| How to Use this Board |
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Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I get my posting to the Front Page? The site owners and volunteer editors pick what shows up on the front page. Tips: Postings that are directly on-topic, get lots of replies, contain good pictures that are within our size and bandwidth guidelines, and are not duplicating other recent topics have an excellent chance of getting bumped up to the Front Page!
- I hit POST and my message never posted! It disappeared into the ether. -- You probably have spellcheck or preview turned on. It will automatically just preview (and NOT Post) and highlight possible misspellings in red until you unclick the "spellcheck" and "preview" boxes, and THEN hit Post (or submit). You can change whether it does it automatically in your Comment Preferences menu. When your message is successfully posted, you will get a message along the lines of "Message Posted, thanks for contributing!"
- My postings don't have any line breaks in them, even though I hit 'Enter' multiple times. How do I make a line break? -- In your Comment Preferences menu, you'll see a selection box for your posting preferences. You are set for "HTML" -- that was the default for users who signed up early with the new new board. The new default is "auto format" -- go to your Comment Preferences and change to Auto if you want to try it. It will pick up all your links and make them clickable if you start them with "http://" It should also pick up image tags for posting photos. And it will pick up all your line breaks too.
- When I submit a posting, I get an error that says I've exceeded the 50-word limit. There are word limits for the subject line and for the intro text, but none for the message body. If you are SURE that the text in question is in the body, check to see if you used any punctuation in your subject line. We have seen intermittant bugs when people use quotation marks and other special characters in the message subject. Get rid of them and try again.
- The postings scroll by too fast. So when I check back in 3 days to see if anyone answered my question, I can't find the posting. Solution: click the "add to hotlist" link on the stories you are interested in following. Then they will appear in your personal Hotlist box with a tally of new comments and replies, and will be easy to find until you click "remove from Hotlist."
- I hate advertisements. Why are you serving me up ads? This board uses a lot of bandwidth and costs us a whole bunch of money per month to keep it alive and well. To make the ads embedded in each story disappear, all you have to do is sign up for an account (it's FREE, see below), log in, and the ads will disappear (except for the unobtrusive ad bar on the lower right of the pages).
Creating an Account
- If you don't want to create an account, you can still read all messages, but you cannot post. We had to disallow anonymous posters due to abuse of the board. Please consider making an account! It's free and easy, and if you have trouble we can always set it up manually for you.
- Use the 'create new account' link in the login box on the right side to start. You just need to enter your desired username and a valid Email address.
- This REAL email address will never be posted to the board unless you do it yourself...on your User Preferences page you can enter an email address that will be displayed. Many people use Hotmail or Yahoo addresses for this, to prevent SPAM to their real Email address.
- In a couple minutes you'll receive an Email from Otherpower.com containing your username and a cumbersome (but strong) random password. Log in and you'll see whole bunch more menu choices available to you.
- You can change your password with the 'user preferences' link in the menu. Be sure to check out 'display preferences' and 'comment preferences' too -- there's some powerful features in there.
- IP addresses are logged by the ADMIN when any posting is made. Rudeness, abuse, spam, copyright violations, flame wars, trolls, etc. are not tolerated here. Please be nice and respectful to others. We reserve the right to delete any posting, diary, or upload for any reason we see fit. We always warn abusive posters to STOP before we take action. We can ban IPs from the board, but, we are happy to note, have never had to do this!
Submitting a Posting
- Pick the section and topic carefully! This lets readers find the information they need quickly, and turns this board into a valuable resource when using the SEARCH function and when searching on Google -- Google does index all messages on this board during their monthly web crawls.
- Before posting, please do some research on your question by using the search function and reading the FAQs. Your question may have already been answered in detail.
- The message Subject is limited to 30 words, with no HTML or photos.
- The Intro Text is limited to 30 words, with no HTML or photos.
- Only the HTML tags listed above the message submit form are allowed.
- You can post photos from your own server by using HTML <IMG> tags in your text, or upload the photos to our server. You can use the handy Javascript box to your right to automatically insert the <IMG> tags into your text from the pull-down menu of your uploads.
- If your images are bigger than 640x480, it messes up the page view format for people that have smaller monitors. PLEASE shrink them down to 640x480 or smaller before posting. The File size should be less than 150k to be friendly to our many Dial-Up users. You can use any standard photo editing software to do this.
- You can include links in your posting by using Auto-format for your posting and including the "http://" in front of the link. You can also use HTML -- the <A HREF="http://www.yourlink.com/"> HTML tag.
- Your posting will appear immediately in its section. If it disappears from there, it has been deleted by our moderators for being off-topic or for other violations of our posting guidelines.
- Postings that make the front page are selected by our moderators, it may be as long as 24 hours before a new posting is considered for the front page.
Hotlist
The hotlist feature is really cool - if there are postings you are especially interested in, just click its 'hotlist+' link. It will then appear (and stay even after you logout) in your hotlist box on your right, and show how many new comments were posted to that story. To remove it from the hotlist, just click 'hotlist-'. Using the other buttons in your hotlist box, you can also quickly keep track of whether anyone has replied to your postings, and quickly jump to your own postings. At some point we'll implement a feature that shows which postings are the most hotlisted--but it crashed the server last time, so it's turned off for now.
Photos and Uploads
You can include photos in your postings!
- If you are a registered user of the board, you can upload your images to our server. Simply use the 'Your Photo Uploads' link in the menu.
- To add the image links when you are submitting a posting, just select the image you want from the drop-down menu in the User Files box to your right, and click the add button. The correct HTML tag pointing to that image will appear in your text!
- If the images reside on your server, just include an HTML <IMG> tag in your posting that points to your image.
- Photo Size is limited to 150K bytes.Please resize your photos before posting them, whether they on our server or yours. 640x480 is a good maximum size. If you post large images, it causes problems for other users who have slow internet connections and small screens. And you'll be able to fit more images in your directory on our server...the maximum photo directory size is 8 meg per user.
- Obviously this feature could be easily abused. PLEASE DON'T. We don't care what your pictures are of, especially in your diary. But porn and images copyrighted by someone else are OUT, and will be deleted.
- It's very possible this feature could be used for sound bites and video clips too. We haven't tried it, but it should work. The same rules apply -- if it's copyrighted, it MUST be YOUR copyright!
- Right now each user account is limited to 4 meg of space. We can change this at any time if needed...just drop us an email!
- To save space in your image directory -- be sure your images are saved as .jpg or .gif to take advantage of compression. You can also crop and size them before uploading to save space too.
Diaries
Diaries are for your stuff, whatever you want! New windmills, projects, your house, your spouse, your dog, your political philosophy...They don't have to be related to alternative energy, though most folks who use our board have some sort of solar, wind or hydro project going. You can include photos in your diary, and probably sound bites and video clips too. Go for it!
By posting your message on our board, you are expressly giving us permission to make it available to the public via our board software. It continues to be owned by you, and we will not use it or your photos for any other purpose without your consent. We reserve the right to move and delete postings at any time, without warning to the author. We also reserve the right to ban users from this board, at any time, for any reason.
If you have any questions, comments, praise or criticism about the board, please Email us.
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