06-09-2008
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Posting
((This will be an article on several of the different posting functions.
As I am not an all-powerful Guru of greatness(..yet), I will edit this article to fit any mistakes that are pointed out to me.)) Following will be my (some-what) extensive article on posting functions and etiquette. Posting A Message.(Etiquette) Now, joining a forum does not give you a right to post. Yes, I know there's that little button down there that takes you to a message box when you click it. Or even that other one that allows you to start a new thread but having access to weapons doesn't really give you the right to use them, does it? Posting is a privilege that most of us take for granted. It gives us the power to voice our opinion to the entire board! Whether this be in the form of light, moderate, or intense discussion; Complaints or suggestions to the board-leaders, or maybe just a little word game to burn time.(Figure of speech. Burning time is, indeed, impossible.) Posting is something that shouldn't be taken lightly, though. For the most ironically entertaining reason: People will know what you think, and the way you thought it. Quick, unthoughtful posts will only show that you are incompetent and do not yet understand the significance of your words. Therefore, you will most-likely be ignored by those of the more, higher-up, snobby faction. And no, don't deny it. You have ignored someone because of their incompetence, before. No matter who you are. You have. It's just natural for someone to over-look a child's words as insignificant because of how much the child has yet to learn. I doubt that you would be quick to get down on your stomach and put your hands behind your head if a child walked up to you wearing an officer's uniform. (Whether or not you were actually breaking the law) So if you put off the aura of a child, expect nothing more than to be treated as such. Be mature. Be considerate. Be nice. Understanding that your opinion is not the only one in the world is the first step to a more mature outlook-as well as a more mature image in the eyes of others.
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Last edited by 76. : 06-11-2008 at 07:38 AM. 
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06-09-2008
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Posting A Message.(Where Does This Go?) Now that you have an idea of what attitude you need to have before ever touching that tempting little 'post message' button. Let's move on to organization. Usually when you join a board, there are already several different forums to post in. And it is appropriate to consider that the administrator of the forum has a distinct place designated for you to post certain sorts of material. Here at RpGuild, we are blessed by considerate administrators who are more than understanding of our needs as a community. Because honestly, they are apart of the community! They have constructed a very well-balanced and easily interpretable forum. Just about every type of material you can think of has a place here.(Within limits. See the announcement by Blackfire) Last edited by 76. : 06-12-2008 at 03:27 PM.
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06-09-2008
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The Forums. News: This is the forum where you will find only important news that concerns the Guild as a whole. News that's only purpose is to inform you of special events and changes made to the guild. Be sure to read up on the latest RpGuild AP. This forum is for introductions and departing words. One would be expected, when first joining the Guild, to make an introduction thread. This helps for new members to more quickly and comfortably immigrate into the community. Allowing members to know a little about yourself and how you role-play is a good idea here. Don't be shy! We're all friends here! To those of you under the age of 18 or 21 years, it is strongly advised by me, your local mother-figure, 76, to never give out information that is not needed to role-play or participate in community activities. No-one needs to know your age, sex, or location to play here. This forum is for the discussion of play ideas, interest-checks, and all-around RpGuild-related discussion. This forum is heavily moderated, an as such, is a no-spam zone. Any spam threads here will either be moved to the off-topic discussion, or deleted.(at a moderator's discretion.) This section is for user-posted Articles and Tutorials. Content that is thought to be useful to the Guild is placed here. Anyone can submit an Article. We encourage you to share any knowledge you have that may help someone. Constructive criticism is also encouraged. Help us, to help you. This forum is for any sort of material that is not related(indirectly or not) to the Guild. Word games, life-problems and general chit-chat goes here. But keep it mind, though this forum's moderation is a bit more lax than others, it is still moderated. Any thread that degrades into meaningless spam will be deleted at a moderator's discretion. This is the place to show off any of your personal handiwork. From signature request threads, to short stories. Any form of artwork is welcome here. Get feed-back and give commentary on other's works. Help yourself as well as others to improve. (Note: It is highly frowned-upon to post claiming works that are not truly yours.) This forum is for user-submitted suggestions to help the Guild grow into a better place for all sorts of people. Anyone can discuss a suggestion, but anything but constructive