Forum Code of Conduct / FAQ Thread
Welcome to the Official Jonathan Coulton Forums!
Purpose
These forums are for the discussion of Jonathan Coulton's music and all things JoCo-related. We are a diverse group of geeks, video-makers, musicians, and just plain fans, united in our enjoyment of all things JoCo.
Because we are such a diverse group, we ask that you tread lightly in these forums. Please take the time to introduce yourself and spend some time lurking to get a feel for our style. We always welcome new members and, clearly, since you are here, you have impeccable taste in music (and are good-looking, too).
Conduct
While we expect our members to know how to behave themselves and act like grown-ups, we do have a few hard and fast rules. Violation of these rules will likely result in a speedy ban from the forums.
We like to keep this forum loosely run, and we like input from all our members, but all forum-related decisions ultimately lie at the moderators' discretion.
Drama Clause
We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to discipline or remove any member whose actions or presence disrupt the forum.
Moderators
Your user admin is Bry (vaguelyamusing-at-gmail-dot-com).
Your master administrator is JoCo, Jonathan Coulton Himself.
Although Jonathan does post in the forums, he does not constantly monitor them. Therefore, contact Bry if you have any questions, problems, or complaints about the forums; contact JoCo if you have any questions, problems, or complaints about Bry.
We hope you enjoy your stay,
The Management
(Credits: The well-written parts of this code of conduct are by SaintPeter, with input from many forum members; the bad bits are by Bry.)
Purpose
These forums are for the discussion of Jonathan Coulton's music and all things JoCo-related. We are a diverse group of geeks, video-makers, musicians, and just plain fans, united in our enjoyment of all things JoCo.
Because we are such a diverse group, we ask that you tread lightly in these forums. Please take the time to introduce yourself and spend some time lurking to get a feel for our style. We always welcome new members and, clearly, since you are here, you have impeccable taste in music (and are good-looking, too).
Conduct
While we expect our members to know how to behave themselves and act like grown-ups, we do have a few hard and fast rules. Violation of these rules will likely result in a speedy ban from the forums.
- No personal attacks
- No "bad forum behavior" (including, but not limited to, using sock puppets, trolling, impersonating other members, abusing HTML, etc.)
- No spamming (links to anything JoCo-related, however tangentially, are absolutely A-OK)
- No excessive, gratuitous swearing (occasional swearing or quoted lyrics are fine)
We like to keep this forum loosely run, and we like input from all our members, but all forum-related decisions ultimately lie at the moderators' discretion.
Drama Clause
We reserve the right, at our sole discretion, to discipline or remove any member whose actions or presence disrupt the forum.
Moderators
Your user admin is Bry (vaguelyamusing-at-gmail-dot-com).
Your master administrator is JoCo, Jonathan Coulton Himself.
Although Jonathan does post in the forums, he does not constantly monitor them. Therefore, contact Bry if you have any questions, problems, or complaints about the forums; contact JoCo if you have any questions, problems, or complaints about Bry.
We hope you enjoy your stay,
The Management
(Credits: The well-written parts of this code of conduct are by SaintPeter, with input from many forum members; the bad bits are by Bry.)
Comments
Feel free to ask a (JoCo-related or JoCo-Forum-related) question, or submit a question you feel should be answered, below. I will add these questions (hopefully with corresponding answers) to the FAQ and delete your post from the thread, for the sake of
repressionelegance.Q1: What do all the buttons above the "Enter your comments" box do?
A1:
- b - bold
- i - italics
- link - hyperlink (for completeness's sake, although you knew that)
- b-quote - blockquote
- del - strikethrough
- img - embed an image
- ul - begin unordered (bulleted) list
- ol - begin ordered (numbered) list
- li - line item (one entry in either a bulleted or numbered list) - use within ul or ol tags
- code - display preformatted, as for source code [DO NOT USE TO TYPE TABS OR CHORDS! USE "pre" FOR THAT!]
- "Close tags" - well, yeah, you know
Also, be sure and select the option for "Format comments as HTML" under the comments box.[too lazy to type out a completer / more accurate version of this answer right now. Anyone's welcome to chime in.]
notpost. I hope.A2: Well, obviously, if the forums go down, you won't be reading this, but I'll assume this is for those who want to be well prepared. Bah. You probably read air safety cards too.
