Also, notice that I wrote it in a humble attempt to show people a more efficient way of posting, and wasn't trying to make RULES in any way. We've all had enough of the RULES made by the Tower! This is no time to make RULES! Only Simon is allowed to do that
*** JWD For Newbies ***
1. Introduction
2. Do's and Don'ts.
3. Some important people on this site. (e.g. Simon and the gang)
4. Acronyms and their explanations, and perhaps a bit of history.
5. Streaming Media.
6. Advanced posting - using images, embedding pages, smilies, quoting, and so forth.
1. Introduction
Hopefully this little tutorial/guide effort will be accurate. Mainly, this is about advanced posting features, but I figured it would be good to include a little bit of the history and famous people on this site as well, in order for new people to get up to speed more quickly. Thanks for your time in reading this, guys
2. Do's and Don'ts.
These are just a few little things that you might want to think about when posting on JWD. Of course, feel free to correct me on any of this.
DO use a spellchecker - it's a painless way to make sure your posts look neat and professional. There are free word processing programs such as Abiword which have built-in spellcheckers.
DO check that nobody has replied to a thread underneath the posting box when you decide to post - this has helped many avoid misunderstandings in the past, including myself.
DO remember that many people on this site are scattered all over the world, so they might be asleep or at work when you post, and vice versa.
DO compress your images. This means choosing a higher level of compression for JPEG images. GIFs usually always have the same amount of compression. Very significant decreases in file size can be attained by sacrificing only a very tiny bit of the quality of any given image when using JPEGs.
DO upload all of your pictures to a server such as Strike9, which allows outside HTTP referrals. Sites such as Geocities and Angelfire DON'T allow outside HTTP referrers, and will merely insert no image at all (the dreaded red cross) or will send a dumb little placeholder image instead. FEH! Be careful with Strike9 - their "random image" feature which is on EVERY page on that site sometimes coughs up very dodgy images, which might just be enough to get your ass fired from your job if you're not exceedingly careful. My recommendation - when logging into Strike9 and uploading images, turn off all images in your browser. Your days will be longer, my son. Then again, if you're into foot fetishes, you might just want to leave those images turned on after all
DON'T post a topic and then never reply to any of the other posters who post on your thread. This is Bad Form, and a Sign Of Trolling.
DON'T Use OverCapitilization Like Some People On This Forum!
DON'T post excessively large images, as they considerably increase the loading times of the forum pages.
DON'T use GIF images for any picture which looks like it has more than 256 unique colours. For instance, your average photograph of a person's face has many times more colours than that, and would benefit from being saved as a JPEG (or JPG as some older programs call it) image, because JPEG images allow each pixel to be any one of 16.7 million colours. GIF images might land up being much smaller in certain instances. As always, use your judgement. Save your image to both formats, and compare file size and picture quality to get the best results.
DON'T embed a picture in a page from YOUR LOCAL COMPUTER - it MUST be on an outside server somewhere. Our computers can't see what's on your computer, only YOUR computer can! This is very deceptive, because while the images will show up quite nicely for you, we will just get the dreaded red cross.
3. Some important people on this site.
There have been many very valuable contributors to this site - a few of the links below are to the threads created by those people. It would probably be beneficial for you to page through some of these threads, as many of them have very excellent research material in them. Note that these are just the names that came off the top of my head - and I've probably left out many worthy posters.
Simon - webmaster of this site!
SilentLambs (Bill Bowen)
AlanF
Farkel
JanH
Maximus... Can't think of any more right now! Please post below if you feel that an important poster has been left off this list!
4. Acronyms and their explanations, and perhaps a bit of history.
We'll start with ones that are common across the wild Web:
LOL - The most common one - Laughing Out Loud.
ROFL - Rolling On Floor Laughing.
LMAO - Laughing My Ass Off.
ROFLMFAO - Rolling On Floor Laughing My F*cking Ass Off.