or meaningful discussion will be considered spam or out-of-place here. Be sure to have a good idea what your talking about before adding to a discussion. Also be sure and see the Organized Suggestion-Box for a good list of suggestions that are still being debated. Problems or concerns are also kept here. Any sort of server-related problem, site issue, or disturbance to the community. Don't be afraid to post here if you have any sort of problem. We'd be glad to help you. This forum is the starting point for anyone who's just gotten into role-playing or someone who just wants to take things slow. Though riddled with a constant stream of one-liners, there are some really good plays in Beginner. One should not over-look this forum thinking that it's just a bunch of newbies going wild. Sometimes us older-folk just wanna take things easy and not worry about meeting higher standards. Beginner's is also a great place to find simple inspiration. Reading through the plays is a great way to find ideas that take new spins on things you thought were boring. This is the counter-part to the IC. The same rules apply to this forum. No double-posting. No off-topic, etc. When posting a play, it is a good idea to post an OOC counterpart in the appropriate OOC forum. This way you can discuss your plots, stories, and different aspects of the play in general to help further develop your play without the interruptions of OOC brackets.( {OOC} yo dewd Dat' ws kool hoa U totally kicked but{/OOC}) This forum is those who consider themselves Role-play savvy. That is, they have a good feel, and a little bit of experience under their belt. Good, quality role-plays are many here. The standard for this forum is no one-liners, a single paragraph of development per post. No OOC in the role-plays, etc. Easy-going with some depth and without the weight of advanced standards. The rules for Casual are about the same as for Beginner. You use the OOC to discuss. Not the role-play thread. Not in the mood for simple piddling? Need something to really get your weathered engines roaring? Advanced is the way to go. With heavily moderated playing, a minimum of 3 paragraphs per post, and in-depth story-lines and characters. This forum is the place for 'your more-than role-play savvy' self. A little extra work is usually required for this forum, and the plays tend to move just a bit slower than the other forums. But if you have the skill to keep it going, then you're going to greatly enjoy this forum. Let your marvelous stories and plays run free in this section. Let them grow and expand into the novels we all know your writing. As for the Beginner's and Casual, Advanced OOC is for all the stuff you wouldn't want cluttering your play. It is highly frowned-upon to post any OOC in an advanced thread. But, if you can't entirely avoid it, you can always place your OOC in a text-color that isn't incredibly noticable. Something the reader knows to avoid. Something that doesn't interrupt the flow of reading. Something like this This is probably what one would call 'The mother of all role-plays' A direct imitation of real life; Persistent world moves along a single timeline. Anything that happens in one thread could directly or indirectly affect another. The amount of posibilities are -like the world's- endless. But, don't stop and think 'well, what if I want to play something 'out of this world'? Well, that's okay too! As long as you're ready and willing to describe every aspect of how that person is becoming who they are! The thing about persistent world, is it is just that: Persistent. You have to start at the bottom and work your way up. Live in the Persistent world. The standards for Persistent world are the same for Advanced. Three paragraphs minimum, etc. The rules for this OOC are the same for all the others. Put here what you don't want in your play. Your first stop before posting in Persistent world. Your character's registry sheet is what creates him. All you have to do is make a thread with your character's name as the title and throw in whatever information you want the world to know about your character. Needn't worry about lengthy descriptions. Just describe what your character looks like, where they're from, some personality and history and you're done! Simple as that. This thread can also be updated as frequently you like. This will help to keep a history of what your character has gone through in their life. This forum is basically the same as the Character registration, you make the group's name the title and note your intentions and what qualifies people to join, etc. The only difference is that you can use this as an OOC for your group. Any actions your group would take would be posted in the Persistent World forum. This is for those of you who just like to make a character and Kick ass. Basically it's the place for plays that involve much less plot-to-fighting ratio. The standards in this forum are the same as the Advanced standards. For a better idea of what belongs here check the Arena rules. For all OOC related chatter about threads in the Arena forum.
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Last edited by 76. : 06-12-2008 at 03:26 PM.
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06-09-2008
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Alright. Now that you've got a pretty good idea what each forum is for; you shouldn't have a problem posting in the appropriate forum. If you still have further questions about where to post, feel free to ask anyway. Not that big a deal. Just use your best sense to post, and we'll all be happy.