But if the forums go down unexpectedly, first check the front of jonathancoulton.com to see if it's still up (if it's not, it's very probably a server problem). The next gathering place is the Jonathan Coulton Project website (JoCoVideo.com, which redirects to jocopro.libsyn.com), home of all kinds of wonderful user-submitted videos for JoCo songs. Kerrin, who owns that site, will put up an open thread for everyone to keep talking JoCo -- and if jonathancoulton.com is down for long, Kerrin will keep you updated as to what measures are being taken to find a more permanent location to get together.
And another question: an alert at the top of the page saying "Please select a category for Private Messages at the settings page" - is that directed at everyone? Who put it there? What settings page?
A3: Polls! All registered forum members can now attach polls to any discussion they started. Please don't abuse the privilege -- there are certainly many good times to use polls, but too many of them and it gets annoying, you'll understand.
Since you can only attach polls to discussions you start, you will generally have to start a new thread in order to create a poll. Be equally cautious when you do this -- starting a dozen new threads just to say things like, "Mayonnaise or mustard? Vote!" is inadvisable. (Besides, we've already got a thread for that.)
You can view the results of a poll once you have voted in it. I am given to understand that the creator of a poll can view the poll results by clicking "Edit this poll." But NOTE: Do NOT save any edits to a poll once it has been created! It will only end in tears (or having to delete the poll and reenter all the little poll entries and get everyone to vote again).
Q4: Private messages?
A4: Private messages! When you're logged in, when you go to any forum member's profile, the sidebar on the left should include a "Send private message" option. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to check your private messages.
Update: Agent Lex points out: In the current setup, there's very little in the way of notification that you have a new private message. Your best option, I think, is to go to your own account page (click Account on the top bar), choose "Forum Preferences" on the left, and turn on e-mail notification of private messages.
A5:
- Read, and follow, the Forum Code of Conduct (first post of this thread).
- Lurk for a little and see how everyone else behaves. Show some regard for grammar and spelling -- perfection is not required, but a good-faith effort is appreciated.
- Introduce yourself.
- Post about your 5 favorite songs.
- If you're musically inclined, consider signing up for the all-Internet Jonathan Coulton cover band, the Mandelbrot Set.
(Anything I'm leaving out?)Not a big deal.
I keep seeing people say go:
ETA: Another unrelated comment here.
I have been unable to divine its meaning.
Here is a link to a Frappr map for JoCo fans to mark their locations. Here is a fairly comprehensive list of emoticons and their meanings, from Wikipedia (link active until declared non-notable / trivial).
A6: I suppose. HTML-literate people should try not to grit their teeth too much, because I am going to go for "usable" before "technically correct."
As far as we are concerned, links have two components: the text of the link (the part that shows up blue and underlined) and the target of the link (the webpage, etc. that it takes you to). The text of the link must be surrounded by HTML tags, to make it clear when the link begins and ends.
Here is a link:
Back to JoCo
The HTML for this link would look like this:
Back to JoCowhere the link target is www.jonathancoulton.com and the link text is Back to JoCo.
You can type that in by hand every time (make sure you include all the punctuation!), but the forum software also allows you to create a link with the "link" button above the "Add your comments" text box. To do that, first type in the link text, then highlight the text, click the "link" button, and type in the address of the link target.
(If you do not have any text selected, the "link" button assumes you are creating the first tag, that is, the one that reads <a href="Your URL Here"> -- so to finish the link, just type your link text and then </a>.)
All this also applies to the other html buttons (with different tags than "a", of course), but linking's the one that comes up the most.
(Edited to reformat, as was suggested.)
A7: That's an icon, and here's how to get one:
First, you need your picture. Make it as small as possible -- the forum software automatically crops and centers your image to 32x32 pixels, which is to say that if your picture's too big, your icon will be a little square taken from the exact middle of your picture. Any graphics-editing program should be able to shrink your picture to the right size. (Specific instructions will depend, of course, on which editor you use.)
