Post by Draco Falkor 777 on Feb 18, 2007 1:36:22 GMT -5
Q: What is a forums?
A: A forums is a community of folks just like you and me who come together and leave a communicational set of posts, also called "threads" in which interact with each other.
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Q: What will I benefit if I join the forums?
A: No major benefits. The forums just give you a little more freedom than just a constant back-and-forth communication between two or more people, for an example in an e-mail or IM. It give a more sense of a community with a few enhancements. You also gain more friends by being part of a community of people who share the same interests and ideas. The forums is also good for debates.
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Q: Is there a fee to join?
A: No. There is no fee to join nor will there ever will be! The forums are free due to the advertisements you see within the forums. You can thank ProBoards and Google for for that! ;D
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Q: I don't wish to use a particular e-mail that I own or I may want to use a special e-mail just for your forums. Is there something I/you could do?
A: Nothing for us to do but suggest registering for a free e-mail service. There are a few places which can provide you with an e-mail service for free. www.aol.com or www.aim.com is a good place to start, so is www.yahoo.com. There is also g-mail and the sorts. A quick search will allow you to just type in "Free E-mail Service" or something to that effect and you will get a nice list of services and websites to choose from. We reccomend not using AOL or AIM as much for some of the e-mails from ProBoards may not go through, especially your comfirmation E-mail, which includes your activation code in which you will need in order to go past your registration setup.
Creating a free e-mail account just for the forums is the best way to go for our forums so that other fellow forum members may be able to contact you.
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Q: Is there an age requirement to join up?
A: Legally, you cannot be under the age of 13 when you register. Any accounts registered to anyone under age 13 will be deleted by either us or the owners of ProBoards. Anyone between the age 13 and 18 has to be monitored by an adult, but usually not most of the time. We do request parents to monitor their child's activities and behavior if it's on our forums or anywhere else while they are on-line.
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Q: What enhancements does your forums provide?
A: Our forums has the ability to private message, create a profile, and so much more. I'm not going in to full details since that's there's so many things we can do with the forums, as well as many additions, but we'll be adding them later down the line, and yes, we will announce what was added when they go live.
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Q: Polls! What about polls?
A: Polls can be made in pretty much any category you like! Just as long as each poll is on topic. All off-topic polls will be moved to it's apporpriate area and any polls that doesn't deal with any of the topics will either be moved to the General Discussion or the trash can, depending on the actual poll. We may use polls for contests, so keep an eye out!
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Q: What about my profile for the forums?
A: You can put in whatever info you choose and show only what you want others can view, such as your e-mail and birthday.
Your profile and mini-profile is capable of having an avatar icon. It is also capable of having a hosted avatar icon by posting the link to it in Avatar URL text box, but please keep it as clean as can be. If anyone has any problems with anyone's avatar, we will be requested that you change or remove the avatar or we will be forced to remove it for you. We have provided a feature for your avatar. If you have a picture, such as a picture of yourself or something you feel can show who you'd like to be, then you can upload the picture from your hard drive. Please don't use URL links to pictures where the site is not yours, that is call bandwith stealing and may be illegal unless otherwise noted on the actual site that you get the URL from saying that you may use the link.
You also may set yourself up to appear invisable to others when on-line. In other words, when you're on-line, it'll say that you're actually off-line. Staff can still see when you are on-line at any time, even if you set yourself to appear off-line!
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Q: When I'm in "Edit My Profile", I've noticed that there's an option for a website URL. What goes in there?
A: Only any website URL that is YOUR website. It may be your own forums, a MySpace account (that is YOURS), your family home page, etc. If the URL is of a website that is NOT yours, it will be taken down. The website should be about you, your family or as close to YOU as possible, or your company's with permission. This is not really a place for advertizing, but if requested for review in the Suggestion Box, we will take a look at the site presented.
When you first start modifying your profile, you don't need to fill this in.
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Q: Who can see my IP address/e-mail? I don't need/want it to be seen by the public.
A: Your IP address is recorded when you last log in or when you post, even as a guest. This is only seen by the administrators and moderators (if permission granted. This helps in getting rid of any forum users who abuse the system). Your IP can also be seen by anyone who works for ProBoards. Your IP address will never be given out, not by us or by ANY ProBoards employee. The only time we will need an IP address is if there is an unnecessary spammer/troublemaker and the IP needs to be banned and reported.