Posting A Message(font and codes) Do you plan on posting with that simple text? Why not jazz it up? It's time you learned about simple Vbcode.(which varies slightly from BBcode) Now, again, I'm no guru. So don't bite my head off if I get this wrong(Once more, a figure of speech. Unless you have the mandable of a crocodile. Which I highly doubt). (Note: all tags here were displayed using the [noparse]noparse[/noparse] tags) The many and vast uses these text augments have are too many for me to even point in their general direction. But what I will do is give you a basic break-down of what they are and what tags to use to get them. this text is bold this text is italic this text is underlined this text is highlighted this text is blue [b]this text is bold[/b] [i]this text is italic[/i] [u]this text is underlined[/u] [highlight]this text is highlighted[/highlight] [color=blue]this text is blue[/color] All of the above can be found used in just about every thread in this forum. They're the most basic fonts you can use. And when used correctly the reader can easily tell what 'tone' you are using. There are also many different types of font you can use in your plays to help give them that extra feel I particularly like the 'Comic Sans MS' text. If I wanted to use this in my post I would use the [font=comic sans ms]this text is comic sans ms[/font] tag. Without the 'noparse' tag around the code, my text looks as it does now. If I wanted my text to have a cartoony feel all the time I'd have the font tag set to Comic Sans MS all the time. Though do you really think people would take me seriously if I had my text like this all the time? Or how about something like this? Or This? Or how about if I just kept my text like this all of the time. Every post I made? It would be ridiculous. Text is not suppose to make you squint when you look at it. Nor should it force you to turn the brightness on your monitor down. Text should be readable and balanced in contrast to the color of the background it sets on. The white text on the nice brown(-ish grey?) of the background of the guild is a perfectly contrasted balance.(in my honest opinion) Only when you are trying to give your character's words a bit of emphasis to strengthen their character development should you do any drastic changes to the basic text. (An exception would be to change the color of two individual characters controlled by one person. The first character could have blue speech-text while the latter would have red. Perfectly reasonable, play-wise.)
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Last edited by 76. : 06-12-2008 at 03:28 PM.
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06-11-2008
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Signatures. One's signature can be found directly under one's post. Whenever you post this will appear -if you have the check-box, checked. To edit one's signature. All you have to do is go to the top of the page and click 'User Cp' (Control-panel) and go down to the link on the left-hand side of the page, in the side-bar, that says 'Edit Signature'. This will bring you to a message box that is almost exactly like the Posting box. Except here, you have a much more limited amount of text, images, and space you can use. Your signature can not be longer than 1000 characters including BBCode markup. Here is the current maximum height we allow: | | | | | | Only one signature picture is allowed. Note, that the five lines of text showed above measures to about 120 pixels in height. Now, the width of the forum's table is about 1000 pixels. So a signature can be about that wide before it causes horizontal scroll-bars to appear. But I am not telling you this so that you'll go and make a signature 1000 pixels wide. No. I am telling you so that you won't. Or even post an image that wide! To put an image in your signature, you have to use a hosting site like ImageShack® - Image Hosting or Image hosting, free photo sharing & video sharing at Photobucket to host the image onto a webserver so that the forum can access that image at anytime, even when you're offline. If you try to do the following technique without hosting the image, you'll just be wasting your own time. If the image is not on a webserver, the forum's server cannot access it. What you have to do is upload the site to a host, in this case, Imageshack. When you do, it'll give you a list of codes that have different out-puts for different types of boards etc. What you're looking for here is the one that says 'Direct link'. It should be the one on the very bottom of the page. Next, you take the direct link and put the Img tags around it. This will, when previewed or posted, retrieve the image from the link and display it where the code was input. [img]direct link[/img] = Image extracted from link. http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/6...6yh2kz6oz5.gif Direct Link. [IMG] Tag [img]http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/6959/296yh2kz6oz5.gif[/img]  Now, remember, that not everyone has high-speed. So the more images/etc you post will add onto the already slow loading times of anyone on dial-up. Be considerate and moderate yourself whenever posting. The best way to cut-down on loading times is to post thumbnails of your images, so that when you click the thumbnail, it takes you to the larger image. Both ImageShack and PhotoBucket have this option, so it's as easy as cut-n-paste. Update:Another contributing factor to loading-times is file-type. The most common file type for images is Jpg or Gif. Of the two, I suggest using .gif, because it is the best image-type for use with the internet. Yes, it has limited colors(256) but it can be utilized to make that almost completely unnoticable. (The above image is a .gif) Another plausible note: Do NOT upload a .bmp image. Period. The file is automatically(from my experiences) converted to a HUGE-ASS .png file. These files alone, when posted in a thread, can grind internet traffic to a halt. They are usually several megabytes-large. If you have a .bmp you wish to post, open it in MSpaint and go over to the 'file' menu hit 'save-as' and save the file as a .gif by dropping the menu down to that file-type. (Note: The image above is Much too large to be put in a signature. Please do not use an image of this size in your signature. It will be deleted) Also be sure and see the RpG Special Report
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Last edited by 76. : 07-23-2008 at 11:07 PM.