Then you need a place to upload pictures: Flickr and Picasa are two popular and free sites. If you're using an icon that already exists somewhere online, you can just copy the address of the image; if you can't find what that address is, leave a note and someone'll try and help.
Once you've created and uploaded your pictures, go to the Account tab in the forums and choose "Personal Information." Select the check box for "Icon" and enter the address of your picture in the text box; save and you should be all set.
Icons are not the same as account pictures -- the latter are the images you see when you click on someone's profile. Account pictures can be a lot bigger, but other than that, the process to add them is more or less the same (choose "Account picture" instead of "Icon," of course).
A8: That's not really a question.
Q8: I'm having problems getting images to work?
A8: Ha ha, wiseguy. There are a couple of things that might be causing the problem, depending on what you're trying to do and what result you're getting, but the one that arises most often is that the forum software really, really wants you to put in exactly the right kind of input, and it doesn't cooperate otherwise, and yeah, it's confusing, and yeah, it's not well documented (well, read this FAQ entry and then tell me if it's still not well documented).
I'll try and try to simplify -- you have webpages, and webpages have pictures in them. When you're trying to use an image, the forum wants you to give it the picture itself, not the webpage with the picture in it. If you're trying to pull a picture from a site like Flickr or Picasa, it's very likely that what you're looking at is the webpage, not the image itself.
Let me put it this way: The webpage is a kind of "wrapper" -- it has some things that are meant for humans to use, such as letting us move to a different picture, or resize the picture, etc. But the forum software doesn't know how to "unwrap" it, so you've gotta do that for it. And the way you do that is, you give it the address of the picture itself -- and the way you find the address of the picture itself is slightly different, depending on what you're using.
On a Windows machine running Mozilla Firefox, right-click on the image and choose "Copy image location."
On a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, right-click on the image and choose "Properties." One of the pieces of data you see should be "Address (URL)". That's what you want to copy.
Then come back to the forum and paste that address wherever you meant to use it.
(Tip: A lot of files have an extension, that is, the last few characters of the filename tell you which kind of file it is -- for instance, ".html" is a webpage, ".doc" is a Word document, ".mp3" is a sound file. There are certain file extensions that mean "picture" -- actually, there's a pretty lengthy list, but ones you're likely to see include ".jpg", ".gif", ".png", and maybe ".bmp", and I may have skipped some common ones but that covers most of it. So if the address you're trying to use ends in ".html", it probably isn't going to work, and if it ends in ".jpg" or one of the other picture extensions, that's probably what you're looking for.)
If you go Account -> Send Private Message -> Options (or Account -> Forum Preferences), you can check the box that says "receive e-mail notification upon new private messages," though.
A9: Sure! (I'm indebted to Colleenky for hunting out most of these links.)
JoCo Concert Stats 2008", a list of all the songs he's known to have played in concert, with frequencies, to give you an idea which songs are most popular.
(Offtopic but I've seriously never had this much trouble using a forum and I am very very familiar with forums and have been for many a year now.)
What your text should look like is this:
This is the text I'm quoting.(Sorry to hear you're having trouble with these forums. I'd be glad to help however I know how, but I know it's frustrating to have to ask.)
Well, it works now and thats the main thing.
Oh you do help when I ask! Its just frustrating /having/ to ask. I'm just so used to BBCode I guess.
(As admin, I can see the source of anyone's posts, so if ever anyone has any trouble with their posts, at worst, just point me at the post and I can look at what you've done.)
Thanks for the magic touch that seemed to make the button work for me finally! I recall trying at least three different ways of quoting, starting with the button and none of them worked so I gave up trying!
That is it, it is that simple.
"http://www.jonathancoulton.com/forums/search.php?page=2&PostBackAction=Search&Keywords=Bry%3A&Type=Comments&btnSubmit=Search"
Bold added by me. This says the page number, typed in 75 instead of 2 (which going by number of posts on his profile should have been number of pages). This returned no results so went down page by page until I found some. It says what posts are shown at the top of the results on each page, which gave me number of posts.
http://www.punbb-hosting.com/forums/joco/index.php
See, I did my homework after all
Thanks!