Any person who tries to falsely report these forums to Proboards will have their IP address then too, so to see if the person is intentionally trying to have a forums deleted. This is to prevent any problems.
As for your e-mail address, it will alwasy be seen by the head administrator. with permission granted to the Global Moderators and regular moderators. ProBoards staff as well! The e-mail address can be used with the IP address to permanently ban someone from the forums and both the IP address and the e-mail can be used to report any spammers when neccesary.
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Q: What else should I know about the forums?
A: You have every right to delete your own account when you need to and it doesn't even have to be requested to be deleted. You should be able to go into your account and go into "Modify" and there should be a "Delete Account" option available at the very bottom. All your posts will then become as if you were a guest. This will NOT delete your IP address from when you posted. If your IP address is what concerns you, you have the option of deleting your own posts before deleting your account, but that will leave a mess of posts which will have no meaning.
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Q: What about swear words?
A: Um, the only thing is that we have the profanity filter on, which comes standard with the forums. This means that ProBoards would most likely want you to behave yourselves and act as adults. So, basically we would have to say no. This means anyone trying to bypass the filter by changing the spelling of words will have their posts modified and that spelling added to the list. If it starts to get out of control, we would have to go and modify the post and start giving out warnings, either in thread replies, private messages, in the account user's mini-profile or any combination. Your best bet is to keep it clean.
Also, besides swear words, most pornographic, offensive, racist, etc. are entitled to be deleted by any staff members of our forums or by ProBoards staff. Speaking of these things....
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Q: Is there anything else that I shouldn't say on the forums?
A: Matter of fact there is a big no-no with a public forums, such as ours. Never EVER post up personal information about yourself or anyone elses. This will result in an automatic suspension and a warning to follow afterwards. The length of the suspension deals with what actual information is given out publically. So does the warning. The more info publically made, the more severe the suspension will be. This includes last names, private telephone numbers, home addresses, IP addresses, and anything that should remain personal. In other words, keep it to yourself. If a person wants to request personal information, you may post a request, but make sure the person who replies does it in a private message. Better yet, just ask them in a private message (this is what the Private Message system is for). If a person is asking publically for a specific website, lets say for someone's pizza joint, then that's a different situation and it is solely up to the pizzaria's owner if they wish to make it public or send it in a private message.
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Q: Can I be a moderator or part of your staff in some way?
A: Well as of 3/23/07, we are looking for specific staff members and/or moderators. When we say specific staff, we mean someone whio can specialize in a specific category of magic, or someone who wishes to design in different forums areas, such as coding and forums skins + hex colors.
Specialty staff members may be teamed up in specialty sections to control the forums. In other words, let's say that "Mary" is a moderator. She may moderate a few select forums. She is very active on the forums, so she may moderate 3 or 4 forums, if not, she'll moderate maybe one or two inactive sections. Now, lets say that Steve specializes in spells and potions and may also specialize in food and drink recepies, he'll have a special rank name and moderate those 2 sections.
Staff member rankings are not immediately given as they must be earned by trust and experience shown on our forums. If you wish to be a ranked member on our forums, you may let us know about what you are good at and then show that you know what you claim you know. You may request to be a ranked staff in our suggestions board.
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Q: Will you be adding more to the forums? There seems to be so few features here.....
A: We have several plans for the forums and would be glad to continue to modify the forums as updates and codes become available to us. You may view some codes over at the support forums located at www.proboards.com/index.html. More codes may be found at socal.proboards26.com/ and at 101support.proboards43.com/. There is a suggestion section within our forums. If there is a code you would like to see used, feel free to post the URL of the post with the code and what it does on our suggestions board.
As for skins, we need plenty to work with in order to create skins. We require large photos for our background and colors, either in word or hex form, should be kept close in match, so not to have clashing colors. A simple search through the provided links above should give enough information about this topic.
Since we are fairly new to the majority of things that we can use to enhance our forums, please bear with us as we are leaning as we are going.
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Q: Can I post an event on the calendar?
A: Well, at the moment there's no need for it. If there's something you think is worthy to be on the Calendar, please post it up on the Suggestions board and we'll take it into consideration. If it's an event with a magical theme, then it'll be taken into consideration. But it would be considered more than someone's birthday party announcement.
Know of a convention coming up in your area? We will accept the information. When bringing up an event, please provide brief information and a link to your source. If no link to a source of the information to the event, we may not accept it for our calendar. When we do accept the information, WE will post it up on the calendar and link it to the post with the source's link.
