posts end up with high scores). Conversely, if people hate your posts, you end up with negative karma.

When people moderate you, they have to give a reason. They pick a word from a short list that best describes the reason you deserve a karma shift. There aren't many words, so sometimes the match isn't that great. If your post has been labelled "Obnoxious" and you don't know why, it might be because the moderator couldn't find "Resurrecting Dead Threads to Make a Joke That Wasn't Funny" in the list.

Pathetic is good. We're all pathetic, we like people like us. When your post is labelled "Pathetic" you gain a point of karma, and your post's score goes up.

Don't feel insulted - it means we like you.

You've been posting a while. You've patiently built up a karma in the double digits. You post a few comments you thought were really funny, interesting, or intriguing. Someone disagrees. Suddenly, all your posts are getting "-1, Stupid", and your karma dropped four points.

Who cares? If the number attached to your name on a web site is really important to your sense of self-worth, get professional help. Now.

Moderation is done by pretty much anyone who happens by. Sometimes they will do something stupid with that power. But they won't have that power for long, and it might cost them karma too, through the wonderful mechanism of meta-moderation. If you are contributing to the site, you will end up with a high karma. In the long run, it all balances out.

In Response to albionsoft (#12892):

(Care of Dynedain) [goats.com]

The moderation categories are as follows (you can't assign a moderation without a categorical descriptor):

Normal (this is just used in the drop down list for "no change")
Funny (+1)
Clever (+1)
Informative (+1)
Intriguing (+1)
Insightful (+1)
Compelling (+1)
Pathetic (+1)
Super-Genius (+1)
Obscure Reference (+1)
Redundant (-1)
Stupid (-1)
Obnoxious (-1)
Troll (-1)
Flamebait (-1)
Incoherent (-1

Posting to dead threads is seen as a no-no. But what makes a thread dead? Use these handy rules of thumb!

If a thread's last post was in the last two or three days, it is an active thread. Post freely.

If a thread is under two weeks old, posting to it might bring it back to active status. Post freely, but don't be upset if everyone else ignored you. We're just bored of that thread.

If a thread is over two weeks old, only post if you have something pretty stunning to say. Posting to a thread of this age just to make an obvious joke or to say "me too" is pretty dull.

If a thread is over four weeks old, it's dead. Leave it alone.

You can start a discussion when your karma reaches 5. Patience, grasshopper.

In Response to unFalln (#12887):

Bah, don't discourage Tor from posting under the influence (or not). He keeps the forum lively.

Moderation has its own FAQ [goats.com], which you should read when it becomes relevant to you. Basically though, everyone (1) gets to moderate occasionally. When you moderate you get five points to spend to raise or lower the score of posts, and also the poster's karma.

Metamoderation is a check on moderation. Everyone (2) gets to vote once a day on whether some random moderations were fair or not. Too many people think your moderation was unfair, and you lose karma.

(1) Everyone, that is, who has positive karma and has been here for a while. Those who post very often or very infrequently are less likely to become moderators.
(2) Everyone who could be chosen for moderation, anyway. Meta-moderation doesn't care how often you post.

In Response to albionsoft (#12896):

If a thread is over four weeks old, it's dead. Leave it alone.

I would add after the last sentence:
If you have something to say related to the dead thread, start a new discussion and use HTML to link back to the previous discussion.

In Response to albionsoft (#12894):

I would add that karma can also drop if someone mods you up and then later posts to the thread. The point values of their moderations on that thread are nullified, even though the posts retain the tags associated with the original mod.

Yes, yes you can. If you're familiar with HTML, go ahead.

Permitted tags: <b> <i> <p> <a> <li> <ol> <ul> <em> <br> <tt> <strong> <blockquote> <div>

Because tags are rendered, make sure you escape < and > if you're just using them to mean greater than or less than: &lt; for < &gt; for >

You should probably know this by now, but use bold to emphasize something. Please DON'T SHOUT!

In Response to Deathalicious (#12923):

To use the <img> tag in a posting, you must be a premium member. Become a premium member, and you can put images in your posts. Don't, and you can't.

Some things in life have a premium, I guess.

If you are a premium member, you can use the image tag, using this format:

<img src="http://www.domain.com/folders/imagename.jpg">

jpeg, gif, and png images are all perfectly suitable. Other graphic formats (bmp, etc.) generally don't work on standard browsers, so don't use them. Convert them to jpeg or gif first.

Keep in mind that the image should be one that you host yourself. It's generally considered impolite to point directly to the work of another person. If you want people to see a cool image that isn't yours, post a link to that webpage instead.

