The FAQs thread

[Kathy Li]

Jsut realized the old FAQ Discussion got nuked somehow. (sigh). So, here's the place to air any grievances with the FAQs, or point out any holes to plug or additions to be made.

Ideally, if you have a new question, and you write it up like an FAQ Q&A, I can just move it over to the appropriate FAQ.

[Kathy Li]

Slash posted:

you know that the rules are very well thought out!

[moved from the Board FAQ, to de-clutter it. Sorry to lose your posting attribution, Slash! --kli.]

[Sean L.]

Curious, vaguely, why you don't just consolidate all the posts?

[edit] Or better for organization, post all the rules in one area, append actual questions to the end in one more post, and finally dedicate two posts each to the how-tos

[alla]

Most people cringe at the thought of reading one big long FAQ post, which I guess is why they're not consolidated. And posting all the rules in one area doesn't work for a similar reason. Its easier to navigate people to 'Board FAQ' or 'Chat FAQ' rather than just one. We seem to have enough trouble getting people to read any FAQs these days, without them having to slog through an überpost.

[Kathy Li]

Alla pretty much guessed it on the nose.

Basically, it's the way it is for historical reasons. And splitting everything off even more seems like rather a bad idea, given that we've currently got three FAQs on the go, right now. Four, if you count the in-jokes thread.

I think I add things separately now if 1) I'm too tired to go searching for it in the main post ; or 2) if it's not something a newbie needs to know right away. Nearly everything in the big post on top are the "ya really need to know" things; vs. the "nice to know" stuff down below, like how to get a custom graphic into an avatar.

A FAQ is a living document. It changes, evolves, and morphs. At some point, I'm sure, it'll grow to the point where it needs to be reorganized again.

[Slash]

It is ok Kli6 i don't mined if that got moved!

[Slash]

Well there is this geeky li'l girl asking me this Q and I am getting tired of it K so I am goibg to ask you dudes it and see if my A is right K... (you: o.k)

Q: Is the YW .com any diffrent then YW.com?

A: I have no clue!

Here are some things I thought I could be...WHY?

<UL TYPE=SQUARE> <LI> some people just like 2 websites
<LI> others just made a oooops!
<LI> we don't care a poof![/list]
[moved over here, since it didn't have anything to do with chat. --kli.]

[Kathy Li]

You are so gonna regret asking this, because my answer will probably be nothing but gobbledygook to you, and you'll probably just reply with a "What?" one-liner again.

Actually, there is a difference. YW .com would give you a browser error if you tried to view the page.

But if you were talking about the difference between youngwizards.net and youngwizards.com? They are two different domain names. A domain name is translated into an internet IP address, which is a four-part number and is the magic of which the internet is made. Multiple domains can map to the same address, or to different addresses.

Oh! That's interesting. I did a reverse DNS lookup on both of them, and they resolved differently: youngwizards.net resolves to 63.251.4.188 (Ireland), while youngwizards.com resolves to 69.5.26.33 (USA). Ok, maybe that's part of the reason for the different domains--one for serving in the US, and one for serving in Europe--sharing the load of the main YW site as it were.

And, of course, this board exists only on yw.net, not yw.com.

Traditionally, ".net" addresses are for machines that are for 'net maintenance and presence. It's become rather like a miscellaneous category for sites that don't fall into the other categories. ".com" addresses are for commercial purposes. ".gov" addresses are for government purposes. ".edu" addresses are for educational institutions. ".mil" for military, etc. And then there are the ISO country codes.

And that's probably more than you ever wanted to know about domain names.

[Sean L.]

Thank you for the gobbledygook, ms. resident technogeek mod.

On a more serious note, the trace is interesting - the forums trace to Ireland? Does that mean that groupee bases its servers in Ireland? Insofar as I can tell, the spell seems fairly fast for something intercontinental - something I don't get when trying to access Far East pages.

And now there's .biz, .gam, and more, from ICANN.

[Peter Murray]

It's true that youngwizards.net gets traced to Ireland, as DD/Owlsprings owns the domain, but the nameserver is infopop.cc, which traces to Seattle, WA.

[Kathy Li]

Originally posted by Sean L.:
... the forums trace to Ireland? Does that mean that groupee bases its servers in Ireland? ...

Er, no. DD doesn't use groupee servers (does groupee do servers?), she uses groupee software on her own server, afaik.

Hmmm. And it looks like she moved OoA from Blogger to a WordPress installation on her own server.

[Birdhead]

Hey, Kathy or Peter, sorry to hit you with this here but the FAQ is locked down and I didn't want to bother you to unlock the FAQ discussion thing when I can just ask (but feel free to move it there.) Minor q. of total irrelevance to this discussion: what's the (new? I guess?) policy on spoilers and white-out? Is it really necessary, for example, to white out HW spoilers in the HW forum? How about DW spoilers in the WAW forum? Browsed around a bit and checked the FAQ but nothing much there. Ta.

*sprints for relevance to topic* Hi to everyone who's new and floating around.

[Kathy Li]

Yeah, I locked the FAQs down to make sure I wouldn't have to do a mass move to separate discussion from actual FAQ again. However, I'm completely bummed that the discussions locked themselves up again. I thought I had 30 days before they expired. Guess it's still looking at the last entry date, not from-time-of-opening. Use it or lose it.

Ok spoilers is one of those places where I don't want to set a policy, because enforcing it will probably net us too little gain for too much effort. It depends on the posters to determine what is spoiler and what is not. And to point out to someone when they've misjudged.

I spent hours a few weeks ago trying to maintain spoilers in the Harry Potter thread, and it was ridiculous, because nobody gave a damn, and went right on merrily posting them. It's like trying to direct a hive consciousness... The hive collectively makes the decision on what's a spoiler or not. It would be nice if we were all a little conscientious about the first-timer on the board who may only have read the first book, but, it ain't gonna happen.

You're right in that we haven't spelled out spoiler policies like that. However, my personal feeling is that unless a thread title is marked with [Spoiler], care should be taken to white out spoilers.

Dictating by forum is probably not wise. Consider the case of The Big Meow: we've got subscribers, non-subscribers, the simply curious, and so there are two threads marked spoiler and non-. And then there's the case of having separate spoiler/non-spoiler forums...

Also, forums tend to start out BEFORE the book is published, and have tons of speculation threads in them. And then, there's simply the fact that after a time, stuff ceases to have spoiler potential for most folks, and it all becomes moot.

To sum up: yes, it's a mess. What policy do you think would be fair?

[Birdhead]

I don't really know, that's why I asked you, heh. Although I agree that a hard-and-fast rule would be a lot of petty little work for you guys and that would suck. The reason I asked was I saw you'd whited out HW spoilers in a HW thread that I'm fairly confident everyone participating in was totally familiar with, you know, the big HW spoilers. Such as they are. I still spoiler for Dilemma on up, since that's about when the new ones startand also, IMO, the really big spoilers - but I probably wouldn't cut for the big end of Dilemma spoiler in a Dilemma thread, you know? I guess I'll just have to be extra-vigilant, is all. sorry to bug.

my personal feeling is that unless a thread title is marked with [Spoiler], care should be taken to white out spoilers.

I would act on this in the general forums, but probably in the individual book forums I'd do the reverse - white out spoilers only in topics marked as non-spoilery. *shrug* But I'm happy to adjust.

[Kathy Li]

Well, if it works, it works. If nobody's screaming about having stuff spoiled, then it's probably ok. That's my other personal take.

Lately, I'm just too exhausted and tired from the MdDS to try and make coherent sense or policy out of everything. Nothing I do makes sense much these days.