When there are no events in the near future, the calendar will be set to disabled.
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Q: I would like to post a video, but your forums don't allow it. How can I get it viewed?
A: As of now, there is no way to post any video visually. Unfortunately, the only way to get a video shown is to post up the URL of the "hosted" video. Just use the
icon and add the link. Posting an actual video within a post will only slow down the post from opening, especially those who are still on dialup.
When we say "hosted" we mean that it's already available on-line. There are some services that'll allow you to upload videos. You can do a search on it. Google Video and Youtube are some you can start with and you'll need an account to upload any videos. Myspace also has a video upload feature as well, but you'll need an account with them as well. Be aware that most have either a time limit, file size limit or both.
Actual videos posted in a thread would just slow down the thread. Please keep the dial-up users in mind!!
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Q: I have a spell or work of others I wish to use or to inform others with in a reply or a new thread. Hoe can I use works of others?
A: Basically, in all reality as well with copyright protection, you cannot claim the work to be yours or make money off of it of any kind. Most of the times, you may have to ask the owner of the material if you can use it. Some stuff may be just general and common stuff. Definitions of certain words is an example of stuff you can use without permission. If providing information from a book, catalog, magazine, etc., please make sure that you acknowledge where the information is from, or even the author. You may also provide a link to where you found the information on-line by providing a link to it. Give thanks and blessing to the source, since they would appreciate the acknowledgement, and don't claim the information as your own.
So basically, make note of any copyright material whenever possible. Provide the link to website and/or name of book, author and year of publication so that others may do some research of their own.
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Q: I have friends and/or family members who would enjoy your forums, or even benefit from it. Can I tell them about it?
A: Go right ahead and tell them about us. Send them a link and ask for them to join up. They're more than welcome to join. Word of mouth is the best advertisement a place like ours can get. Search engines take forever to put our forums up in their list, IF we even get noticed there.
E-mails, blogs and/or bulletins on MySpace, links through an IM program, posts on other boards are all good ways to get the word out.
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Q: I have a business dealing with magic and the sorts. Can I affiliate with your forums or even have my own section on your forums?
A: We may consider this. We must investigate with the business' owner first and may require some sort of contact via phone to do so. Once we comfirm the request to a business, we will decide on if we will allow a section for your business. Whoever works for the business will be responsible for their own section, if not, we may take your section down.
A: A forums is a community of folks just like you and me who come together and leave a communicational set of posts, also called "threads" in which interact with each other.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What will I benefit if I join the forums?
A: No major benefits. The forums just give you a little more freedom than just a constant back-and-forth communication between two or more people, for an example in an e-mail or IM. It give a more sense of a community with a few enhancements. You also gain more friends by being part of a community of people who share the same interests and ideas. The forums is also good for debates.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Is there a fee to join?
A: No. There is no fee to join nor will there ever will be! The forums are free due to the advertisements you see within the forums. You can thank ProBoards and Google for for that! ;D
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: I don't wish to use a particular e-mail that I own or I may want to use a special e-mail just for your forums. Is there something I/you could do?
A: Nothing for us to do but suggest registering for a free e-mail service. There are a few places which can provide you with an e-mail service for free. www.aol.com or www.aim.com is a good place to start, so is www.yahoo.com. There is also g-mail and the sorts. A quick search will allow you to just type in "Free E-mail Service" or something to that effect and you will get a nice list of services and websites to choose from. We reccomend not using AOL or AIM as much for some of the e-mails from ProBoards may not go through, especially your comfirmation E-mail, which includes your activation code in which you will need in order to go past your registration setup.
Creating a free e-mail account just for the forums is the best way to go for our forums so that other fellow forum members may be able to contact you.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Is there an age requirement to join up?
A: Legally, you cannot be under the age of 13 when you register. Any accounts registered to anyone under age 13 will be deleted by either us or the owners of ProBoards. Anyone between the age 13 and 18 has to be monitored by an adult, but usually not most of the time. We do request parents to monitor their child's activities and behavior if it's on our forums or anywhere else while they are on-line.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What enhancements does your forums provide?
A: Our forums has the ability to private message, create a profile, and so much more. I'm not going in to full details since that's there's so many things we can do with the forums, as well as many additions, but we'll be adding them later down the line, and yes, we will announce what was added when they go live.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Polls! What about polls?