AFAIK - As Far As I Know
IMHO - In My Humble Opinion
IMNSHO - In My Not So Humble Opinion
IIRC - If I Recall Correctly
TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!
AWOL - Away With Out Leave.
SNAFU - Situation Normal, All F*cked Up.
Now for some words specific to this site and any other Anti-ridden site
Dub - Abbreviation for "Jehovah's Witness", taking their name from a ponderous 5 syllables down to ONE!
J-Dub - See above. For the less hardcore Apostates.
Dubby - Derogative form of "Dub" - can also mean smaller Dubs.
Catholics - Really cool bunch of people that Dubs hate.
Protestants - Really cool bunch of people that Catholics hate.
BORG - Taken from StarTrek, used to describe the state of the Society at any given point in time. Robot-like obedience is implied, and no freedom of thought.
BORGanization - See above.
Roaring - Activity pursued by Silent Lambs who are now screaming about their abuse and making the Tower quiver in it's booties.
Tower - Short for The Watchtower Bible And Tract Society, a bunch of guys in Brooklyn who sell books and think they're God. Or something.
LIGHT - For Dubs in the BORGanization, there are many kinds of light. There is New Light, there is Old Light, and there is Middle Light, which is only found in certain special Halls.
Kingdom Hall - Pretty obvious if you've ever been a Dub, a Kingdom Hall. Often abbreviated to KH or Congregation for short.
Please see Farkel's brilliant "Watchtower Terminology" post for more Dub terms and sayings!
5. Streaming Media.
Simon has put several different television programmes, like Dateline and Panorama, on this site for us to watch youll need Windows Media Player to view them. They are pretty low-res, but they do get the point across! Heres a LINK.
6. Advanced posting - using images, embedding pages, smilies, quoting, and so forth.
This is probably going to be the longest chapter of them all! The image below is a reference:
1. Insert hyperlink. Select your text that you want to link with the mouse, and then click this. A dialog will pop up that will allow you to enter and address, and VIOLA, you have a hyperlink.
2. Embed Page. Use this to embed an ENTIRE page into your post be careful with this! Same procedure as above, except you dont have to highlight anything.
3. Insert Image From Web. Use this to insert an image from a server somewhere on the web, such as Strike9. Youll need to know the location of your image first. For instance, is the URL for the image I made as an explanation for all this, then uploaded to Strike9.
4. Embed Image from file. This isnt working yet, apparently.
5. Insert Smilie. This only inserts the default smilie. Here is a list of smilies as well as the codes for them that you can type in instead: http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/chat/chatHelp.asp
6. Quotes. Select the text you want to turn into a quote, then press this button.
7. Highlight. This highlights any text youve got selected, only in yellow at the moment!
8. Text colour. Any selected text is changed to the colour here (currently only red).
9. Increase indent. Use this to put extra space before each line of your post.
10. Use this to decrease the amount of space above. For instance, if you had a paragraph with a heading, youd increase the body of the paragraph by one indent, to separate it from the rest of your post.
11. Bullet mode. Not used to kill posts, but rather to enable bullets, for bulleted lists. Each time you want another bullet, just press Enter.
12. Numbered Bullet Mode. Same as above, just with numbers instead of dots.
13. Right Justify. Sticks your entire paragraph on the right of the text block.
14. Center Text. All highlighted text will be centered.
15. Left Justify The default text justification mode.
16. Striked Out Text Highlight your text, then click this to put a line through it. Very useful for things like spiritual food beer.
17. Underline Text Puts a line underneath every character and space of any highlighted text.
18. Italicized Text Italicizes text.
19. Bold Text Makes the selection bold.
20. Font Size You can only select the standard Web sizes for any highlighted text here. Use it to change the size of paragraph headers and so forth.
21. Font Use this to choose a different font for any selected text.
Notice that when I say highlighted, I mean text which has been selected using the mouse or the keyboard.
Whew, quite a long post this!
