Wednesday, 15 February 2012

Frequently Asked Questions - Posting Messages

To help create a more usable site that's easier to navigate, and better for search engines to search and place us high in the rankings, please help by adding good titles to your threads.

Hopefully, the recent addition of the graphic on the 'new thread' and reply pages will help produce better titles...

...it's obviously a bit tongue in cheek, but some have been spectacularly offended by it If it does the trick then we'll obviously remove it...let's hope we don't have to make it even bigger, brighter and more gaudy looking than it already is.

P.S. We can change as many as a dozen titles a day, so unfortunately it's just not feasible to pm everyone and let them know of the change.

What are Private Messages?

Registered members can send each other Private Messages. Private Messages (PMs) are similar to email, and enable members to have conversations without publishing the content in the main forum.

To send a private message to another member on the forum...

Click on the member's name to view their profile page
Clink on the 'Send Message' link to view a drop-down menu with messaging options
Choose 'Send a Private Message to...'

All forum rules apply to the content of Private Messages and members must not use the messaging system to send spam or offensive content etc. Members must not publish the content of private messages, or pass on private messages to other members, other than the moderators.

Note: In order to protect our members, the forum Administrators are able to read all private messages.

A Few More tips for Posting in the Forums

The following guidelines should help to make the forum easier for everyone to use.

Thread Titles

Please use short, but meaningful, titles that explain the thread within a few keywords. For example, rather than making a thread title 'Where to go?' when you want ideas on travelling around Scotland to take photographs, please add a title like 'Places to Photograph in Scotland'

If you're looking for an identification, rather than 'What's This?', make the title something like 'Unidentified Green Butterfly'. This should help members and search engines to find your threads more easily.

Ask a Moderator

If you're not sure whether or not you can post a certain topic, add a link, promote an event etc, PM one of the moderators first, rather than having your thread/post removed. There's a good chance we'll allow the thread, but if we remove a thread, there's probably little chance of it being allowed back again.

Adding Images

After you've posted your images in the gallery or the Image Library, click on the 'My Gallery' or 'My Images' links

Do Not Feed the Animals

It doesn't happen too often, but if you get into a heated debate with other members, it's some times easiest to just walk away from the thread. We invite members to post opinions from every side of every argument, and so there will always be disagreements. Occasionally, you may even come across a troll who will make controversial posts simply to get a reaction. If necessary, simply report the post and the moderators will deal with it.

How do I add images to forum posts?

For lots of really good reasons, images in the forum can only be linked from the Wild About Britain Gallery or the Wild About Britain Image Library and not external websites.

To add an image to your forum post:

1. Find the image in the Gallery or Image Library. and make sure you are viewing at full-size, rather than the small thumbnail image.

2. Right-click inside the 'Forum Code' box under the image and choose 'select all' from the drop-down menu - the code should turn blue:

[url=http://www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk/pictures/showphoto.php/photo/539]....[/URL]

3. Right-click in the box again and choose 'copy' from the drop-down menu

4. Go to your forum post and right-click in the text input area where you would like to add the image then choose 'paste' from the drop-down menu.

5. To add more images, press return a couple of times in your post to move down a couple of lines then repeat steps 1-4.

When you press 'submit' to add your post to the forum, the code will create a thumbnail of the image that will link to the full-size picture in the gallery or image library.

Note: To help find your own images more quickly, please use the 'My Gallery' and 'My Image Library' links in the forum post text editor.

Can I edit my own posts?

Members can edit their posts for 30 minutes after the initial posting, but they cannot delete their posts.

To edit your posts, click the undefined button by the post you want to edit. After you have made your modifications, a note will appear, which notifies other users that you have edited your post. Administrators and moderators can also edit your messages.

The reason for the edit time window is that without it we used to have posts being made, then someone would add a reply, then the original poster would change their original post. This was fairly common in debates where someone would change what they originally said then claim they'd never said it :(

Can I Post External Links?

Wild About Britain allows occasional links to external websites, but we don't allow spam. We're keen to help promote non-profit wildlife and environment websites around the UK, but we also want to control the type and amount of links posted on the site.