A: Polls can be made in pretty much any category you like! Just as long as each poll is on topic. All off-topic polls will be moved to it's apporpriate area and any polls that doesn't deal with any of the topics will either be moved to the General Discussion or the trash can, depending on the actual poll. We may use polls for contests, so keep an eye out!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What about my profile for the forums?
A: You can put in whatever info you choose and show only what you want others can view, such as your e-mail and birthday.
Your profile and mini-profile is capable of having an avatar icon. It is also capable of having a hosted avatar icon by posting the link to it in Avatar URL text box, but please keep it as clean as can be. If anyone has any problems with anyone's avatar, we will be requested that you change or remove the avatar or we will be forced to remove it for you. We have provided a feature for your avatar. If you have a picture, such as a picture of yourself or something you feel can show who you'd like to be, then you can upload the picture from your hard drive. Please don't use URL links to pictures where the site is not yours, that is call bandwith stealing and may be illegal unless otherwise noted on the actual site that you get the URL from saying that you may use the link.
You also may set yourself up to appear invisable to others when on-line. In other words, when you're on-line, it'll say that you're actually off-line. Staff can still see when you are on-line at any time, even if you set yourself to appear off-line!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: When I'm in "Edit My Profile", I've noticed that there's an option for a website URL. What goes in there?
A: Only any website URL that is YOUR website. It may be your own forums, a MySpace account (that is YOURS), your family home page, etc. If the URL is of a website that is NOT yours, it will be taken down. The website should be about you, your family or as close to YOU as possible, or your company's with permission. This is not really a place for advertizing, but if requested for review in the Suggestion Box, we will take a look at the site presented.
When you first start modifying your profile, you don't need to fill this in.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Who can see my IP address/e-mail? I don't need/want it to be seen by the public.
A: Your IP address is recorded when you last log in or when you post, even as a guest. This is only seen by the administrators and moderators (if permission granted. This helps in getting rid of any forum users who abuse the system). Your IP can also be seen by anyone who works for ProBoards. Your IP address will never be given out, not by us or by ANY ProBoards employee. The only time we will need an IP address is if there is an unnecessary spammer/troublemaker and the IP needs to be banned and reported.
Any person who tries to falsely report these forums to Proboards will have their IP address then too, so to see if the person is intentionally trying to have a forums deleted. This is to prevent any problems.
As for your e-mail address, it will alwasy be seen by the head administrator. with permission granted to the Global Moderators and regular moderators. ProBoards staff as well! The e-mail address can be used with the IP address to permanently ban someone from the forums and both the IP address and the e-mail can be used to report any spammers when neccesary.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What else should I know about the forums?
A: You have every right to delete your own account when you need to and it doesn't even have to be requested to be deleted. You should be able to go into your account and go into "Modify" and there should be a "Delete Account" option available at the very bottom. All your posts will then become as if you were a guest. This will NOT delete your IP address from when you posted. If your IP address is what concerns you, you have the option of deleting your own posts before deleting your account, but that will leave a mess of posts which will have no meaning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What about swear words?
A: Um, the only thing is that we have the profanity filter on, which comes standard with the forums. This means that ProBoards would most likely want you to behave yourselves and act as adults. So, basically we would have to say no. This means anyone trying to bypass the filter by changing the spelling of words will have their posts modified and that spelling added to the list. If it starts to get out of control, we would have to go and modify the post and start giving out warnings, either in thread replies, private messages, in the account user's mini-profile or any combination. Your best bet is to keep it clean.
Also, besides swear words, most pornographic, offensive, racist, etc. are entitled to be deleted by any staff members of our forums or by ProBoards staff. Speaking of these things....
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Is there anything else that I shouldn't say on the forums?
A: Matter of fact there is a big no-no with a public forums, such as ours. Never EVER post up personal information about yourself or anyone elses. This will result in an automatic suspension and a warning to follow afterwards. The length of the suspension deals with what actual information is given out publically. So does the warning. The more info publically made, the more severe the suspension will be. This includes last names, private telephone numbers, home addresses, IP addresses, and anything that should remain personal. In other words, keep it to yourself. If a person wants to request personal information, you may post a request, but make sure the person who replies does it in a private message. Better yet, just ask them in a private message (this is what the Private Message system is for). If a person is asking publically for a specific website, lets say for someone's pizza joint, then that's a different situation and it is solely up to the pizzaria's owner if they wish to make it public or send it in a private message.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Can I be a moderator or part of your staff in some way?