In Response to Oedipa_Maas (#12895):

If a post has already been moderated, two additional moderations are made available:

Overrated (-1)
Underrated (+1)

Linking to other sites is a wonderful way to bring sources into your post without retyping them or to alert other to relevant websites/etc.

However, if your link is broken or irrelevant, you will be labeled as a fool, your post moderated lower and the rest of your educated debate over the validity of globalization will be ignored as pure drivel.

To link to another website, the following HTML code be used:
<a href="http://www.goats.com">Link</a>

This will result in: Link [goats.com]

To include a title, which will display on some browsers when the link is moused-over, use the following code:
<a href="http://www.goats.com" title="Goats">Link</a>

This will result in: Link [goats.com]

Once you have written you code and incorporated it into your post, preview your writing and test your links to make sure they work. Then, once you are pleased, submit your work and wait.

What the... Try to replace me with an Open Source process, will you?? Why I'll... I'll... I'll embrace and extend your standards!

So, yeah, sadly, it was more than "a little while ago". I think it's been, like, a year or something. Must be about time for a status report :)

Before I get into that, though:

Oed: Thanks for starting this thread. Seriously. It may be a bit optimistic to believe it'll reduce the work to a cut-and-paste job, but I certainly plan to run through this discussion and incorporate anything I've missed.

Everyone: If you have questions (whether or not you know the answer) that ought to be in the FAQ, please do post them here. If you have anything else to say, please post it somewhere else. Since someone's going to have to dig through this thread and extract the Q/A posts, anything but a Q/A post is off-topic even if it's on topic. Including this post :)

With all that's been going on here, I decided another push on the FAQ would be a Good Thing[tm], and luckily my schedule is cooperating for the moment. Of course, when I looked at the most recent document, I noticed part of why it's taking so long to write: I was trying, without realizing it, to write an all-in-one FAQ/tutorial/reference guide to the fora. In otherwords, a costly-to-write piece of crap that nobody could use.

So I cut out a bunch of un-FAQ-like bits, cleaned up the structure, and now we're rolling right along. I have a decent topic list, what I think is a good structure for it, and I know most of the answers (meaning I need only type them up).

There are actually a couple questions I'm not sure how to answer. Perhaps the Omniscient Ones can jump in with the answers...

Which HTML tags are allowed; I know what we commonly use, but I don't know the complete list.

Also, which level of membership is required for inline image posting?

...

Of course, it appears that some new features were just implemented. *sigh* Yet another document out-dated before it's even written.

In Response to mea37 (#12953):

I'm pretty sure I'm not omniscient, but I can actually answer those.

The allowed tags are as follows (with the appropriate bits to make them tags, of course, which I am too lazy to include here):
B
I
P
A
LI
OL
UL
EM
BR
TT
STRONG
BLOCKQUOTE
DIV

Preemies and Super-Premies may post pictures in the forums; cheapskates like myself must link.

In Response to mea37 (#12953):

Um, Deathaliscious asked/answered both of those questions not four posts down from here.

In Response to zamphir (#12969):

I was actually looking for confirmation of the tag list from someone who'd have seen the code. If I don't hear anything contrary, I'll use the info from this thread.

Hadn't seen the post about image-posting. I'll wade through the entire thread soon, but I haven't yet.

In general, you can discuss pretty much anything you want, and little is considered in bad taste, especially in the "Ring of Fire" forum. That includes other people's right to argue with you and insult you - don't take it too personally. Show you have a few brain cells and a sense of humour, and you should get along fine.

Having said that, there are a few things that are generally frowned on. Avoiding these might save you some unnecessary flames :

Bad spelling, grammer, l33t speak, and other such signs of a lack of education.
Repetitiveness.
Whining self-pity.
Posting to a dead thread.
Repetitiveness.

Pretty much everything else is okay - rants, flames, bad (taste) jokes, controversy, theorising, silly games. This is supposed to be fun!

the FAQ will be as simple as copying and pasting into a document

In an effort to test this, I've, er, cut and pasted everything so far into a single, handy document [grahamrobinson.com]. HTML is very crude - someone can make it pretty when the text is finished. I've divided it into three sections, and changed the order a little bit. That'll doubtless change again as more text appears. I'll add every new question as I notice it.

Cheers,
Graham

In Response to sakuruth (#12959):

Both this and Death's list show the <div> tag, which surprised me. So I've been trying to test it with the preview window, and unless I've forgotten how the tag works, I can't get it to show up (IE6).

So, can anyone (a) confirm or deny that this tag works here, or (b) provide code to demonstrate it?

In Response to mea37 (#12987):

Both this and Death's list
This are both probably copied verbatim from the listing that shows up right below the "preview" button, labeled "Allowed HTML:".