With a few conditions attached (see below) we allow quite a lot links on the site via our link pages, forum signatures, directory, forum profile, news etc, but we don't want links to start filling up the forum threads because:

Not surprisingly, we've found some members linking out to external sites as a form of free advertising
Links can sometimes be a real community killer, stopping a conversation and taking it off the site
The URL of links can often change and the 20/30 replies in the thread become a waste of time.
It's easy to cut and paste content into the forum or reference pages, so there should be little need to link to external websites
We don't want to link to unsuitable or illegal webpages and websites,and the content of the link page might change
Lastly, if WAB links to blacklisted sites then we lose credibility and points with search engines, so we've added rel="nofollow" code to all links
With 2 million visitors a year and thousands of members who have their own sites, we'd soon have lots of threads trashed by links if we allowed everyone to post them whenever they like.

The Good News - Ways in which you can link from Wild About Britain

You can link to your own non-commercial wildlife and environment website in your forum signature, after you have first placed a prominent link to www.wildaboutbritain.co.uk on your own site.
You can setup a reciprocal link with us via our link pages.
If you are an established wildlife or environment-related organisation, you may be able to list in the Wild About Britain directory
You can advertise on the website via the google ads

We allow links which point to useful, relevant or pertinent information, and lots of them can be found throughout the forum. However, we have to draw a line between valid links and attempts to spam the site or get free advertising etc. If we think that too many links are being posted to a single site then we'll remove them all and/or block the site.

Why Can't I Post External Images in the Forum?

Wild About Britain has a stunning gallery and a pretty good image library that lets members post images and include them in their forum posts. This is great because it means we don't have to use external websites to host images, which means:

No More Dead Links

You've probably seen it all over the Internet - 'Image removed', 'Image No Longer Available', 'Page Not Found', 'Error'...we've seen lots of it and it makes websites look rubbish. So we ask all our members to not post images from their external website, photobucket, flickr etc, to avoid those error messages where the images should be. We've got lots of pages like this from the early days and the bounce rate on these pages (the number of people who viewed the page then left WAB straight away without viewing another page and never coming back) is almost 100%...average bounce rate on almost all other WAB pages is less than 4%

On WAB Forever

We know that some members promise to never ever take their site down, or change the image's url, or change the image behind the URL. You'll be glad to know that we don't believe a word of it, because we're smarter than that...actually it's because we've had our fingers burnt more times than we can count on our burnt little fingers. And if you think it won't ever happen on the big image hosting sites, take a look at what happened to the millions of photos on Yahoo Photos..."What's Yahoo Photos?" we hear you say..."Exactly!" we reply...click here to see what happened to the massive image site

So after members spend a lot of time answering questions relating to posted images in threads, it's the least we can do to try to ensure that the images and thread stay usable forever. There's nothing worse than seeing a thread with 20/30 replies to an initial post about an image that's now just a red cross.

The Network Administrator Has Blocked This Image!

Thousands of people view Wild about Britain every day from their work PC, but many are unable to view sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook etc because their system administrator has blocked those sites. This also means that images hosted on those sites cannot be shown on Wild About Britain, so we're left with hundreds/thousands of threads where members are talking about images that many visitors can't see.

Easier to Find

If all images are kept in the gallery/image library then they can be easily catalogued, searched and found later on. Having images all stored on the website will also help us organise the photos more easily and make searching a lot simpler than sifting through threads to find images of a specific species.

Faster

Wild About Britain runs on its own dedicated server that costs a bomb, but it does a great job of serving content to well over 2 milion visitors a year. The problem with external hosted images is that their servers can often be cheap imitations of WAB's monster. These other servers are often slow and take a long time to load the images, making it appear as though WAB is running slow, when in fact we're usually travelling faster than the speed of light.

Spam

What more do we need to say about spam? We hate it, you hate, everyone hates it, but not surprisingly we've found some unwanted members using images to link out to external sites as a form of free advertising to promote their website and increase visitors.

Risk

Finally, there have been a few examples in the past of external images being changed after they were initially posted. This presents a big risk to WAB as members could change their externally linked image to an advert, or even hardcore pornography, and if you multiply that by possibly hundreds of posts we would have a massive job on ours hands trying to delete them all.

Sorry

We realise that it may be a bit more time-consuming for members to upload images to the site, rather than simply link to their external website/image host, but it will save the mods and gallery editors a lot of time and make it easier for all visitors to use the site.

To make life easier for all members uploading into the gallery, there is no moderating of images in the Image Library.

How Do I Start a New Thread?

In the forums, click on the title of the relevant category (British Birds, Insects and Invertebrates, UK Weather etc), then click on the 'New Thread' button

Note: Please use a short but descriptive title for you thread, so that visitors know what the thread is about and will be able to easily find it again in the future.