A: Well as of 3/23/07, we are looking for specific staff members and/or moderators. When we say specific staff, we mean someone whio can specialize in a specific category of magic, or someone who wishes to design in different forums areas, such as coding and forums skins + hex colors.
Specialty staff members may be teamed up in specialty sections to control the forums. In other words, let's say that "Mary" is a moderator. She may moderate a few select forums. She is very active on the forums, so she may moderate 3 or 4 forums, if not, she'll moderate maybe one or two inactive sections. Now, lets say that Steve specializes in spells and potions and may also specialize in food and drink recepies, he'll have a special rank name and moderate those 2 sections.
Staff member rankings are not immediately given as they must be earned by trust and experience shown on our forums. If you wish to be a ranked member on our forums, you may let us know about what you are good at and then show that you know what you claim you know. You may request to be a ranked staff in our suggestions board.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Will you be adding more to the forums? There seems to be so few features here.....
A: We have several plans for the forums and would be glad to continue to modify the forums as updates and codes become available to us. You may view some codes over at the support forums located at www.proboards.com/index.html. More codes may be found at socal.proboards26.com/ and at 101support.proboards43.com/. There is a suggestion section within our forums. If there is a code you would like to see used, feel free to post the URL of the post with the code and what it does on our suggestions board.
As for skins, we need plenty to work with in order to create skins. We require large photos for our background and colors, either in word or hex form, should be kept close in match, so not to have clashing colors. A simple search through the provided links above should give enough information about this topic.
Since we are fairly new to the majority of things that we can use to enhance our forums, please bear with us as we are leaning as we are going.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: Can I post an event on the calendar?
A: Well, at the moment there's no need for it. If there's something you think is worthy to be on the Calendar, please post it up on the Suggestions board and we'll take it into consideration. If it's an event with a magical theme, then it'll be taken into consideration. But it would be considered more than someone's birthday party announcement.
Know of a convention coming up in your area? We will accept the information. When bringing up an event, please provide brief information and a link to your source. If no link to a source of the information to the event, we may not accept it for our calendar. When we do accept the information, WE will post it up on the calendar and link it to the post with the source's link.
When there are no events in the near future, the calendar will be set to disabled.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: I would like to post a video, but your forums don't allow it. How can I get it viewed?
A: As of now, there is no way to post any video visually. Unfortunately, the only way to get a video shown is to post up the URL of the "hosted" video. Just use the
icon and add the link. Posting an actual video within a post will only slow down the post from opening, especially those who are still on dialup.When we say "hosted" we mean that it's already available on-line. There are some services that'll allow you to upload videos. You can do a search on it. Google Video and Youtube are some you can start with and you'll need an account to upload any videos. Myspace also has a video upload feature as well, but you'll need an account with them as well. Be aware that most have either a time limit, file size limit or both.
Actual videos posted in a thread would just slow down the thread. Please keep the dial-up users in mind!!
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: I have a spell or work of others I wish to use or to inform others with in a reply or a new thread. Hoe can I use works of others?
A: Basically, in all reality as well with copyright protection, you cannot claim the work to be yours or make money off of it of any kind. Most of the times, you may have to ask the owner of the material if you can use it. Some stuff may be just general and common stuff. Definitions of certain words is an example of stuff you can use without permission. If providing information from a book, catalog, magazine, etc., please make sure that you acknowledge where the information is from, or even the author. You may also provide a link to where you found the information on-line by providing a link to it. Give thanks and blessing to the source, since they would appreciate the acknowledgement, and don't claim the information as your own.
So basically, make note of any copyright material whenever possible. Provide the link to website and/or name of book, author and year of publication so that others may do some research of their own.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: I have friends and/or family members who would enjoy your forums, or even benefit from it. Can I tell them about it?
A: Go right ahead and tell them about us. Send them a link and ask for them to join up. They're more than welcome to join. Word of mouth is the best advertisement a place like ours can get. Search engines take forever to put our forums up in their list, IF we even get noticed there.
E-mails, blogs and/or bulletins on MySpace, links through an IM program, posts on other boards are all good ways to get the word out.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: I have a business dealing with magic and the sorts. Can I affiliate with your forums or even have my own section on your forums?
A: We may consider this. We must investigate with the business' owner first and may require some sort of contact via phone to do so. Once we comfirm the request to a business, we will decide on if we will allow a section for your business. Whoever works for the business will be responsible for their own section, if not, we may take your section down.