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06-11-2008
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Alright. I've put enough time into this that I think it wouldn't hurt to go ahead and let it simmer a bit.
If there are any needed corrections to this article please private-message me and tell me so. Please do not post in this article. It is left unlocked so that I may edit it later.
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06-11-2008
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Suggested reading for any new role-player:
Elements Of A Good Forum-Based Play. By none-other than Mahzkreig; our site administrator. Character Creators. By Ravynzyon A Basic Guide To Weapons And Fighting. By Tsardel. GM's Guide To Magic Weaponry. By Godly-Mortal. Complex Magics. By EarthCaste. An In-Depth Look At Firearms. By Dustin. Simple First Aid(for rp purposes only). By Falcifer. How To Role-Play Effectively. By Light, and by Darkness. Help Your Fellow Role-Player: Make Your Posts Readable! By Mikodite. Advanced Role-Play Tips. By Tsardel. Advanced Character Development. By Rouge47. Keeping It Alive. By Candi.
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Last edited by 76. : 08-22-2008 at 07:40 PM.
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06-11-2008
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A great advancement in this great community of ours, is the...
Each of the three main forums( Beginner's Role-Play, Casual Role-Play, Advanced Role-Play) all have their own Directory. A dedicated sticky in the On-Topic forum for anyone who wishes to locate a Play that attributes to their preferences. Each of the Directories is split into different genres, Fantasy,Modern Fantasy, Modern,Science Fiction, Historical,Horror, suspense, thriller,Romance,Fan-fiction, and Arena. Just go to the directory counter-part to your favorite forum(Beginner's, Casual, Advanced -Role-play) and then go down to your favorite genre. Then you can browse through all of the threads that have already been posted. The Directories are updated daily(unless other-wise noted), so the information there is always accurate. Another great place to hunt Plays is the Role-Play Advertisements. A huge list of author requested plays. Usually they advertise for members, but that doesn't mean that all the threads in the advertisements are still open. So be sure and pm the thread starter if you're not sure. If you have a play you want to advertise, fill out this form and send it to Candi Quote:
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06-20-2008
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Posting A Message.(Editing and Deleting) It is strongly advised by me, your local mother-figure, 76, to edit your posts rather than post several separate ones. Having the edit-post function is a blessing that you may take for granted. Allow me to emphasize it's usefulness. Say you're playing in an rp and you spend about an hour, maybe even two hours writing up a nice long, detailed post. You're reading over the finished product, you see no faults in grammar or writing what-so-ever and your finger slides over that 'post message' button. Suddenly! You see, out of the corner of your eye, a typo that you had ironically missed during the once-over. It's too late. The post has been made. You read the post in it's 'set-in-stone' place in the thread, and you realize that in your rush, you missed several typos. If only you had an edit button! You could edit the post and fix all the typos as many times as it took to fix them all. Simply go beneath any post you've ever made(if it is in a locked thread, you cannot edit your post.) and click the 'edit' button', this will turn the post into a message box, inside the message box will be all the code you used in the post. Now, at this point, you have two options: You can edit the post, add or take away, fix grammar, spelling, paragraph arrangement, etc, or you could simply delete the post entirely. To delete the post, go down to the edit button and click it, now that the post is in it's 'post-box' form, you can go right in-between 'Go advanced' and 'Cancel' you will see 'Delete', click this and it will drop down another section. Within this you will find two options. To delete the post, or not to delete the post. Select 'delete message' and click the 'delete message' button right below the two options. The post will be removed and the ones above and below will be directly connected in it's place.
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Last edited by 76. : 3 Weeks Ago at 01:27 AM.
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Linear Mode
